Wonder Bread

I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. (John 6.48-50)

More than “Bigger, Stronger”

It’s funny what sticks with us as we age. I grew up during the golden age of advertising, when copywriters worked overtime to condense a product’s appeal into an indelible tagline. If memory were a canister, I could unscrew its lid and dozens of product slogans would pour out. The tagline for Wonder Bread—“Helps build strong bodies 12 ways”—ranks among the most memorable. Yet I didn’t fully appreciate how ingenious it was until researching its origins.

With sly cunning, Wonder Bread deployed a two-pronged strategy. It spent most of its ad dollars on children’s TV, securing brand loyalty among young consumers who never bought a loaf of bread in their lives, yet nonetheless influenced their parents’ buying decisions. As kids, we were constantly told to eat our vegetables, take our vitamins, and get plenty of sleep and exercise so we would “grow up to be big and strong.” The ad’s claim made Wonder Bread an easy purchase for us. But the campaign's real genius rested in its resonance with adults. What made this bread so wonderful to them was its being unlike any bread they’d ever known. It was packed with nutrients—12 in all—that staved off a raft of vitamin-deficiency diseases prevalent in their youth. What’s more, Wonder Bread was more durable than old-fashioned bread. Its preservatives allowed it to be pre-sliced without going stale. So while we heard, “Wonder Bread makes you big and strong,” our parents heard, “Wonder Bread keeps your family healthy and saves you needless expense on bread that doesn’t last.”

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells us in Sunday’s Gospel (John 6.35,41-51) Though everything within me resists comparing that glorious declaration to an advertising slogan, I can’t escape its parallels with Wonder Bread’s claims. Jesus is speaking to traditional Jews who’ve taken umbrage at His claim that He’s “bread that came down from heaven.” (v41) He’s calling Himself living manna—a bold move any way one slices it—and appealing to His listeners’ inherent desire to grow bigger and stronger. Remember, this is a crushed people subsisting on deficient hopes and stale ideas. They’re longing for a decisive deliverer to end their spiritual famine, not something so ordinary as heaven-sent bread to fortify their souls. They’re looking for a messiah to champion their cause, not a Prophet Who echoes Psalm 34.8’s challenge: “Taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in God.” Yet the more astute of Jesus’s listeners—and we, if we’re equally astute—hear much more than “bigger, stronger” in His message. We hear, “I, the Bread of Life, will keep you healthy and save you needless expense on bread that doesn’t last.”

A Supernatural Phenomenon

While Wonder Bread quietly hinted at the inferiority of older brands, Jesus’s comparison is baldly overt: “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.” (v49) It turns out the manna miracle recorded in Exodus 16 probably wasn’t the supernatural manifestation many envision. It’s more probable the foodstuff from heaven was a honey-like secretion of plant lice common to the Sinai. (To this day, it’s gathered and sold as a Middle Eastern delicacy.) The arid conditions caused it to dry into resinous flakes that could be baked into sweet cakes rich in carbohydrates, with protein provided by quails flocking to snatch up what was left at day's end. But there were also drawbacks. First, manna alone didn’t make for a healthy diet. The saturated carbs boosted the Israelites’ energy; without protein, however, their stamina would fail. Second, it decayed rapidly and attracted flies that laid eggs in its resin. This made stockpiling manna impossible and discouraged the Israelites from settling for a high-carb diet that put them at high risk of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease—the worst imaginable health crisis to befall a nomadic nation. Consequently, manna was the natural phenomenon by which God sustained Israel during its wilderness journey. That is a miracle of provision all by itself.

Manna kept Israel healthy because it didn’t last. In its place, Jesus offers something infinitely superior, a supernatural phenomenon that transcends physical hunger and survival. He answers those who deride His self-proclamation as living bread with an even more outrageous claim: He has come “down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.” (v50) This bread is unlike any the world has ever known. It goes beyond sustaining life; it gives birth to new life that defeats death and the myriad fears associated with it. As long as we feast on Christ’s living bread, we will continue to grow bigger and stronger, because this bread is life-giving, life-changing, and life-affirming bread. By its supernatural power over death and fear, it endows us with unparalleled health that outlasts life as we know it.

