False Bread, Part 2

In part 1 of this series, we talked about how “false bread” can infiltrate our tradition and even our church experience. I was a victim of this, so much so that by the time I headed off to college, I had decided not to attend church anymore. Yes, I’m sure God was laughing too. But at that point, I wanted nothing to do with the institution. 

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe somehow that Jesus was the Son of God, but that knowledge was so clouded by my experience of church that, to use the cliche, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

False Bread Revisited

It wasn’t until later that I met people who had about them a kind of winsomeness and joy that came from deep inside. I knew they knew something about God in Christ that I didn’t know at all.

Through all of that, I wound up coming into my own relationship with Christ. It had the same kind of life-changing vitality, but I still was caught up in rule-keeping. Once, while I was in seminary, a friend of mine and I were praying together, and he got a picture that I thought was prophetic. 

“You know what I see when I pray for you, Greg?” he said. “It’s like you’re on a tightrope.” 

I got it: Way up there, courageously, with great effort, I was trying to cross to the other side. Underneath, it was really steep and scary. And I thought, “You know, even though I do believe in Jesus in a way that I hadn’t in the past, that’s still how I see a part of my life.” 

I realized in that moment that I had, in essence, split the Trinity. Jesus was my Friend, my Savior. God? He was a whole different story. He was still the one up there making a list and checking it twice. 

So I had to come face-to-face with the fact that, regardless of what I knew in my head, the one my heart related to was a false god, not the God expressed in the Scriptures, the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ.

You see, Jesus’ identification as the second person of the Trinity with God the Father is complete. He is, Paul writes in Colossians, “The image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15b). As Jesus said, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father” (see John 14:9).

So if your picture of God doesn’t match up with what you see of Jesus in the New Testament, your concept of God is not right. It’s false bread. 

False Bread Challenged

I went on a quest to find the real God. And I knew that quest would be answered. In the story we discussed in part 1, we don’t know if the blind beggar is seeking, but Jesus seeks him. He picks him out: “For the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

This is Psalm 23 personified: the Good Shepherd coming to this very broken one who thinks he is in a place of demonic captivity from which there is no release. Jesus breaks into the middle of that, does a new creation on his eyes and changes the man. 

But there’s a price to pay. The religious system that put the blind beggar in that psychological prison to begin with still had to maintain its place of authority, to protect the system no matter what. The man who stood, complete and whole, was a denial and a challenge to that very broken system. So the leaders had to get rid of him, excommunicate him from the synagogue. 

But the Good Shepherd hears that the man has been put out and invites him into a deeper relationship. “’Do you believe in the Son of Man?’

“‘Tell me, that I may believe in him,’” the man answers.

And Jesus says, and I believe so tenderly, “The one speaking with you is he” (John 9:35b-37). In the Greek, it says the man literally fell down with his face to the ground and worshipped him (see John 9:38).

True Bread

Is there a gap in your life between what you think about God and what you see in Jesus? Is there a longing in you to put it in a more positive way, for something more than that which you already know? So you can say by experience, “I know the Lord to be my Shepherd. He has protected me in the valley of the shadow of death. He stands beside me when others will forsake me. 

“I know the companionship of his presence in good times and in bad. And even when I feel nothing experientially, I know his Word is faithful and that I will walk with him no matter what. Because his commitment to me is based not on what I feel but on his work, because he’s the one seeking me—even when I want to go somewhere else. Even when I want to be the sheep that strays, even though it might take me into the hands of the wolf, he is still there.” 

This is the one to whom so many of us have said yes. The one who gives us life, freedom and the capacity to live courageously with great winsomeness and dignity, knowing we are children of the Most High God who will judge systems and redeem the broken every single time. 

May we always follow the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for even the least of his sheep.

Have you had a time in your life where your view of God was based on false bread? 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 26, 2017, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Cocoa Beach, Florida.)

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.