Holy hurry or deliberate devotion
It is often said, to the point of cliché, that we live in a breakneck culture. Drivers honk at the car in front of them a mere microsecond after the light turns green. Day spas offer hand massage to alleviate the stress from heavy use of BlackBerrys and pagers. Church supply catalogs promote all-in-one communion sets, with individually wrapped servings of wafer and juice in a convenient ready-to-go plastic container.
There are movements afoot to counter what author Kirk Jones has called our “addiction to hurry.” The slow-food movement, for example, provides a corrective to fast food on the run by emphasizing local produce and the unhurried enjoyment of a meal with loved ones.
In Luke 13 Jesus provides the image of a woman slowly baking bread, working yeast into a lumpy fragrant mass, letting the dough rest, then kneading some more.
Churches are places of leavening. We seek connection with one another, listening carefully, speaking thoughtfully, allowing God to knead us, and to let us rest, and then to knead us some more. It is painful sometimes; we get stretched and pulled along the way.
Such a process takes time and effort. It takes more than a Sunday commitment. But the resulting bread nourishes and tastes like nothing else on earth. We can imagine Jesus saying, “To what shall I compare the reign of God? It is like bread that feeds for a lifetime.”
But there are occasions when a big, yeasty loaf that takes a long time to rise is impractical. When life closes in on us, we don’t have that kind of time.
In Exodus 12 the Israelites beat a hasty exit from Egypt, with bread half-baked, mixing bowls wrapped in cloths for the journey. The text reminds us that life is so often on the move. Unleavened bread is the food of the hasty departure, of urgency and immediate need. Often people can’t wait for the leavened bread. They need a word of grace, and they need it fast.
As disciples of Jesus sent to minister to a hungry world, we meet people all the time who cannot, or will not, wait for the bread to rise. Their father is dying and they need to make a heartbreaking decision about life support. Or a hurricane has barreled across the coastline, leaving devastation in its path.
In crisis situations we are rarely asked to expound on the finer points of theology. Instead we are invited to sit with hurting people and to speak a simple word of comfort and hope, to respond with acts of mission and mercy. And through a miracle of God’s grace, people who cannot wait are sustained for the moment by the most basic meal, a meal of quick, unleavened bread — the nourishment that comes from knowing that God cares for us and desires our wholeness, that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
To what shall I compare the reign of God? It is like unleavened bread that feeds a hungry people who urgently need it and cannot wait.
The church at its best helps us master both types of bread: a recipe for slow-rising, long-baking bread, that takes a lifetime to master and is shared in deep relationship, and a recipe for quick bread, bread for the road, bread for times of crisis.
Neither is better than the other, and a complete diet consists of both. Too much of the luxurious leavened bread and we get too full, complacent and lazy, forgetting the needs of the world. Churches can become insulated and clique-ish, gorging on their own good feelings of comfort and community to the exclusion of anything or anyone else.
On the other hand, too many meals on the run and our faith becomes a series of empty words and cheap clichés.
As ministers in Christ’s reign on earth, we’d better know how to bake both kinds of bread, because the world needs both.
The world needs our best, most unhurried, most prayerful deliberation about Scripture and theology. And the world needs us to have internalized the gospel message to the point that we can provide a quick gift of grace in unexpected places, almost without even thinking about it — like a reflex.
To what shall I compare the reign of God? It is like a group of people with leavened bread in one hand and unleavened in the other, asking that through them God might feed one another and the world. |
