The Antidote to Soul-Leanness: ‘Evermore Give Us This Bread’
I want to start out today with what to me is one of the most chilling verses in the entire Bible, and it’s in Psalm 106: “And He gave them their request but sent leanness into their soul” (v. 15, NKJV).
Inner Humility
Contrast that to Jesus’ words about himself when he says, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge” (John 5:30a) meaning “As I hear from God.” He goes on in that same verse to say, “and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
in many ways, that is, in fact, for us, the place of safety, to have a very healthy suspicion of our own convictions. “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear …” and even hearing, having both the humility as well as the perseverance to check out what I think I am hearing. It’s very easy for us to go to the Scriptures to more or less justify our own prejudices, reinforce our own theological convictions, which could well be completely out of line. That’s the story of the Jews standing in front of Jesus: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).
That was a strong thing to say to Pharisees, who made their livelihood studying, parsing and applying the Scriptures for the people of Israel.
If we are genuinely hungry for God, there will be times in our lives where we get caught up short in realizing that sometimes even the most deeply held opinions we have had are just wrong. And sometimes a part of the work of God is to build in us a kind of inner humility that allows us to have a healthy skepticism about our understandings about ourselves, about other people, even about how life operates.
Not so that somehow I might tremble in insecurity. But instead, so I might see in new ways the absolute necessity of finding ways to lean in to Jesus so I can remain in that place of being the humble recipient of whatever it is the Father is trying to teach me. Otherwise, I could get it wrong, and do it for all of the most religious of reasons. I could build into my life a level of comfort that, in fact, makes me feel good about myself, but notice around the edges a certain kind of softness of conviction, and a certain distance between God and me that I think reflects the very thing the Scripture describes when it uses the term “leanness in their souls.”
‘Gracious Father’
It is in that place that we cry out to God in the collect that has been given to us, “Gracious Father,” when we find ourselves in those places where we realize “I’ve been so wrong, and I had no idea,” in those places where we really need God to be gracious to us. He knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust. He’s seen it before, right here in the Scriptures.
It’s not that somehow we’re being particularly or unusually stubborn. It’s the revelation of our stubborn wrongness. That’s not new to God. He’s been noticing it in us for quite a long time, you see. But he is graciously continuing to provide opportunities where we actually see the truth and out of that are willing to challenge our own assumptions. And we do call God “gracious” and “Father,” because, regardless of what your images of “Father” might be in the New Testament, the understanding of God as Father is chiefly as protective provider. That’s who the Father is.
‘Evermore Give Us This Bread’
And so I can come to him and say the very thing I need to know of him, in calling him “gracious Father,” and asking him to “evermore give us this bread” that came down from heaven, the bread that gives life to the world, the bread that says, “I am the truth,” in a way that actually changes my heart, meaning my thoughts and my disposition. Because I can still be right for all the wrong reasons, especially if I want to use being right as a club to get other people to think your way. No, it’s a changing of both conviction and disposition that God desires to work in us, so that what we carry as bearers of the Word of God reflects more of Jesus and less of our own orneriness.
Our deep need to always be right, the capacity that we have to berate others, even in the subtlest of ways, if they disagree with us, the gentleness that in fact, trusts in God’s power, both to inform as well as to reveal that which God has said to others who may be hearing your voice. “Evermore give us this bread,” so that I am not lulled into the anesthesia of being content with a lean soul. That I’m not continuing to ask and seek and knock for those things that I might not even understand but have a hunch that I just don’t have as strong a grasp on the truth as Jesus would like me to have.
‘That He May Live in Us, and We in Him’
There has to be, you see both an inward preparation to be able to receive as well as the capacity to hear it. And that’s something only God can do. He’s got to be the one who works in me the capacity to receive so that when the truth gets spoken, I hear it and recognize it. Otherwise, if the truth is spoken and there isn’t that capacity to receive, what actually happens is the hardening of my own heart.
So today, beloved, we who can easily be those who deeply believe for all the right reasons something that in the kingdom of God doesn’t look like Jesus at all. Ask God with me, “Gracious Father, evermore give us this bread…” that we might look like and talk like and share out of the genuine heart and ministry of the God we love so much.*
Have you experienced a leanness of the soul? Its opposite? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.
(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on March 15, 2018, in the Bishop’s Oratory of the Diocesan Office, Orlando.)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
* The collect in full: “Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world; Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.”