May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each heart be wholly acceptable in your
sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Please be seated.
“You’re not yourself when you’re hungry”: the tag line for one of the most successful ad
campaigns of all time, one created for Snickers candy bar. In the tv commercials, a regular
person is transformed temporarily into a celebrity who ill-suited for whatever activity is
happening. For example, a young man playing football with his friends transforms—because he
is not himself when he is hungry—into octogenarian actress and comedienne, Betty White.
Rose, from Golden Girls. An African-American rapper transforms into British singer-songwriter
and pop icon Elton John. And their friends, realizing that they are not themselves when they are
hungry, give them a Snickers, and et voila! Betty White transforms back into a football player,
Elton John back into a hip hop artist.
While the wisdom and efficacy of a Snickers bar being the first-choice for satisfying nutritional
needs is debatable, what is not debatable is that if we are undernourished, we are not
ourselves.
That’s the reason why Just about every self-help book, recovery program, or therapeutic
relationship out there teaches the HALT practice: before we make any big moves or decisions or
speak words out of our mouths or our fingers on a keyboard, we are well advised to HALT—and
make sure we are not too:
H ungry
A ngry
L onely
T ired
Those who teach us this strategy know that nourishment, of all kinds, has to be attended to
before we are good for anything else. And if those basic needs are not met, we are not only not
good, we may actually be harmful.
And while we recognize—and even joke about—how we are not ourselves when we are
physically hungry—we get “hangry”—are we as clear about the consequences of being
spiritually hungry?
Carl Jung wrote of humanity’s spiritual needs as being “as real as hunger” (Jung, Collected
Works, para. 403). Not a secondary need to be addressed when we have time or when we feel
like it, but a primary need that must be addressed regularly and faithfully—just as physical
hunger is.
No one would ever expect to eat one meal, push back from the table, and say, “Oh! Good job!
Got that done for the week.” No! That’s absurd! It’s not a one-and-done; we know this.
But I wonder if we might be doing a spiritual version of exactly that? Perhaps coming to church
on Sunday, listening, nodding; yes, yes, love God, love your neighbor, love yourself, got it, got
it—good job! Done for the week!
It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a one and done.
In John chapter 6, Jesus tells the crowd point blank: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to
me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). And
then Jesus goes on to say more—much, much more——extending the “bread of life” metaphor
for another 30+ verses.
And in the middle of this long “bread of life” discourse, there’s one of my favorite moments in
all of scripture. Jesus pauses, and the disciples turn to each other and say:
“This teaching is difficult.” (John 6:60)
And that moment makes me laugh every time, because I feel your pain, my brothers! This
teaching is difficult. Because what this gospel is trying so hard to get us to see is something we
may not be jazzed about recognizing—that how and if we choose to nourish ourselves—it
matters. What we choose to consume—matters. Because we cannot be ourselves if we are
spiritually hungry.
Dr. Andrew Weil, Harvard-educated physician and pioneer of integrative medicine, has written
persuasively of our need to broaden our ideas of “nutrition” beyond what we eat. In writing
about the need for good nutrition, he says:
“I have given you many suggestions about diet, about nourishing your body. I think it is
useful to broaden the concept of nutrition to include what we put into our
consciousness as well. Many people do not exercise much control over that and as a
result take in a lot of mental junk food.” (Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Ballantine,
2007, page 78)
Our world makes it awfully easy to indulge in junk food for the body—and—it makes it equally
easy to indulge in junk food for the spirit.
Are we nourishing ourselves, in whatever ways help connect us to Spirit: prayer, meditation,
reading, writing, physical movement, creative expression, being in nature, being in community,
serving others? Or—are we stuffing ourselves with junk food? Do we overindulge, for example,
in echo-chamber media sites that purport to inform us but are actually inflaming us,
overstimulating us with inflammatory rhetoric, scare headlines, muck-raking, pot-stirring, fault-
finding, all masquerading as journalism? Or maybe we spend our time eating from our own
private garden of poisoned fruit—our disappointment, our frustration, our envy, our self-
aggrandizement—feeding our basest wants but failing to nourish our most basic need.
We gobble up these empty calories until our spirits so jacked up on junk that we can’t even
think, much less feel. Numbed, self-righteous, and scattered, we go out into the world starving
to death, and we think that we are following Christ?
And you’ll notice the pronoun I’m using here is “we”—because <gestures to self> Oh yes, I have
helped myself to the “all you can eat” buffet of spiritual junk food, more than once. And y’all,
nothing has ever brought me—and those who had the misfortune to be around me—nothing
has ever brought as much sorrow as the decisions I made, the actions I undertook, and the
words that I spoke when I was spiritually hungry.
Are we nourishing ourselves? Do we recognize in our hearts and minds and live out in our daily
lives the unflinching reality that our Collect of the Day (Proper 14, page 232) makes plain: our
need for God. Do we strive, as our collect has us pray, to “do always those things that are right”
and acknowledge that “we cannot exist” without God?—not if we are to be the people that
God calls us to be.
Today we come together to baptize a beautiful child of God, Levi Teel Cone. And in so doing, we
will renew our own baptismal covenant. We will again promise to everything we can to support
this precious child and family in their lives in Christ. This most beautiful and sacred of pledges
we cannot do, however, if we are spiritually undernourished. We cannot live fully into our part
of the baptismal covenant if
we are not doing what we know to be right,
if we are not fully cognizant in mind and heart and spirit that we cannot exist
as the people God has created us to be, without
the Bread of Life, without
the God who creates us,
the God who transforms us,
the God who nourishes us.
Amen.