- Mud Pies of the Spirit: On imitating God as a beloved child, by the Rev. Ragan Sutterfield
- Ephesians 4:25-5:2
I would invite you to think about a couple of questions that occurred to me in conversation between this piece by Ragan Sutterfield and the epistle to the Ephesians.
This passage is a really wonderful set of instructions for living in community, and so I urge you to wonder, to wonder about what it means, for example, to be angry but not sin. What helps you have anger that is not wrong? I don’t mean righteous anger in the usual sense of that phrase, you know, because I think it’s so easy for us to start to think that we’re very righteous.
Nevertheless, anger is an energy. It’s a response. It’s sometimes what helps us make change, either in ourselves or in the world, and I always wonder what it is that helps it not veer into the kind of bitterness or resentment or blaming that is wrong, but to have a kind of a rightness about it, a cleanness about it. One piece seems to be to not let the sun go down on it, to not hold onto it too tightly.
Relevant to this question comes from the Sutterfield piece: Who are those Christians, those saints, or maybe people who are of a different faith tradition entirely, who are your models? Who are the people who help you get a sense of what it is to live a faithful life?
For me, the older I get, the more I realize that some of them are older than me. Some of them are my elders. Some of them went before me and were mentors, and some of them are younger than me. Some of them are people who are growing into a world that I can only just begin to dimly sense and imagine. But who are they for you? They might be in this room, they might be in your history. They might be in a completely different time and place. They might be someone in your family. Who are they, your saints?
And finally, this passage from Ephesians, has a phrase in it that we frequently use as an invitation to the offertory. We say, “Walk in love….” It says, “Live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” And I expect that the writer was thinking of a fragrant offering in terms of incense, in terms of sacrifice. But I wonder if we might, particularly because we are in this period in August, when we go on and on about the bread of life, I wonder if we might think of all the fragrances of food that nourish us, and maybe especially of good bread baking. And think also about that image of tasting and smelling and experiencing nourishment, and how that fragrance is emitted, evoked and offered up from our lives. Amen.
