Many of you may remember the Nestle Boycott back in the late 70’s due to its unethical marketing of infant baby formula in poorer nations. Nestle was promoting its baby formula with several blatant lies such as saying it is a healthier option to breastfeeding or that it would free up a mother for other things like working outside the home to make money. They used advertisements that stigmatized breastfeeding as disempowering to women.
Well as it turned out and still does baby formula is problematic in poor areas where clean water isn’t available and proper sanitation practices are difficult to observe. Mixing powdered formula with tainted water was giving babies dysentery and worse. Moreover, because it was more expensive than breast milk people were watering it down to make it go further resulting in babies being under nourished. And to cap it all off, Nestle had the audacity to sell to poorer countries baby formula that was not as nutrient rich as what they were selling in richer countries so that white Westerners who used it had a better go with it giving the “home front” impression of “well it works for us so the problem must be them”.
Babies do better physically and emotionally when breastfed for at least the first six months of life. That’s indisputable scientific fact. Breastfeeding passes immunities and other beneficial goodies from mother to child that infant formula simply cannot. The bond between mother and child is so much strengthened by the physical, skin-to-skin contact breastfeeding involves, which incidentally, also produces stress reducing hormones. Baby formulas are a godsend if there is some reason, like latching issues, that breastfeeding just can’t happen. Otherwise, real mother’s milk is the best food for a baby to grow on.
That in mind, Peter tells us here in our reading, “Like newborn infants long for the pure, spiritual milk so that by it you may grow into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” A couple of weeks ago we spent some time learning about how we are born anew in Christ. That God the Father had sired us anew with the Holy Spirit so that we are now his children, members of his family, brothers and sisters of and in Jesus the Son. Now, Peter plays that image out a bit further in saying as newborn infants, we need to eat. If we are going to grow up into salvation people who bear the image of Christ, then we need to eat real food not watered down cows milk or something like that.
Back in Roman times they had alternative foods for infants other than their mother’s milk. They knew that human breast milk was best for the baby. But the also had this Nestle thing going on too. If you were rich and didn’t want to be “inconvenienced” by motherhood, you procured a wet nurse slave which often meant the death of the slaves own child because yours came first. So also, if you were not well off and a breastfeeding issue arose, you had the wet nurse option if another woman in your family was nursing at the time. But most often, if you couldn’t feed your baby your own milk, you had to feed milk from a cow or a goat. This meant that your baby would not have the immunities it should have and the chance of infant mortality was greater. Though they didn’t understand germs, they did see the risks. It was risky not to feed an infant human breast milk.
So back to Peter and to the pure, spiritual milk; what is he referring to? Well, right at the end of chapter one he refers to the love that is within Christian community, inviting us to love one another deeply from the heart. We who have been given a new birth by the Holy Spirit and are the progeny of God the Father grow to salvation by participating in the loving community of Christian fellowship. The love we share is God’s face on earth.
So, in 2:1 Peter tells us to put aside some things and these things are what I would call the watered down cows milk that we should avoid if we are to grow into salvation: salvation being mature, loving Christian community. I can’t emphasize that enough. The things that we are to leave behind are all things that hurt community and they are unfortunately things or rather behaviours that broken and hurt people do to break and hurt others. Peter mentions hostility, deceit, hypocrisy or putting on pretences, envy, and spreading lies about other people. All these behaviours destroy trust and kill community. They weaken friendships, give a false sense of power and security when all they really are is an instinctual cover for the insecurity we all feel when we don’t have that sense of God’s unwavering love for us. Bringing these watered-down, unsanitized infant formula behaviours into Christian community kills it. It turns a congregation into a club dominated by dominant personalities who are afraid of their own insecurities.
Peter says that if we have tasted the good stuff, the love of God in Christ then we are to desire it and choose it. He invites us to come to Christ Jesus the living stone who is the cornerstone of a living temple of which we are the living stones of which it is being built. The early church didn’t have church buildings or temples like the other religions. We only had our fellowship. To come to church was to come to a gathering of Jesus followers wherever they happened to meet.
Peter also says we are the priesthood of “the temple” who offer up the true spiritual sacrifices that come with helping one another be disciples of Jesus and grow in him. Christian community is built on discipleship, people committing to following Jesus together. Small groups of people committed to one another to study Scripture together, to share our lives, our struggles and joys, and to pray together.
Peter then goes on to point out that Christian community matures into a visible, holy nation among the nations. The biggest mistake the Church ever made throughout history was to get involved with empires and nations so that a national body can today call itself a Christian State while in turn having absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus; especially his teachings that we are to love our neighbour and our enemy and the immigrant among us. We ignore these essential teachings all the while coopting the reputation of God to seek the will of a power hungry few who just want to own everything. Oops. Sorry. Got side-tracked.
The “Jesus” nation exists as small gatherings of people who by earnestly following Jesus strive to do things like eliminate poverty in their immediate communities, care for the elderly in the immediate communities, help with childcare in their immediate communities. The Jesus nation brings healing to the immediate communities in which they exist expecting nothing in return. This is the way we proclaim the mighty acts of the one who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.
I know I sound idealistic, but…this is the way the early church was for the first couple of centuries before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early 400’s. Over the centuries there were times when the church rose to the occasion and manifested this idealistic behaviour. Believe it or not, it was during plagues and pandemics. When these things broke out it always seemed that the official State church spent its time saying God was getting the people for sins; or, scapegoating immigrants or other ethnic groups as the cause. Yet, there were also small groups of faithful followers of Jesus who didn’t play like that but rather shut up and fed the hungry, nursed the sick, buried the dead, cared for the widowed, raised the orphaned at great risk to their own health and sacrifice of their own resources.
As I said, I know I’m sounding idealistic, but…this wouldn’t be the first time that longing for ideals has changed the world for the better. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that inspired and is still inspiring good change in the world. We live at a time when the ideals of Jesus are what this world needs to counter the myths of privatization, consumerism, and materialism and so perhaps we, the followers of Jesus, should begin to long for, to deeply desire, the pure, spiritual milk of Christian community as we have indeed tasted that the Lord is good. Perhaps this deep longing in reality looks like a deeper commitment to Jesus and to being his disciples together and from let the mighty acts of God arise from us as he moves us to greater acts of love towards one another and for those outside our fellowship. Long for the pure, spiritual milk that will cause us to grow into the salvation that arises among God’s family loving one another deeply from the heart. Amen.
