We Are What We Eat
Far from being just a way to nourish our bodies, food is also a powerful metaphor for what nourishes our souls. If the saying is true, “We are what we eat,” perhaps we can reflect on what we take into ourselves, what we consume. What do we pay attention to? How do we spend our time? What we consume weaves into our very being.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
In the name of the father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Here’s your mantra for the week. Here’s our interactive part of the sermon. I’m going to say a phrase and you say it after me, because you’re going to need this this week with school and with everything else. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Taste and see that the Lord is good. Taste and see that the Lord is good. It’s the same for us. So when anyone gets on your nerves this week, just put your hand up and say, taste and see that the Lord is good. I love that image, that phrase. So this morning I have just a few thoughts around food that I want to share and see if this makes sense to you.
One of our most prized gifts that we had when we first were married was a cookbook from my grandmother from Grandy, who took a journal with lines in it and hand wrote out all of my favorite things from childhood and she put like, those awful photographs of you as a child. You know, they were fuzzy because they didn’t have the best ones.
Back when I was a kid and some some of her favorite prayers, and she wrote all of that in there, and then she covered it all with that plastic film to guard it against spills. So we still use that book a lot, and I’m blessed to be able to still call her. She’s 86 now, so I’ll call her and ask her things about that.
And the last one that I asked her, I called her, I said, “Grandy, what is oleo?” And she had to explain to me what oleo was. And I said, “what can I substitute? I’m just going to use butter.” That’s what I took. She said, “butter is fine, baby. Butter. Butter is always good.” So I go back to that over and over, and we cook from that book.
And every time I make something from that cookbook, all of the memories come swirling back. All of them. I can put myself back there in time, but I’m not quite sure when I say that. If I go back in time, or if all of that somehow gets pulled up here to where I am. But I’m back in that space and I can smell and I can taste and I can hear conversations that we would all share.
Right? And hear the arguments that we would share and wait until someone walked out of the kitchen, and then we’d all cut our eyes toward each other. We were the only family who did that. But all of that come swirling back, and it all centers around food. Food is such a crucial part of our life, and it not only nourishes our bodies, but it nourishes our souls.
And there’s so much around food as a metaphor and as a symbol that teaches us who we are deep down in ourselves. So think about all of these phrases that all orbit around food, that we use to describe how we feel. That got stuck in my crawl. He bit off more than he could chew. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
There’s so many. There’s. Here’s my favorite one. Wine is how we know that God loves us. That’s one of my favorites. But there’s so many and we all know them. And they just flow off our tongue. See, there’s another one. Because food is such a meaningful, symbolic part of our lives. What nourishes our souls? There’s another phrase in the past few weeks, as I’ve looked at this text that has come back to me, an image or a metaphor that means a lot.
And it’s this: we are what we eat. That one has really rung true to me. These past several months, if not beyond that, we are what we eat. All of these are very, very important, and it’s why there’s so much that is meaningful around what Jesus tells them in this morning’s text. Or if you get it in front of you, we’re going to look at it.
Open up your bulletin to that text from John, because Jesus is doing something absolutely radical here in so many ways. Jesus starts off, you know, the text that we have this morning, Jesus starts off and says, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
And the next line says, Then the Jews began to complain about him. But we always have to keep this in mind with John, because with the way that John has been used, right when John says that the Jews did something, what John is saying is the Jewish religious leadership, the establishment, that establishment pushed back on Jesus, saying that because to them there was a strict division, a separation between the creator and what was made, and that division served them because they got to man the gate, they got to staff the gate, as it as it were.
So when Jesus steps in the midst of them and says, I am the bread of life, they push back on this because it was a threat to their establishment. Let that sink in for a minute. Boy, how we have picked up on that tendency in so many ways in our own lives, right? Thinking that we somehow control the door, control that access point, and then perhaps in our own story, in our own life, Jesus steps into our own myths and says, I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. And it challenges us to ask ourselves how we have put ourselves in that point of controlling who is in and who is out. So they push back on Jesus. And when they questioned Jesus, Jesus just went all out. He went all out.
He didn’t hold back. He followed up with that one and said, 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 1st May eat of it and not die. I am the living bread who came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. And there’s that word ‘flesh’.
You should know that word is intentionally used. So if you had your Greek New Testament in front of you, you would see that John intentionally uses a word there that is not used in other, texts. In other zones, in other parts of the Bible, when it talks about bread and body and that piece, the word ‘soma’ is used and ‘soma’ is the more palatable (there’s another one) ‘soma’ is a more palatable word to use to look at the role of the body.