Made to Last

This bread is wonder bread. It is eternal life lived in a realm impervious to time and space. It is life that can only come from God and only be experienced as God’s expressed presence moving and shaping our lives. It builds our strength more ways than we can count. It helps us grow into bigger, sturdier people than we could possibly become on any other diet, no matter how phenomenal it may look or sound. It keeps us healthy and alive, even when physical health fails and mortality calls. And it’s replete with sound promises that replace hollow hopes, vibrant principles that replace stale ideas. It is bread made to last. In verse 51, Jesus stresses what differentiates Him from soft-focused spirituality and faddish philosophies and other flaky, sweet-tasting—yet ultimately perishable—treats that appear to fall from the sky. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” He says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Unlike manna, the Bread of Life falls from heaven to be twice-raised, first on a criminal's cross, then from the bowels of a borrowed tomb. And out of its brokenness flows the nectar of triumphant life.

We are right to wonder at this living bread capable of supplying everything we need to experience healthy, eternal life. If you’ve not yet discovered it—or if you’ve yet to make it the mainstay of your soul’s diet—I invite you to join billions who, for nearly two millennia, have attested to its life-giving, life-changing, and life-affirming power.

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

The Bread of Life supplies everything we need to experience healthy, eternal life.

Twister

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Him Who is the Head, into Christ. (Ephesians 4.14-15)

A Winning Proposition

Remember Twister? It’s the deceptively simple children’s game that forces players into increasingly difficult contortions to see which of them can stick to their positions without collapsing. If it were played individually, the player with the most stamina and flexibility would win. What makes Twister hard is that you’re asked to work around other players to find your spot on the mat. Consequently, you’re required to twist yourself into crazy positions just to stay in the game—which sounds like fun, but ultimately proves futile. Twister is one of those perverse kiddie games that have no winner. When the clumsiest, weakest player goes down, everyone falls. Of course, kids will play again and again for the fun of it. But the game loses its appeal over time. As kids mature, they see it for what it is: a ridiculous exercise that leads to embarrassment more often than pride.

Invite a group of teenagers to play Twister and they’ll smirk. It’s a silly game unworthy of their time. They’d rather hang out and talk to one another and listen to music or watch TV or try their hands at more challenging games—all of which appears less engaging than Twister’s contrived gymnastics. Yet teens get it. Things they love to do intuitively hone their understanding of the world, each other, and themselves. Hanging together is how they learn to live together in community, and the surest way to land on the outs is by forcing others into uncomfortable positions and demanding they stick to them. Teen life is defiantly agile and fluid and unsettled. That’s why it’s the scariest passage in life. It raises more questions than it answers, more than a community can handle, more than anyone can process. That’s also why most of us mature into adults who abandon the quest for community and revert to Twister-like games we’ll never win.

Of late, we’ve seen a whole lot of Twisting going on. Political posturing in the UN, Europe, and the States has forced otherwise nimble people into rigid positions that endanger global stability. The bigoted comments of a fast-food CEO have contorted buying lunch into a moral dilemma. At the Olympics, eight badminton players were ejected from the Games after bending over backwards to increase their odds of winning medals by intentionally losing preliminary matches. A Mississippi congregation bowed to pressure from a handful of hypocrites and closed its doors to an African-American couple asking to be wed in their sanctuary. Our contempt for these and similar shenanigans can only go so far before it boomerangs, because we all—in some way, shape, or form—play Twister. Indeed, many of us have got so good at it we play multiple rounds at once. We strike a position here, another there, and yet another over there. And we’d rather get buried beneath the weight of our contortions than confess that it’s a loser’s game. In Sunday’s readings, Paul urges us to grow up and pursue lives of faithfulness that strengthen community. He gives us a winning proposition.

A Perfect Seven

If we listen attentively to the text (Ephesians 4.1-16), we’re immediately startled in that it offers us a choice in how to live, while explicitly telling us we have no choice. Paul writes,  “I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (v1-3) We are called into community and told how to create and sustain it—humbly, patiently, lovingly, and peacefully. Either we heed our calling or we don’t. Our attitudes and behaviors either foster unity or they defeat it. We’re free to get twisted up in positions and poses. But if we decide to do so, we disqualify ourselves from any hope of togetherness. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all and through all and in all,” Paul tells us in verses 4-6. Reread that and count the ones: a perfect seven. Our unity—our commitment to community at the expense of personal persuasions and preferences—makes that possible.

Before we break out the rainbows and lollipops, we should note the community Paul describes is remarkably diverse and multifaceted. He defines it not by the compatible personalities or common interests of its members, but by the vast array of gifts Christ has given to them. There are specific callings within the greater calling, Paul says, all of them designed “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” (v12-14) In other words, your talents, my talents, and those of every other believer are given for one purpose: growing together in the community we call “Christ.” And if we follow Paul’s metaphor to its obvious outcome, we admit we have no means of predicting what the fully matured Body of Christ looks like, how it behaves or thinks. Jesus and the Apostles tell us what it should look like, how it should behave and think, but how that happens remains a mystery. Thus, we are not called to shape the Body—presuming to dictate the nature of its growth by contorting ourselves into ridiculous, self-serving positions. We are summoned to contribute all of our gifts to community making, to invest our whole selves for the sake of a greater whole. This is a grown-up’s intentional endeavor to build unity, not a childish game that collapses in loss.

The Community Challenge

“We must no longer be children,” Paul writes, invoking images of a different sort of twister: “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.” In our determination to twist faith into certainty, we invite division, decay, and instability. Our vain contortions guarantee collapse. Paul’s letter comes to us in a timely fashion, when we need to be reminded Twister is a silly, pointless game beneath our calling. Instead, we should undertake the community challenge Paul issues at the end of Sunday’s passage: “But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Him Who is the Head, into Christ, from Whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Then, and only then, will we achieve the perfect seven, united in one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God.

We’re called to make community not take positions.

Discovering Abundance

By the power at work within us [God] is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3.20)

Peanut Butter

Years back, I was asked to speak to a group of advertising and marketing students about mapping career paths. Although the invitation flattered me, I was flummoxed by it. I was the last person to tell kids how to succeed in the crazy world of agency politics and client demands, as I’d stumbled into this business with no idea how it worked or how to make it work for me. I was a film and psychology major who spent his first 10 years out of school putting little of his training to use. Before settling on a career as a marketing creative director (which I discovered as a temp typist), I’d tried my hand at dozens of things. “Are you sure I’m your guy?” I asked the professor who tendered the invitation. “I didn’t really choose this path. It sort of chose me. I only got this far because I learned a lot by not having a career path.” He chortled, “That’s why you are the guy.” He’d observed a trend that concerned him. Major agencies were recruiting his students straight out of school and running them through their cookie cutters before they acquired any real-world experience. “That can’t be good for them or our field,” he said with a sigh. I couldn’t have agreed more.

I titled my talk “Learning to Love Peanut Butter,” referring to many times when all I had was a jar of Skippy and some bread. After clocking through my résumé, I told the students that, as far as I could see, there are two types of people: hikers and explorers. Hikers find—or are given—a path and stick to it. They know where they want to go and get there sooner than explorers. Explorers, on the other hand, tend to get lost along the way. Their destination isn’t as sharply defined and the route often takes them to places where they find little clarity or comfort. “That’s how you learn to love peanut butter,” I explained. “If it’s all you’ve got, it’s as good as steak—even better than steak—because it’s all that stands between you and going hungry.” But along with loving peanut butter, explorers learn that success and abundance can’t be measured quantitatively. They’re discovered in what lack of worry about them affords: freedom, endurance, simplicity, and resilience. Reaching deep inside to see what you’ve got is how you discover all you’ve been given. Once explorers master the art of bringing everything they’ve got to the table, success—and its abundance—comes to them, often surpassing that of hikers who’ve stuck to prescribed, “tried-and-true” paths.

Sacrificial Living

Aside from followers of the oxymoronic “prosperity gospel,” most believers get queasy whenever they hear success and abundance linked with Christian faith. Jesus’s teachings are anything but a formula for worldly success. By definition, discipleship is a discipline that aspires to selflessness; its “success” can only be measured by the extent of one’s sacrifice, not one’s gains. Yet Sunday’s Gospel (John 6.1-21) and New Testament (Ephesians 3.14-21) describe how sacrificial living—made possible by departing from proven paths—reaps great success and abundance. Both texts endorse an explorer’s mentality that takes stock of all we’ve been given so that we can bring everything we’ve got to the table.

John tells the familiar story of how Jesus miraculously feeds 5000 by multiplying a boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish. This massive congregation assembles at a most inconvenient time. Jesus and the disciples are exhausted. He needs some time alone with them to replenish their energy and discuss next steps in His ministry. He whisks them off to a mountainside and no sooner do they get settled than a huge crowd shows up. An ordinary leader would politely greet the uninvited horde and tell them, “I’d love to talk with you, but I’m in a very important meeting. If you go back to the seashore, I’ll get to you as soon as I possibly can.” Not Jesus. He scuttles His agenda—urgent though it is—sensing that most of the crowd has climbed the mountain with little or nothing to eat. Before anything else can happen, they’ll have to be fed. He already knows what He’s going to do. But He tosses the predicament in the disciples’ laps to see how they’ll handle it. They tell Him it’s impossible. There’s nowhere to buy bread and if there were, it would cost a fortune to feed so many people. A quick survey turns up a boy’s lunch and nothing more. Jesus tells the disciples to make the people sit down. After He gives thanks for the loaves and fish, they’re distributed to the people. Not only is His strategy successful. To the amazement of all, it yields an abundance—12 baskets overflowing with leftovers, one for every disciple.

It’s impossible to know if Paul (or the author writing in his name) recalls this story while outlining the principle of spiritual abundance in the Ephesian letter. Scholars date the epistle circa 62 CE, around the time that Mark, Matthew, and Luke pen their gospels and 30 years before John composes his. So Paul may not have even heard of this episode. Yet he is by far the greatest explorer among all the Apostles, the one who discovers success and abundance come to those who quit the beaten path and, for lack of a better phrase, learn to love peanut butter. He prays the Ephesians “may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” (Ephesians 3.16-17) He trusts they will discover “the power to comprehend… what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (v18) With this power at work within us, he writes, God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” These statements sound lofty until we reach down inside ourselves and discover what we’ve got is more than enough. If all we have are peanut butter and bread—if the most we can scrounge up would barely feed a growing boy—it’s still an abundance, because we’ve been given power to comprehend God is at work within us.

What’s in Your Pocket?

Of the gospels’ miracle stories, the feeding of thousands—5000 here, 4000 in another instance—strikes me as the most problematic. Living in an age when meteorological and medical phenomena are standard news, calming storms, walking on water, curing disease, and even raising the dead seem, well, not so amazing. (In a way, what we’ve learned from science since these stories were first recorded magnifies their miraculous nature by shifting the focus from their inexplicable outcomes to Jesus’s role as the catalyst that brings them about.) But there really is no explanation for how Jesus transforms one lunch into dinner for 5000. Or so I thought, until I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s exquisite sermon on this episode. In “The Problem with Miracles,” she invites us to imagine most everyone on the mountainside showed up with a little something to eat in his/her pocket. The problem was none of them thought they had enough to share.

They might have been able to keep their own food for themselves if that bread basket had not come around, full of scraps, everyone so careful not to break off too much, everyone wanting Jesus’s crazy idea to work so much that very carefully, very secretly, they all began to put their own bread in the basket, reaching in as if they were taking some out and leaving some behind instead.

Of course, we can’t say with certainty that’s how it happened. Nonetheless, the notion is fully in keeping with how God works. God leads us to places where we discover God’s power to transform the little we have into overflowing abundance. Yielding our meager talents and resources is how we enable God to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. As we ponder Sunday’s passages, I pray we’ll discover that by learning to love peanut butter, not only will we eat well. Hungry hearts that find us will also be fed.

What’s in your pocket?

God’s power at work in us transforms what little we have into more than enough.

Support

Teach me Your way, O LORD, that I may walk in Your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name. (Psalm 86.11)

When the psalmist prays to walk in God’s truth, he uses a loaded word that extols God’s faithfulness. The term is less concerned with “truth” as we understand it today—as in true or false—than God’s reliability. In the ancient Hebrew, it suggests firmness, the sense that the ground we travel upon won’t crumble beneath our weight. So the prayer to learn God’s way brings with it a stated desire to experience God’s unyielding support during our journey. Yet in the next phrase, the psalmist seems to recognize how often trusting God creates intense inner conflict. He sees that the only way we can discover that God’s way is sure is by walking in it. Looking at the path God sets before us doesn’t always provide us with reassurance that it is the safest way to go. We must take the first step, and then the second, and then another and another, with each of them powered by an undivided heart of confidence that God will uphold us and secure our footing. God’s Word is proven by God’s faithfulness to us. That is God’s way.

