Lent 1 2007
Eating our words…

Traditionally, Lent is viewed as a time for abstinence: often our Lenten discipline involves giving up some part of our diet – we stop eating chocolate for a time and a season – or we leave the wine alone. And this enforced abstinence, this fasting focuses us on our spiritual journey. But if we see our Lenten discipline only in negative terms, in terms of lack, then we can be seriously misled. If we open our eyes, ears and mouths to the readings today then the theme which screams out at us is abundance. If anything the richness of our readings strains our digestive capacity - for we have some astonishing interweaving: Jesus himself quotes the Psalms and Scripture; the temptations are mentioned in the Psalm, and the reading from Deuteronomy with the approach of the Israelites to their desert experience resonates not only with Jesus’s answers to his hunger, but also with our answers to our own hunger.

Faced with a meal like this, what do we start with – or should we push our plate away from us because we think ourselves unworthy to tackle such fine fare? Milk and honey don’t mean so much to us --- nowadays they are pretty much everywhere, but consider what it might be like for those without to receive the blessing of food. The Jewish scriptures use the image of milk and honey as a sign of the abundance of God’s provision – the rich blessing of God’s Bounty. Food is indeed a blessing, although the abundance of our provision deludes us into thinking that it is less than holy. And so our Lenten discipline of giving up some of the abundance of our diet can reopen us to appreciate the blessing of food if we are open to that possibility, and don’t just see the giving up as an end itself rather than the means to a greater spiritual end.

Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is a brilliant book, blending mystery, theology, history and is also a cracking whodunnit. In it, the murderer (who happens to be a monk: but don’t’ worry, it’s set in a monastery so I haven’t spoilt it for you!) ends up committing suicide by eating pages of poisoned ink. In spy movies, the secret agent is often expected to destroy the tape or paper with his instructions on: he (and it’s usually a he!) is often expected to eat the scrap of paper with the hidden meaning on. So we can consider what it means to have a mission where we have to so to speak ‘eat our words’. We are directed to inwardly digest God, to feed on him in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.

In the Eucharist we meet and share in the blessing God gives us in Jesus, the Word of God. His body, his bread become for us the foodstuff of life. And when Jesus says ‘humanity does not live on bread alone’ it is exactly right – we need more than bread, more than milk, more than honey: but we have to be careful that the sanctity of life and the holiness of the spirit does not so cloud our judgement that we delude ourselves into thinking that bread isn’t important!

Up near Redcliffe, just after the Clontarf bridge, every morning at 10am you can see the Pelicans feeding: The Pelican is featured on many lecterns in our churches as the place from where we read the Bible. If we are careless with our images, we might say that words from God are dispensed from there: but the fact is that the Word of God, that is Jesus, is dispensed amongst us in the Gospel from amongst us, symbolically reminding us that we are that very body that has to give of itself for the survival of others. The image of the Pelican is so apt at this point – the Pelican who spills her own blood to feed her young – pecks away at her own breast to provide the stuff of life for those who depend on her.

Crashaw the 17th century poet puts it like this in a paraphrase of Thomas Aquinas:

O soft self-wounding Pelican!
Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man.
All this way bend thy benign flood
To’a bleeding Heart that gasps for blood.
That blood, whose least drops sovereign be
To wash my worlds of sin from me.

And isn’t it an indicator that the very organ we use for eating is the same one we use for speaking? Perhaps obvious, but let’s get it clear today that the meal of the readings, like the meal of the Eucharist, like the meal of the BBQ after our meeting is a holy expression of what it means to be Christ’s Body and blood. The Church is Christ’s body – currently very obviously bleeding and hurting: but none the less we believe that Christ is the source of life.

So will we eat our words? Not as in Crow pie, but in the spirit of grace that through our humble and greatful feeding God will open the way for us to a more meaningful existence? God guides us by saying that we can contribute to the world around us by seeing everything as a source of food. Will we learn, this Lent, to value what we say, what we do, what we eat and what we learn? For unless we eat God first we cannot really speak about God to others – and what more important calling is there than that?

This sermon is a development of an idea and theme generously provided by the Revd Rupert Jeffcoat.