Way back when Levi was a baby, I remember I had a particularly hard week. I seemed to be doing everything wrong. I’d apparently let my older kid use the wrong kind of hand soap, I’d been duped by and let the homeless walk all over me and con me into giving away five bucks that he’ll surely use on booze or drugs, and I’d let my youngest do irreparable damage to his cerebral cortex by letting him “cry it out.” I shopped at the cheap chain grocery store instead of the local organic co-op, and I forgot the reusable grocery bags. And I’d turned the heat on in the house and forgotten to close the bathroom window, and when we ran out of whole milk, I fed my kid heavy whipping cream. I remember that that week I was so tired and overwhelmed by that horrible “witching” hour between 4-6 pm, that hour when your kids are tired and hungry and freaking out and you are tired and hungry and freaking out, that I put my baby in the bathtub and forgot to take off his socks.
It was one of those weeks when those inner voices are incredibly loud. Like the bass-thudding-in-the-giant-SUV-next-to-you-at-the-stoplight loud. You aren’t good enough. You can never do enough. And what you do do is flawed and broken. And it’s pledge week on public radio, so instead of donating another five bucks a month, you can’t, because you gave that five bucks to the drunk guy down the street, so you ignore the news and the pleas for donations and listen instead to the Jimmy Buffet cd you found under your driver’s seat with the coffee cups and the stale Cheerios. You feel like a failure every way you turn. Your five year old doesn’t know about the function of the silent e and can’t do basic algebra problems. He insisted on wearing sandals on a forty degree morning and you didn’t stop him. You gave your baby drinkable yogurt. The baby poured drinkable yogurt all over his car seat and all over himself, so when you brought him inside you just stripped him down to his diaper and let the dog lick out the drinkable yogurt from his pants, and then you let the baby wander around in just a diaper and socks all afternoon, all while he cried for more drinkable yogurt. Until it’s time for a bath and you take off his diaper and plunk him in the tub only to realize that you haven’t taken off his socks.
So. That day, I remember, I decided to bake some bread. Or try baking bread, rather. There’s this recipe in the New York Times for “no knead bread,” and it’s really simple, and Dan makes it all the time, so I thought, why not? Let’s try it.
But see, I am a terrible bread baker. It takes a certain touch and some patience and an amount of precision that I just don’t have. It’s a science. But there it was, this recipe for no-knead bread that seemed easy enough. So I tried it.
3 cups of flour
1/4 teaspoon of yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
1 1/2 or so cups of warm water
a lot of patience.
that’s it.
voila. Bread.
Four simple ingredients that, when they are what they are, when you let them do what they are meant to do, they work together and, Bread.
It didn’t turn out perfect. It wasn’t even particularly pretty. The crust was a little too hard. And there are a few hot spots in the pan that made dark circles on the bottom. And it didn’t rise like Dan’s does. It was a little too chewy. But there it was, bread.
And, also, a desire. For more bread.
So I made another batch. I didn’t even clean out the bowl from the first batch. I just kept going. I added more flour and more yeast and salt and mixed in the water and I let it sit, once again.
And life went on. The yeast multiplied and grew and bubbled and the gluten formed and the Facebook kept on hollering at me and the boys kept leaving their apple slices where the dog could get them and the husband kept leaving his boxers on the bathroom floor and I kept tripping over my own shoes that I leave lying around the front door.
And the yeast kept rising.
Once in awhile I’d look over at the stove and peek through the plastic wrap and I’d see the dough rising, the gluten sticking, the simplicity of four ingredients simply doing what they were made to do, being what they were made to be — together, becoming bread.
The lawyers and the Pharisees and the people of power are back at it, in our reading today, back at trying to trap Jesus. To trick him. To let him know that “we are on to you, Jesus. You’re walking around like you’re the expert, that you know a better way, well, we’ve been at this our whole lives, not just your three measly years wandering around telling everybody about “love.” Tell us, Jesus, if you’re so smart:
What is the most important commandment?
And like a master bread baker. Like an artist who makes landscapes out of three primary colors. Like the one who first discovered how to make and tend to fire. He gives us the simplest of ingredients. Just a couple of things, that, when combined, make bread, and art, and fire, and community, and forgiveness, and comfort, and peace.
Love God.
And like it, Love each other.
That’s it.
Two ingredients that come together to make the body of Christ.
The lawyer asks Jesus, what’s the most important thing, the one thing that we need more than anything else? What’s the one thing?
And Jesus gives him two.
Sure. Flour is probably the most important ingredient when it comes to making bread, but if you don’t have yeast, and you don’t have water, then we’ll have nothing but powder in our mouths. What’s the point of having flour if you don’t have yeast? If you don’t have water? Or salt?
What’s the point of loving God with all that you have if you don’t love what God loves?
What are the things we need most in this world? To love God, and to love what God loves.
We need to chew on more than dust. We need real bread. We need the whole recipe.
How do we love what God loves?
One thing I learned about making bread is that you can definitely work the dough too hard. If you mess with it too much, it becomes rubbery, tough, and the dough collapses.