Second Chances

The LORD passed before Moses, and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34.6)

In Exodus 34, Moses is in the worst imaginable predicament. Not long before, God met him on Mt. Sinai, set down some basic rules for Israel, and affixed promises of longevity and a new land as incentives for obedience. Coming off the mountain, Moses discovered Israel had succumbed to idolatry in his absence. In a rage, he smashed the tablets inscribed with God’s laws—and hence literally broke God's contract God with Israel. By all rights, God could say, “That’s that,” and leave Moses to manage Israel on his own. But God calls him back to the mountain and reissues the contract. Rather than dwell on Moses’s anger—rather than turn against Israel for its false worship—when God meets Moses again, the first thing God does is remind him Whom he’s dealing with: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithful.

When we confront evidence that something’s gone haywire in our society, we must know that God is faithful. Idolatry—of a golden calf, a cartoon villain (as we’ve just seen), or anything else that supplants our love for God—will inevitably result in destruction. Yet God faithfulness is manifested in second chances. Whether on a scale that rivets global attention or in tiny ways that go unnoticed, harms we visit on others and ourselves are not cause for God to abandon us. We will suffer for our wrongs. But we’ll never be left alone. God calls us back to the mountain and reminds us we’re dealing with the LORD, the merciful, gracious, patient, loving, and faithful God of second chances.

Flesh

He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things. (Mark 6.34)

He is our peace; in His flesh He has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2.14)

A “Lusty” Bunch

Of late, I’ve been tearing through Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s chronicle of our faith’s origins and evolution. To call it epic is to undersell it. Nearly all of its 1000-plus pages serve up at least one startling detail that sets off far-reaching implications for what the Church will become and our faith will come to mean. The history is so vast the author can’t escape getting lost in the weeds. Still, a picture of our ancestors emerges to startle us with how real and personal their passions are. In another context, we would call them a “lusty” bunch—given their obsession with flesh. Paul isn’t straining for metaphor when he describes the Church as “the Body of Christ.” It isn’t poetic reach that inspires John (writing after Paul’s death) to preface his gospel by framing Jesus as “the Word made flesh.” It is no accident that early Christians choose the table—rather than the cross—as the centerpiece of their liturgies, or why they model their houses of worship on banquet halls instead of temples. They revere the table as the place where they physically encounter Christ’s flesh and blood in communal bread and wine.

So great is the Early Church’s flesh obsession that it’s immediately plunged into crisis over whether Gentile males should physicalize their confession of Christ via circumcision. Shake your head in disbelief if you like. Yet the controversy nearly rends the Church in two and had the Apostles not intervened, Christianity very well might have amounted to no more than a footnote in human history. From there, the first few centuries are consumed with increasingly subtle divisions over the “nature” of Jesus’s flesh and how faith plays out in our flesh. Some believe Jesus wasn’t made of flesh at all; others teach He was fully human and then made divine when God declared Him “My Son” at baptism. Meanwhile, some Christians believe Paul’s insistence that faith frees us from religious law grants us permission to indulge our flesh however we please. In other circles, believers fixate on another of Paul’s tenets—the mastery of one’s flesh—to the point they climb atop poles to subject themselves to hunger and harsh weather and some even integrate self-flagellation into their worship. And most ironic of all: while various groups rip at one another’s flesh, they erect massive cathedrals and monasteries as testaments of their devotion to Christ. By the late sixth-century CE, the entire known world—from Europe to China—is dotted with elaborate structures whose external similarity conceals rabidly divergent dogmas and practices.

Doctrines and rites we accept as fundamental—the Virgin Birth, Incarnation, Lord’s Supper, and Trinity—were hot topics in the Church’s formative years. They were every bit as volatile as current debates about gay inclusion, the ordination of women, birth control, marital equality, and human sexuality in general. And with those comparisons, everything comes full circle. Contrary to what we’d like to imagine, we’ve not outgrown our infantile obsessions with flesh nor our fondness for infighting. We may have found new things to argue. What we’ve yet to discover, however, is the antidote to hostilities sprung from our varying persuasions and fetishes. This is the Church’s great tragedy and, if not reversed, may very well be its undoing.

