How Do You Smell Today?
I live right around the corner from La Rosa’s Pastry Shop – and it’s impossible to ignore. Now, I’m not much of a pastry or fancy dessert guy. But it’s impossible to ignore – not because I see it every day, and not because I shop there, and not because I crave pastry regularly.
It’s impossible to ignore because of the aroma that it pumps into the air.
It smells, in a word, delicious.
I’d say every other day, I’ll walk out of my house or open my car door after returning home – and I am hit with this wall of sugary sweet pastry smell, and it melts me.
Delicious. Impossible to ignore. It draws me in.
It makes me hungry.
Why am I telling you this? Glad you asked. In yesterday’s bible reading (2 Corinthians 2:14), Paul says this about our calling as a church to spread the good news of Jesus:
But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him.
You catch that? Through us, God means to spread (in every place) the fragrance that comes from knowing him. He’ll later say that we are “the aroma of Christ”.
It’s a deeper passage with all kinds of questions and interpretations – but at the heart of it, it asks us a very simple question:
Do our lives give off the ‘aroma of Christ’?
When people live around us – like the bakery – do they get a whiff of the undeniably sweet love and mercy and grace of God? When people experience the way we treat them directly, see what we post on social media, hear what we say about people behind their backs, see how we engage in this divisive political climate, observe the way we treat the ‘least of these’ around us – are they drawn in to that impossible to ignore smell of Christ’s life?
Or do we give off a stink that repels them from Christ?
Ask yourself this (admittedly odd!) question:
How do I smell?
Like Christ, or not?
We have to ask ourselves as a church, how do we smell? Like Christ, or like the world around us (and not in the good, bakery sense!)? If not like Christ, then what part of us needs a good cleaning?!? What part of us do we need to lay down, i.e., as a sort of burnt sacrifice whose aroma would be pleasing to God? What attitudes, actions, words, or responses do we offer that give off an offensive odor? When people are around us – and ‘smell us’ – are they drawn to Jesus, the delicious, filling, life-giving bread of life – or to something else? Or – is our life together so unremarkable, so ‘vanilla’ (which ironically, smell delicious), that people can be around us and simply ignore us – and so ignore Christ?
I can’t ignore the aroma of the bakery – it’s impossible to live around it and not smell it and be attracted to it. Imagine if the people who live around us never smelled the sweet aroma of Christ?
May we love those around us in such a way that we give off the aroma of Christ, and in doing so, God will draw others into Himself.