Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
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Imbibe: A Sermon Preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, August 19, 2018, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Imbibe
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, August 19, 2018, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Texts: Ephesians 5:1-2, 15-20, John 6:51-58
What do you imbibe? I’m not asking about your drink of choice, though that is the most common association with the word “imbibe” these days. To “imbibe” is from the Latin embibere, meaning “to drink in.” This can be used literally as “drink a liquid” or figuratively as “drink in knowledge.” There’s a sense in which the word can mean “to soak up,” or “internalize”—that is, to unconsciously assimilate an attitude or behavior from what’s around us. We imbibe a lot, don’t we? What do you consciously or unconsciously soak up, internalize, drink in?
The letter of Ephesians offers both a filter and a recipe for what followers of Jesus take in. Ephesians was written—whether by Paul or a later disciple (as many scholars believe)—not as a letter to one church (as with the letters to the Corinthians) but rather as a general message to many churches—a teaching bulletin to the regional congregations, if you will—about the new way of life offered in Christ, a way very different from the predominant culture.
This new way of life is modeled on the self-giving love and mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ. A one-line summary of the letter’s message is found in the first two verses of chapter 5: “Be imitators of God (creative, merciful, steadfast, just, relational), as beloved children (here is found your dignity and worth!), and live in love (not hate, fear, or greed), as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” A “fragrant offering” here is not referring to a fancy, fragrant floral bouquet, but rather the wonderful smell of roasted lamb, the central course for the Jewish feast of the Passover. Christ gave himself to us sacrificially, to feed us with what we need most of all.
The Gospel of John, uses this same theological metaphor, describing Jesus as the “the Lamb of God” (Jn 1:29). In John, Jesus is recorded as saying, “I am the bread of life (Jn 6:35)…the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh…(Jn 6:51) Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life (Jn 6:54).” This talk freaked people out from the beginning. Flesh-eating zombies and blood sucking vampires may not yet have been thing in Bible times, but certainly human sacrifice was practiced in some pagan rites and cannibalism would have been anathema to many peoples even then. But the point throughout the Gospel of John, the point in the letter of Ephesians, is not about literally eating human flesh and drinking blood. The point is that we are given an opportunity and the means to drink God in, to soak up the way Jesus lives, to become like Christ, to imitate God. We are called to a new life that is qualitatively different from life outside Christ—a life formed according to God’s wisdom and way of compassion and justice, that shares in God’s work in the world, that is filled and fueled by God’s steadfast love. That love is our sustenance, that love is our freedom, that love is shown to us and offered to us in the flesh-and-blood gift of Jesus. We are given this way of life, this way of love, to eat and drink, to soak up, to take in, to imbibe.
Our passage from Ephesians says, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit.” (5:18) Wine isn’t the problem here (Jesus drank wine regularly, even made it on occasion), but rather the result of alcohol abuse, or drunkenness is the issue. This is described as “debauchery”—in the Greek is asōtia, a form of the word used to describe the behavior of the so-called “prodigal son” who “squandered his property in dissolute living (asōtōs).”[i] (Luke 15) So it seems that thoughtlessly, greedily wasting time, wasting resources, wasting your life on things that separate you from love, from health, from God—that’s the problem. The alternative choice is to be filled—drunk—with Spirit; imbibing Spirit promises a different kind of exuberance, confidence, and freedom than wine or drugs and is said to result in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22)
What do you imbibe? And what is the result? // When we are children, we only have so much control over what we imbibe. Children soak up everything…the energies, attitudes, language and practices of the adults around them. And parents and caregivers can protect children from only so much of what is streamed into public consciousness through images, television, internet, and more. As we grow up, we still can’t control what is happening around us, but we can become aware of those things and learn that we have choices to make.
I’m not sure why it is the case, but we humans often struggle to choose wisely. What you take in to yourself changes you. What you imbibe affects everything. As the old saying goes, “You are what you eat.” So why don’t we consistently choose to consume Christ and walk in freedom and joy and justice? Why not daily drink in Spirit and be filled with love?
Well, the truth is there’s a lot of juicy, tempting junk food and drink around that is often much easier to take in than what Jesus offers. Junk food tastes good in the moment, but has negative effects. Just as self-medicating in the moment with alcohol or drugs can feel helpful in the moment, we know that the fall-out can be a disaster. Often “junk food” looks better than it tastes and we end up growing unhealthy on food that is not (as my friend calls it) “calorie worthy.”
What do we consume that fills us with empty calories? What do we take in even though it can be heart-clogging, vision-blurring, energy-sapping, and joy-stealing? We gnaw on negativity, apathy, and bitterness. We soak up the poison of cynicism, fear, and gossip. We consume violent and exploitive images and words. We nurse drinks filled with our grievances. We take in the message that those who are different can’t be trusted, that there is one right way to do things and it just so happens to be ours. We take in headlines overwhelmingly filled with violence and bad news forgetting that’s not the only news out there. We consume the narrative of scarcity and zero-sum games that compels us to look out for number one. // Even though we know better, we read the comments… // We consume hurtful or limiting words directed at us from others and allow those words to have more power than God’s word of love for us. These words are destructive; they are junk food; and they cloud our vision and our hearing and fill us up so that it is difficult to receive the spirit and life that Jesus offers.
Things that do harm can be so tempting and addictive. Why is it easier to focus on the negative, to drink in drama, to believe the bad stuff, to consume that which doesn’t satisfy? Why is it so easy to allow foolishness to make us turn our nose up at what nourishes spirit and life? These are the persistent questions and the primary choice before us every day: do we fill our cup with God or with idols, with hope or with cynicism, with grace or with negativity, with meaning or with distractions, with love or with fear?
In thinking about our theme for today, I thought of a metaphor C.S. Lewis provides in The Screwtape Letters. As many of you will know, the premise of that book is that of Screwtape, a master tempter, writing letters to instruct a junior in the art of deception and recruitment away from God. Screwtape contrasts the “devils’” goal with God’s goal (Screwtape refers to God as “the Enemy”), and does so in what I find to be a terrifying way: “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands…is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about [God’s] love for [humans], and [God’s] service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. God really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of [Godself]—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like [God’s] own, not because [God] has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to [God’s own]. We want cattle who can finally become food; [God] wants servants who can finally become [family]. We want to suck in, [God] wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; [God] is full and flows over.”[ii]
All that which is not God, the junk food voices that make us shrink and fear and lash out and shut down, want to consume us. The junk drink energies make us live smaller lives than we’re made for, keep us drugged and dull and want to devour us. But God wants to feed our hunger and quench our thirst so that we might live more freely and joyfully.
Hafiz, the 14th century Sufi mystic poet helps us think about what happens when—for whatever reason—we don’t imbibe what we need. The poet writes:
I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:
…
Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self
O I know the way you can get
If you have not been out drinking Love:
You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.
You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.
You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.
I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's Hands.
That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep Remembering God,
So you will come to know and see [God]
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.[iii]
We all know how we get without God’s abundant, nourishing love. So why not take a big gulp? …and say “Thanks.”
[i] Susan Hylen, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=376
[ii] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (HarperOne, 1996), 38-39.
[iii] Hafiz, “I know the way you can get” (excerpt), I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz, by Daniel Ladinsky, Sufism Reoriented, 1996.
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