John. John uses the word ‘sarx’, S-A-R-X, which explicitly means ‘flesh’. Now, when our daughter was young, when we lived in Smyrna, I think she was around four. We were doing a, communion service. It was Rite One. Y’all don’t ever come to Rite One. But that group of people are wonderful. They really are the best people there. Quiet. But they’re great.
So we were doing a Rite One service, and there was one part where there’s this prayer that says, “and grant us so to eat of his flesh and drink of this blood, that he may live in us and we live in him.” And it was the first time that she had heard that. And she looks up in the middle of that prayer and just yells out loud, “we’re going to eat his what!” So what do you do when you’re standing like this? You just keep going. You bow and you look. Yes. So there was something in her that speaks that rings true for all of us.
This image of flesh that Jesus somehow equates his own self, his own body, with bread, to the point where he highlights and focuses our attention in on flesh. Now we may read that text. This came up in our Wednesday group. We may read this text and we may think, if I had been sitting there in that day and time, and if I had heard this, I would have thought that Jesus was absolutely crazy and that the people who heard this must have thought he was absolutely crazy.
But the trick is they did it. Here’s the fascinating thing. They lived in a different mythological and symbolic mindset, and it actually would not have been that unusual to them in a weird way, because the mystery cults Dionysus and all of those others were all out there and had permeated their world, and there were patterns in their cults when they would go that they ate raw flesh. It’s brutal. We can’t even picture it. And that’s why early on, people judged and criticized the early followers of Jesus because they called them guess what? Cannibals. They said, “these people are cannibals. They’re in there eating flesh. And we can’t tolerate that.”
So John intentionally chooses this word, flesh to push a point and to challenge us to say, just how far are we willing to go to understand how much that God would enter into our lives?
Just how far are we willing to go? Jesus. God went so far into our lives that divinity, incarnated flesh. So then how does that change the way we hear that saying we are what we eat? When we come here every Sunday and at other points too, and we all take our place and we share these prayers, and we eat bread and we drink wine.
What are we doing? What’s going on in our lives, in each of our souls? If we are what we eat, and Jesus tells us that somehow that this bread is his presence and we’re taking that into ourselves, that presence of Christ transforms and weaves itself into the very fiber of our being, and it changes who we are. It changes the way we live in the world.
It changes the way that we act, changes the way that we see the world changes the way that we make sense of things, who we understand ourselves to be. We are what we eat. So if that’s true, the question that we should ask ourselves is this what are we eating? What are we taking into ourselves? What are we consuming?
Are we consuming those things that transform us, that make us into more faithful people that change us, move us as we say more and more into the likeness of Christ. Because chocolate cake can transform us. But so can hateful social media. So can reading things that we know are blatantly not true, but we just want to keep reading them because we like how it feels.
Because we like to think that someone on the other team is being punched in the stomach. Although we know that’s not true. We know it’s a lie. We know it’s an exaggeration at best. What are we taking into ourselves? Because we are what we eat. It does make us who we are. And this is why this text is such a challenging one for us, given where we find ourselves.
Why do we pay attention to. The BBC had a piece last week that said that the average American average spends 13% of their time on social media. 2.5 hours a day.
Why? What’s our motivations with that? Why are we trying to run from in our own life that we are so obsessed with? Other people had for dinner and their business? What are we doing? What’s driving us to do that? What are we running from? What do we think we’re running toward? How do we think that helps us make sense of the world in which we live?
Or are we just anesthetize and numbing ourselves because we can’t tolerate the sense of uncertainty that we feel? We are what we eat. So we take that every Sunday, that truth, that deep truth, and we weave it into our own prayers. And that’s where the line comes from. Behold who you are. And then we all say, May we become what we receive.
And that line in France came from Saint Augustine who picked up that truth. We are what we eat and wrote image to prayer for himself and said, we picture ourselves on the altar. Jesus says, the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh, so that it’s transformed. If you want to push that his flesh is our flesh.
Our lives are transformed. And so we picture ourselves here being filled with the presence of Christ, being transformed by the dynamic flow of the spirit, which challenges us sometimes to ask difficult things of ourselves around what are we consuming? So as we go forth in the weeks and months to come feeling like we need a snorkel. We keep these phrases close, right?
We keep these prayers close and in times like that. Whole heartedly with absolute trust. We can look at each other and look at ourselves in the mirror and say, taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen.