Fr. John Allison

13B.2

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15

Ephesians 4:1-16

John 6:24-35

August 4, 2024

Christ Church, Hudson

This week as I was clearing my desk and packing some things I came across a cartoon I clipped out of the New Yorker Magazine close to twenty years ago. It’s moved with me many times and I always find a space for it where I can see it when I sit down to work. It shows a small desert island, with a single palm tree in the midst of a vast ocean with nothing around. Sitting under the tree is a man wearing a cape and a kind of super hero costume, seemingly stranded.  The man has an “aha” look on his face and the thought bubble over his head says,”Oh yes, I just remembered I can fly!”

Paul tells us today in his Letter to the Ephesians that God gives us a variety of gifts, that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip us for the work of ministry, for the building up of the Body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 

We have these gifts but, like the man in the cartoon, we sometimes forget. We become stranded. We become isolated. We forget that we can fly. We forget what God has given us in Jesus and, by extension, we forget what we are called to do. Or, as Paul says, “equipped” to do—to promote the body’s growth in building itself up in love. 

We have been reading from the Letter to the Ephesians for the last few weeks now and this week marks a kind of shift in tone. The first half of the Letter is mostly devoted to Paul explaining the nature of Christ and his relation to the Father. This week he moves beyond that to begin discussing what that means to us as followers of Jesus. Or, more specifically, how we are to act. How we are to be in the world.  

Essentially, Paul tells us we are to seek unity. We are to recognize that we are one body made up of many parts, each one of us with our own particular gifts that are to be used to build up that Body to the point that all are united in God’s love. He tells us we are “equipped” to do this; he uses that word, “equipped,” a couple of times and I want to dwell on that for a moment because the Greek word our Bible translates as “equip” (katartismos) is a bit different from how we normally think of it. We can read it as, God gives us the tools we need to accomplish the task and on one level that’s accurate, but there is more. The Greek is a word that more appropriately is related to healing, to repairing or mending—quite literally it means to set a bone—but in this context it points us to an understanding that in claiming the gifts God gives us we begin to allow ourselves to be restored to wholeness. We begin to repair the break between humanity and God that started way back in the Book of Genesis with humanity’s disobedience in the garden. That’s the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace towards which Paul points us. That is the unity that we forget when we find ourselves stranded alone on a desert island and forget that God has equipped us with the gifts we need to be rescued, to be restored to wholeness—to fly.

Today in our Gospel reading we hear Jesus offering the same message of restoration. We’re at the beginning of the section of John’s Gospel that is known as Jesus’ “Bread Discourse” and he’s here offering what is the basis for our theology of the Eucharist. Over the next three Sundays we’re going to delve more deeply into what it means to eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ, but today he basically sums it up: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” That’s it in a nutshell, but we could say it’s a hard nut to crack. John Calvin, when asked to explain the Eucharist said he would rather “experience it than understand it.” 

Certainly, the crowds who have followed Jesus after his feeding of the five thousand, where our reading begins today, are having trouble understanding. They have followed Jesus to Capernaum because as he says, not because you have seen signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves. He filled their stomachs and they want more, but, Jesus tells them, this is not the point. “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.” We still confuse the two.

In 19th century China, missionaries had a name for people who came to Church because they were hungry for material food—rice Christians. They would convert and be baptized and be active in the Church as long as their needs were met but as their prospects improved and their families no longer needed rice they would drift away from the Church. We have our own versions of this today as many come to church seeking not rice or other obvious material needs but for other reasons that are focused on the self. All of us have heard someone say and we ourselves may have even said at some point, I don’t go to church anymore because I just didn’t get anything out of it. I said that once and a much older, devout friend said, maybe you should go to see what you can give rather than for what you can get. 

This is what Paul is saying to the Ephesians.  This is the offering of our gifts that restores us to wholeness and builds up the Body of Christ in love. St. Augustine in one of his sermons from the 4th century says, “We who are part of Christ’s mystical body receive our share in the body’s life. If then you are the Body of Christ and his members, then that which is on the altar is the mystery of yourselves. Receive the mystery of yourselves.”

We bring our gifts to the altar every time we come together for the Eucharist. Our gifts are present in the ordinary bread and the wine that we place on the altar to be made into the food that endures for eternal life. That’s the Body of Christ and the Bread of Heaven of which we are all part and parcel. 

When we take it into our bodies we are restored. We are made whole. We remember that God has given us, has equipped us, with all the gifts we need. We remember that we can fly. We are not stranded alone on an island but part of God’s all encompassing love that knows no bounds. That’s the Good News of Christ, the Gospel for which we are all equipped. Amen.