Unity

So it is not for nothing that unity plays the decisive role in Sunday’s readings. In 2 Samuel 7, we read of God’s call for David to “build Me a house to live in” (v5), a house of worship “for My people Israel… so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more.” (v10) This calling comes with a covenant attached, one of the Hebrew Bible’s greatest promises, often celebrated in songs like Psalm 89 that venerate David as the channel by whom God establishes Israel’s perpetuity. “My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him: and in My name his horn shall be exalted,” verse 21 says (giving Freudians among us pause). “Once and for all I have sworn by My holiness; I will not lie to David. His line shall continue for ever, and his throne endure before me like the sun. It shall be established for ever like the moon, an enduring witness in the skies,” verses 35-37 sing. In exchange for David’s obedience in building God’s house, God promises Israel will always have a home where its people will dwell in unity.

When we turn to the Christian texts, however, we crash into the fragile nature of unified faith, realizing magnificent houses of worship amount to nothing if those dwelling inside them aren’t united. Of course, Jesus has no church; the great outdoors is His cathedral and He turns hillsides, lakeshores, and boat decks into pulpits. This presents a constant problem for Him and His disciples, as crowds engulf Jesus wherever He goes. Mark 6.31 tells us the multitudes become so overwhelming that “they had no leisure even to eat.” They try to break away, sailing across the lake. But word that Jesus is on the move spreads quickly and by the time He and the disciples reach the other side, people have rushed to get there ahead of them. “As He went ashore,” verse 34 tells us, “He saw a great crowd; and He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things.” Seeing Jesus in the flesh—and watching Him work wonders in the flesh of others—draws the crowd to Him. But it is His teaching that binds them together.

Hostile Barriers

This brings us to Ephesians 2.11-22, where Paul paints the lamentable picture of a burgeoning faith community that confesses Christ as its Shepherd, yet persists in behaving like unpastored sheep. We’re back in the flesh wars here, as Paul strives to neutralize the circumcision debate for what must feel like the nth time. And to get us as close as possible to the heat of this controversy, suppose we paraphrase his premise in its crudest terms. “This obsession with genitals is utter nonsense,” he says. “Your flesh means nothing now that you are in Christ. And if you make flesh your focus, your very skin becomes a barrier that destroys unity within the Body.” Now let’s return to the text, adding emphasis to drive home Paul’s message: “For He is our peace; in His flesh He has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” (v14)

Answering Christ’s unparalleled call to a community of righteousness insists that we overcome our fascination with what’s below the waist and practice peace that only exists in Christ’s flesh. Male or female, straight or gay, celibate or partnered, circumcised or not—these issues create hostile barriers that Jesus suffered and died in the flesh to eradicate. It is through His death and resurrection that we, as Christ’s Body, are gathered. It is through the bread and wine that we are united in Christ’s flesh. Until we let go this centuries-old skin game we’re addicted to, we’ll be no different than the hordes that chase Jesus from coast to coast. We’ll be like sheep who've lost their Shepherd, and nothing like the magnificent cathedral Paul describes in Ephesians 2.20-22, “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone. In Him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in Whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.”

Will we be gathered and shepherded in Christ? Or will we continue to clash over skin? Will we persist in building walls of flesh that tear us apart? Or will we find Christ’s peace and be built together into God’s dwelling-place? If we attend closely to Sunday’s texts, these questions should answer themselves.

As a result of our infantile flesh obsessions, we’ve become like sheep who’ve lost their Shepherd—like magnificent houses of worship fallen into ruin.

Post-Script: Before You Go…

I realize I’ve thrown a lot at you and impinged on your time with a longer-than-usual post. But before you go, I invite you to take two minutes and let today’s readings settle while watching this simple video I put together. Nothing dazzling here—just footage of sheep on an Irish hillside set to the worship song, “He Is Our Peace”. If you can spare the time, I believe it will help bring today’s reflection to a peaceful, reassuring conclusion.

Podcast link: http://straightfriendly.podbean.com/2012/07/21/flesh/