On the other hand, If you rush it, the yeast doesn’t have time to grow, it doesn’t get to do what it was made to do, and you’ll get something more akin to bricks rather than bread.
Time. And just the right attention. That’s what we need. Some practice. A willingness to “waste” a few pounds of flour. We need to be willing to get our hands dirty. To step in to the sticky, glutenous goo and interact with it, stretch it, roll it, fold it and press it.
Only the very skilled baker can handle bread in just the right way. Only the very experienced baker knows how the dough should feel in her hands when it’s just right, when it’s time to put it in the oven, or give it an egg wash, or when it needs a few more hours sitting over the pilot light.
But the ingredients, like the commandments, are pretty simple.
It’s not really that hard, exactly. But it does take patience and a trained eye. It takes the ability to let go and let it sit and to trust that the flour and the yeast and the water and the salt are going to do what they were made to do. You just have to let the ingredients be. The baking of bread is almost too simple. That’s what makes it so complicated.
How do we love what God loves?
Well, we let the body of Christ be what it was made to be. Broken for us. Loaves of food for us.
We heal the sick. We offer a word of hope. We eat together.
We let it sit when it needs to sit.
Then we let it rise when it’s ready to rise.
We knead it and press it out and we let it rise again.
Jesus didn’t rush. He was a pretty poor multitasker. He didn’t juggle demands or question his worth. He was. He was here. He was present. He was. He is. He had his ingredients. He was confident in those ingredients. So he put them in the recipe and watched, was present for them. He made small batches.
He gave it time.
He tended carefully.
We are still going to rush around sizing each other up, comparing parenting techniques, cussing each other out in traffic and putting our kids in the bath still wearing their socks. We are going to tell our kids that we’re listening to them while we are also trying to take the scissors away from the baby and turn off the TV and stir the mac and cheese that the kids have had for the third time that week. We are still going to collapse in our beds at night feeling as though we have failed.
We are still going to think that the only way for a church to stay open or for our kids to grow up or for our marriages to survive is to do and do and do and do.
Meanwhile, there’s a loaf of bread, baking in the oven.
Meanwhile, yeast is multiplying in a bath of warm water and salt and flour.
Meanwhile, God is loving and loving and loving, and we are invited to enter in.
We are invited to let go of the driving and the messaging and the emailing and the planning and sit and ferment. Sit and be. I know this doesn’t make sense. I know how hard this is. I know that we want to get up and do and fix and create and all the things. I know this doesn’t feel good when our own church clock feels like it’s running out.
But.
We can be the Body of Christ.
If we can stop trying and doing and manipulating the Body of Christ.
What would it look like if, instead of doing and doing and doing, if we could be?
What would The Church look like if we could Be The Church, instead of just doing church?
This is the most important question for us at Peters Creek. Whatever the next stage is for us, whether it’s transforming into something new, or closing our doors, or having a sudden, miraculous revival, we need to stay focused on this question: Can we give up “doing” church so that maybe we can focus on how to “be” the church?
We can be the church, whether we have six people in worship or six hundred. We can be the church, whether we have a full-time pastor, or a building, or an endowment, or a beautiful Steinway piano. The ingredients are the same, whether we’re bursting at the seams, whether our building is full, whether our coffers are overflowing, or if we have to one day shut these doors and leave this place into the hands of whomever comes next. No matter what happens, we can still be the Church. We just have to love God and love each other. That’s it. Those are the ingredients. That is what we are called to do, which is actually, to do nothing. That is what we are called to be.
If we did that, I don’t think it would matter if we “survived” as a church. We’d thrive as The Church.
So let’s keep praying, yes. Let’s keep discerning and questioning and trying out new ideas. Let’s listen to the voice of God when God tells us what’s coming up next. But whether we do or don’t do, whether we get a whole new exciting thing started, or we gently say goodbye, no matter what, The Church will survive. The Church will still be The Church. We are loving God, and we are loving each other, in whatever big or little ways, in whatever personal or broad ways, whether we’re giving five bucks to the homeless guy or starting up a whole new homeless ministry. We are being the church, even when we are far away from each other, distanced by pandemic or political perspective or financial status. The heart of our mission will always stay the same because we have the essential ingredients: Love God, Love Each Other.
If we did that, whether we were in a building or not, whether we were surrounded by hundreds of involved and active members, whether we had an endowment bursting at the seams and dozens of missions and committees and a thriving children’s ministry, if we did that, if we stuck to the most important ingredients, no matter what the scale,
I think maybe we’d have bread.
I think maybe we’d be fed.
And other hungry folks would come in and want to be fed too.
And maybe the bread wouldn’t be perfect. Maybe it’d have too thick a crust and the bottom would be burnt and it’d be lopsided and lumpy. Maybe we’d have little boys running around with soggy socks and dirt under their fingernails. Maybe we’d still question our own value and we’d still be tripping over our shoes and tripping over the dog who is still doing our laundry by licking the yogurt out of our baby’s pants.
But it’d be good to eat. And it would nourish us. And it would be broken for us. And we’d share it.
And we’d love God and we’d love our neighbor.
And it’d be good.
And we’d be The Church.
Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment