When I was a child, I didn’t know what discipleship meant. I knew that the bible called people who followed Jesus disciples, and that I if I was good I would follow Jesus as well. Being good meant listening to my parents and my teachers, as well as being polite.  I understood the need to bring my offering for the poor.    At a deep inarticulate level, I experienced a sense of homecoming each time I entered the church sanctuary.   But I would not have understood the choice I needed to make in order to truly say YES to following Christ.  I wouldn’t have understood the “maturity” that Paul was asking of to the Corinthians (Ephesians 4:13).  The maturity to grow to the stature of Christ.

Maturity means being fully developed in body and mind.   In our Christian faith, maturity is a choice.  Each one of us must choose for ourselves to grow and to learn.  We can belong to a community of faith, worship regularly, and still not understand, or perhaps be afraid, or too tired to understand, that growing requires an active "YES."   It is easier to live with the “perhaps.”  Even in the face of the gospel and in the midst of the community of faith, we can choose to remain immature.

 As a minister, I have my own spiritual journey of faith, and my role as a spiritual leader.  One informs the other.  As long as I am searching actively for God’s presence, an active "yes" hounds me in my daily relationships, and in understanding who I am as a disciple.

Maturity in faith calls us to question the reasons for our actions in the world. From what basis do we operate?  When is doing good in the world a humanitarian act, and when it is a true expression of discipleship?  I had a good conversation with a parishioner who does much good work in the community.  For this person, the question is, how his faith informs and motivates his service for others.  When service became an expression of his faith, it took on a new meaning.  Another parishioner shared with me that the sacrifice of Christ was the reason for her sacrifice of self in service to others and to the church.  Without an active faith, one that is daily remembered, we can become good humanitarians, but fall short of opening the door to growth in our faith.  An active faith life helps keep our ego centered in God and not in ourselves. It also opens the door for forgiveness, hospitality, and compassion.

Discipleship can be seen as a culture.  We are aware of different cultures in our communities.  It could be ethnic groups, social groups, or age groups.  Teenage boys with baggy shorts, baseball caps on backwards, and long tee-shirts holding skateboards offer a very different culture from elderly men with loose cloths, baseball caps on forward, holding on to canes.   Asian culture is very different from Caucasian culture.  In each of these different cultures, expectations, cultural norms, and how one belongs differ.

In a culture of discipleship there are also expectations and norms about how one belongs and acts.

One aspect of discipleship is giftedness and service.  Paul reminds us that all God’s people are gifted, and these gifts are for the use of all:

  “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.  We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.”

This morning we celebrated communion ? ate a common loaf of bread, and shared a common cup of juice.  The bread, once scattered grain on the hillside, became one loaf, and then was broken again so that each of us was fed.   In the one Christ, we were united as one people, people called to be disciples.

The bread has many parts: flour, salt, water, oil, honey, and yeast.  Each brings its own gift; together, the bread is created.  To turn this into a metaphor, at different times we are the different parts. At times God or Christ is one of the parts.  One metaphor for God is the baker kneading the Holy Spirit into the fabric of our lives.  Jesus had told the disciples not to lose their saltiness, because salt gave flavour.  In bread, salt aids in the rising.  The kingdom of heaven is like a woman kneading yeast into dough.

Each of us is part of the body of Christ.  Together, we form Christ’s presence on earth.   Paul tells the early church in Corinth that they have to pay more than lip service to building up the church.  The community is built upon the gifts of all the disciples ? not just some of them. The risen bread is dependent upon all the ingredients (and all who produced the ingredients), plus the baker, and the energy of heat.   Likewise, a healthy and vibrant community of faith is the combination and responsibility of all of the faithful.  The ingredients placed on this table also tell us about the centrality of mission to discipleship.  People’s labour and lives bring each to us.

Jesus calls us to his ministry of healing, teaching, loving, forgiveness, and justice ? he calls us to a new life.

As Jesus is the bread of our lives, may our community of faith be bread for this community, and your lives become bread for God’s world.

Amen.