At the Lutheran Church of
the Resurrection in Halifax, NS, October has been celebrated as Spirit-Spiced
month. In autumn, coffee shops, bakeries, and even breweries, go all in on
autumn flavours: pumpkin spice, carrot spice, apple pie spice. These spice
combinations are warming and comforting, associated with positive feelings. The
smells trigger sensory pleasure, joy, and memories with food that tastes like
home. For Lutherans, Reformation Sunday tastes like home.
More specifically, Reformation
Sunday is a day Lutheran’s make a return visit to the Spirit Spiced Shop. This
shop is filled with a robust warmth and an abundance of fragrance. Everyone is
welcome and spices are free. It is the one Sunday of the year where we intentionally
and mindfully breathe in deeply, the full-bodied aromas of Reformation
theology. There are five spices – five solae, as they are called in theological
cookbooks. We enter the Spirit Spice Shop and find five autumn spices (cloves, ginger,
cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice). This cookbook – the sermon- mixes an autumn
spice with a point of Reformation theology to expand our tastebuds and
experience of the same.
Cloves – Cloves are paired
with Sola scriptura. Scripture alone.
A clove is a flower bud from
a bush in the evergreen family. It only takes a small quantity of this spice,
whether used as a whole clove or ground, to add flavour. It can be processed
into an essential oil. The essential oil is used to inhibit mold growth on some
food. It is also used in the conservation of heritage wood.
Luther wrote the hymn God’s
Word Is Our Great Heritage. God’s word, scripture, is the foundation of the
Reformation. Luther’s questions for the Church of his time came from reading
scripture. Scripture for Luther was like a flower bud: one verse, one question,
led to another and another, budding understanding. It doesn’t take a lot of
scripture to spice one’s understanding. We read and hear a pinch of ground
cloves in worship – not the whole Bible at once. Small quantities are shared so
that the Word can simmer within us. Too much at once and it is overwhelming.
The essential oil, the essential Word, wears into us and ages with us, being
passed from one generation to the next. Scripture
mulls within and inhibits mold, hopelessness, and failure of nerve. Scripture
alone – is the essential. It is the fullest of flavour. Scripture flavours how
we live our lives, who we are, and what we do in the world.
Ginger - Ginger is the flavour of Sola fide. Faith
alone.
Ginger is the root of a
flowering plant, in the genus of plant that includes cardamon and turmeric. It
was domesticated in Asia and one of the 1st spices to be transported
from Asia to Europe in the spice trade. For centuries it has been a traditional
medicine in China, India, and Japan. Ginger is used in rituals for healing,
asking protection from spirits, and in the blessing of ships. Most interesting
is that to grow ginger farmers need to protect the seed from disease. This is
done by dipping it in cow dung, smoking before storage, or a hot water
treatment.
The root of Reformation
theology is faith alone. In our practice this root comes to us through the
water treatment of baptism. Baptism is to protect the seed of faith. In the
dipping, the Spirit is stirred within us and rooted deeply, so that as we
journey through life, we stay grounded in God and community. The Spirit –
ginger spiced- works through the baptized to bring healing and blessing to a
broken world. Faith alone, a protected seed, given in baptism as a work of God,
that is the spice of forgiveness and salvation earned by Christ in death and confirmed
in resurrection.
Cinnamon - Cinnamon is Sola gratia. Grace alone.
Cinnamon is an evergreen
tree that produces berries and has thick bark. The spice is the ground bark. A few species of the evergreen are grown for
commercial use, with ‘Ceylon Cinnamon’ being considered the ‘true cinnamon. Most
of the international cinnamon is derived from four other species. The concept
of ‘true cinnamon’ has us ponder grace alone. Grace alone, is not the theology
that stews in some churches, and it is not the theology heard by those who have
left the church or heard by those who have decided never to cross the threshold
of the church. “True cinnamon,’ true grace is the good news that there is absolutely
nothing required and nothing one can do to achieve salvation; it is already
done with no merit given for works. Ephesians 2: 8 says, For by grace you
have been saved, through faith – and this is not your own doing it is a gift
from God –
Cinnamon is a super Spirit
spice for it traverses boundaries being embraced across cultures and used in a
diversity of culinary dishes. Grace – embodied by God in Jesus on a cross –
ground bark. Grace is God pouring God’s self out to flavour the world, across
cultures to diverse peoples, spice! The spice of forgiveness. The spice of love
and shalom. The spice of life, life everlasting! Grace that comes in the waters
of baptism. Grace that comes in the culinary meal of the church, communion.
Cinnamon, grace is the spice of life.
Nutmeg – Nutmeg embodies Sola
Christus. Christ alone.
Nutmeg is ground from a seed
that grows on a deciduous tree. The nutmeg seed is like a nutshell of the
gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Nutmeg seeds are dried gradually in
the sun for 15-30 weeks – agonizing, as was the journey of Jesus on the cross.
Drying nutmeg shrinks to a kernel-size inside a hard-seed-coating. Jesus is
laid in a sealed tomb. Eventually the hard-seed-coating when shaken, rattles. There is an earthquake, and the door of the
tomb is opened. The shell is broken off and the kernel -the nutmeg- appears. Risen,
Jesus appears to the disciples.
Reformation theology points
out that Christ is the only mediator between a person and God. The outer
hard-seed-coating is not meant to be a Saint or a priest as an intermediary for
people to get to Christ. Believe it or not, miraculously the hard-seed-coating is
also a spice, a different spice called mace. Reformation theology believes in a
priesthood of all believers where believers are immersed in the holy – nutmeg
and mace- holy in their everyday lives and vocations. Saint, priest, pastor, believer are all
redeemed, all equal in Christ.
Allspice – Allspice incarnates
Sola deo gloria. Glory to God alone.
Allspice is ground from a dried
unripe berry, of an evergreen shrub native to Jamaica, Mexico, and Central
America. Colonizers called it allspice because of its flavour notes of
cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. It is handled carefully so it does not loss
essential oils in the drying process. It is sometimes grown as a canopy to
shade coffee plants.
The most interesting thing
about allspice is that in Jamaica it is not by peoples’ works that the plant
survives. Attempts to grow the seed have failed. Allspice is spread by birds
eating the seeds and this is essential because there is something in their
digestive track that gets the seeds to germinate. This astonishing brilliance
in creation is glory to God alone. Allspice, although tasting like many is one.
God is one. We are called as the body of Christ to be one. With all our spice,
we offer all praise and glory to God.
Reformation is Spirit spiced.
Spirit spice is the aroma that dwells in us and wafts from us into the world.
The Spirit working through us flavours our communities. In a world where bland,
tasteless, watered-down, insipid, flat, uninspired, flavourless, unpalatable,
unsavory, unseasoned, unrefined, and artificial are all too common, Spirit
spice mixes in that which is needed for healing and wholeness; for justice and
peace; for warmth and comfort.
Sola scriptura, sola fide,
sola gratia, sola Christus, and sola deo gloria.
Scripture alone. Faith
alone. Grace alone. Christ alone. Glory to God alone.
Cloves. Ginger. Cinnamon.
Nutmeg. Allspice.
Breathe deeply, sisters,
brothers, and siblings. Breathe deeply
So that you are filled with
the aroma of God. Warm and comforted, share that spice. Be Spirit-spice.
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