Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Trinity – 8th August 2021: 1 Kings 19, 4-8; Eph 4, 25-5,2; John 6 35, 41-51.

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

We continue to reflect on the Letter to the Ephesians. Today we are urged in that letter, ‘to be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’. (Eph 5, 2)

Marcel Marceau, born in 1923 and died in 2007, was a famous French actor and mime artist. Some of his greatest artistic achievements were without words, simply mime. He called mime the ‘art of silence’.

When St. Paul urges us to be ‘imitators of God’ the word used for ‘imitator’ in the NT Greek is μιμητής. In the light of God’s glory we should be ‘shadowing’ God, miming his love shown in Jesus Christ – this fragrant offering of sacrifice. Of course we are led yet again to the cross.

In one of the Eucharistic Prayers of the Liturgy (Prayer G) we use the words, ‘form us into the likeness of Christ’ – at this point we should be thinking of the mystery of the cross and how we can ‘mimic’ that cross-shaped life in our own witness and in our own spiritual development.

As always St. Paul knows how to pick his imagery from local features in order to make a decisive point about Christ. In Ephesus, remember, was the great temple of the goddess Artemis, around which much social and commercial life revolved, and in the temple there would be great bowls of incense, and sacrificial offerings to appease the Goddess, or to gain from her some favour. So, Paul claims that familiar language and transposes it to the experience of the crucified and risen Lord. Interestingly, having made that connection, Paul goes on to decry pagan ways and praises the practice of the Christian household. In all ways the Apostle is urging us to be dependent on the love of God, and to be ‘mimers’ of this love in our own lives.

Elijah, the subject of our first reading, experience dependency on God. Jezebel has threatened to put him to the sword for the deaths of all the prophets of Baal. Elijah flees for his own safety, but is despondent and wishes just to die. In his sleep he is touched by an angel and in waking up he finds spread before him a stone baked cake and water. Again he falls asleep and the same thing happens – he is restored by the provision God has placed before him and he then goes sustained  for forty days and forty nights to the mountain of Horeb, the mountain where the glory of God appears to Elijah, not in the rock – breaking powerful wind, not in the earthquake, not in the raging of the fire, but in the sound of sheer silence.

Mime – the ‘art of silence’ Marcel Marceau would say.

 

If we are to find our dependency on God we will first have to practice some silence in our Christian lives and to pray in silence. Of course we need to use words in our public prayer at the Holy Liturgy, but to supplement this we need to find times when we offer God nothing but our silence, so that we might share in the divine sheer silence, as the sheer silence addresses us directly. To attempt this is not beyond any of us – it simply means abandoning ourselves, our complicated agendas, our distractions both external, and the ones that are self-created to protect us – and become dependent on God. The place to start is not as a fully qualified ascetic hermit, as that would be ridiculous for most of us; the place to start is simply to want to meet God in that silence.

The great spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen says this, ‘For many of us prayer means nothing more than speaking with God. And since it seems to be a quite one-sided affair, prayer simply means talking to God. This idea is enough to create great frustrations. If I present a problem, I expect a solution; if I formulate a question, I expect and answer; if I ask for guidance, I expect a response. And when it seems, increasingly, that I am talking into the dark, it is not so strange that I soon begin to suspect that my dialogue with God is in fact a monologue. Then I begin to ask myself: To whom am I really speaking, God or myself.’   (The Way of the Heart, Nouwen, p72).

It is when we strip away all the hurricane things, the earthquake things, the fire things, all the places we look for God – or blame God for –  but don’t see him there, then we can meet God in the sound of sheer silence. This encounter, this dependency on the power of the sound of sheer silence is life transforming for us, and it transforms our common life together; our Christian household develops a different quality of communication. We have a hint of this in the letter to Ephesus when we read, ‘Let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.’ (Eph 4,29).

Christ’s words to us are grace-filled, for he speaks as the divine Word, made flesh, crucified, and risen. In the gospel today he says to us ‘I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’. (John 6, 35)

His grace-filled words of life are met with complaint, with grumbling. We thought about this ‘grumbling theme’ in scripture in last week’s sermon. Here we have it again. The divine is offered to us as humans, and the human response is to complain. The seat of the complaint is the lack of faith. The group around him can’t accept that the carpenter’s son can be so arrogant as to use the ‘I am formula’ and say he is the bread of life. It is the stumbling block of the humanity of Jesus that prevents them from seeing the divine in him. Ironically during the Christian centuries it has been the denial of his humanity that has caused the greatest heresies – and the concept that God can be man is the deepest divide between us and other world religions.

Jesus meets them where they are stuck – he refers to the event we read last week, from the Book of Exodus, where the Israelites complain, grumble, about hunger and God provides manna and quails. Moses gets the credit, but it is God who provides. They fail to see their dependency on God, the Provider Jehovah Jireh.

In our prayer lives we are opening ourselves up to the God who provides. In our most popular and most used Christian prayer, we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread’. Jesus says, ‘I am the bread of life.’ We feed on him daily – but God not only provides through Christ, he calls us in our lives, in our church community, to be imitators (μιμηταί) – to mime the love that God has for us with the love we show to one another. We will do this more effectively when seek to find God in ‘the art of silence.’