As Beloved Children - Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Let me tell you the story of a baker. She began by watching. As a 4 year old, she would stand by her father as he mixed the flour, water, salt, and yeast to make their weekly pizza. On Saturday mornings, she’d petition for muffins and wait with rapped attention as the batter rose above the pan in the oven. In her play, she would imitate the actions she saw, putting dirt and water, flowers and leaves into concoctions of her own—mud pies and cakes.

Eventually she began helping, pouring in a couple of ingredients here or there—a teaspoon of salt, a cup of flour. When her birthday came around, she wanted to make her own cake with the support of her father, a guided process of mixing and baking, cooling and icing. Here and there he would offer some advice or general commandments he hoped would stick, important truths like “never make a cake from a boxed mix,” or “no whipped cream worth eating comes from a spray can.” But mostly it was a process of learning by watching and doing.

Her family discovered the Great British Bake Off. Night after night they would watch serious amateur bakers work through making cookies, breads, cakes, and myriad other creations—all in hope of a handshake from the famous baker Paul Hollywood. Through watching, she learned judgement—what makes for a good bake or a bad one, what kinds of flavors work together and what don’t. She even learned a vocabulary of judgement—terms like proofed or under-proofed, airy or stodgy. This baker continues to grow in her craft, and as she grows, the wonderful foods she shares with her friends and neighbors bring increasing delight. Her becoming serves the becoming and joy of those around her.

The story of this baker could have been the story of a musician or an artist, a scientist or a carpenter. It offers a pattern that is common to all human growth and learning, the path toward maturity. Children begin by imitating in play, then imitating in practice, and eventually they achieve enough skill to be imitated by others.

Only recently, cognitive neuroscience has begun to understand how this pattern works. It relates to two central regions of the brain, the frontal cortex and the hippocampus.  In research looking at how we plan actions, scientists observed a movement of neural activity from the frontal cortex, which is involved in decision making to the hippocampus where deep memories are stored. The understanding these scientists reached is that in order to plan future action, the brain goes back to the store of memories to look for maps. For example, if you plan to bake a cake, you will go to your maps for making one, informed by your previous experience with a recipe as well as your history of watching others bake.

In a conversation about this research, the writer Cal Newport suggested that it could be utilized for forming how we take on learning new ways of being. For instance, if you say you want to be a writer, then one aspect of doing it would be to fill your hippocampus with maps for how the work of writing is done. And in fact, that’s exactly what many beginning writers do. One of the most popular and enduring features of the Paris Review has been the “Writers at Work” interviews in which masters of the craft talk about their writing process. When you discover that Hemingway wrote 500 words a day, every day, or that Zadie Smith uses programs like Freedom to block the internet from her computer, a young writer is given a map for how the work gets done.

And so it is with our life as followers of Jesus. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, our call is to be “imitators of God, as beloved children.” This means we are to learn to live increasingly as Jesus himself would live if he were us. In becoming like Jesus, we become like God—a journey that will never be complete, but in which we can increasingly improve through grace. To grow in our capacities of Christlikeness, we should act as our young baker did. We should watch, as a child would watch a parent making a cake, imitating, in our own small ways, the movements of the Master. Over time, we too will know the recipe, we too will be able to do the extraordinary work of forgiving those who’ve wronged us, of freeing our hearts of malice, of loving as Christ has loved us.

Part of this imitation, will come through filling our mind with maps and recipes for a life in God’s image. If we read the biographies of great Christians, we will often find that immersion in the Gospels and the lives of the saints were key to their transformation. When we read of how St. Theresa, turned her frequent illness into a source of deep prayer, then it gives us a way to transform our own sufferings into a life of deeper dependence on God. When we watch St. Francis let go of wealth and prestige in order to fully love Jesus, we are offered an invitation to also let go of all that hinders us from that fullness. When we observe the life of Dorothy Day, who rooted her activism in daily Eucharist and hours of prayer, we come to understand that contemplation is the root of good action, not its opposite.

In watching Jesus, and imitating those who imitate him, we join in a great chain of discipleship—each of us learning to mix the recipe anew in our own bodies and lives. Like a good baker, who eventually leaves the recipe behind, knowing how to play with the ratios of ingredients, our life as disciples will move increasingly toward new expressions of the many facets of God.

At the heart of all those facets is love. As St. Ignatius of Loyola put it, “God is Love loving” and to imitate God is to “walk in love as Christ loved us.” The more we are like God, the more loving we will be. Imagine a world filed with “Little Christs,” as the name Christian originally meant, all offering their homemade, God imitating love. It is a possibility we can begin fulfilling now, if we just move close to the counter, and begin watching our Father mix and stir, bake and serve the love we know through the fragrant offering of Jesus.

“A fragrant offering,” are the words Paul gives us for Christ’s love. Imagine the smell of a cake pulled from the oven and offered, still warm on the plate. Such cakes are now appearing in my house, without much help from me. It’s a great gift and joy to see years of imitation come to such a delicious end. As we learn to love, becoming our own fragrant offering to the world, I imagine God is also filled with joy. Ours is a world that could use more homemade cakes and homemade love. To begin making it we need only to become like children, looking to our Father, and imitating his movements of grace. Amen.