March 26, 2006 - The cure for spiritual neglect

4th Sunday in Lent
26 March 2006
Numbers 21.4-9; John 3.14-21
The cure for spiritual neglect
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

I heard a guy on the radio complain that when he went to seminary at Harvard, not one single class description included the word healing in it. He’d been trained as a doctor, already, and wanted to study the connection between medicine and faith, but the seminary didn’t seem to be aware of any. I’m not surprised. Somewhere we got to the point where all the healing classes were taught in the medical school. Faith was out of the picture. What were ministers going to do, offer faith healing during office hours? Everybody thought that stuff was for crackpots and shysters, and it’s taken years of scientific study (by the medical schools!) for us to realize again that faith and prayer actually do have something to do with the body’s healing, and the mind’s healing.

What’s even weirder to me, now, is that there were no classes in Christian spiritual discipline in the two mainline seminaries I attended. You did have to take classes in other practical disciplines, like pastoral counseling and preaching, but students went through mainline seminaries without learning how to search our life and search our soul and search out God. In one class — and I mean part of one class session — I heard a visiting pastor talk about taking time out for meditation. He said we’d wear out, run down, dry up, and give out without it. We thought he was a little overstating things, but now I suspect he had worn out and dried up, himself, at some point. He just knew what it takes to get your life back.

The seminary wasn’t any more worried than we students about all that. Maybe a rich spiritual life was just assumed by our teachers. Maybe they thought we already spent hours a week in contemplation, and teaching it seemed unnecessary. Maybe the church had thrived so long without personal spiritual discipline that it seemed superfluous. Maybe the mainline churches just forgot how to teach it.

Well, mainline churches have been searching for a source of renewal to reverse their decades long decline, and they’ve found a source in the cool, deep spring of spiritual devotion. My school, San Francisco Theological Seminary—that wacky cauldron of new fangled ideas—became a forerunner in the renewal of spiritual practice, when a spirituality program was proposed in 1979, and then inaugurated in 1981. My 1979 graduating classmates just missed it, and we’ve all been developing the spiritual life, like Lilly develops a new medicine, ever since.

Our laboratory has been the congregation, and we’ve first experimented on ourselves and then applied our research with the people. Some things have worked, others haven’t. A number of members always warm to the idea, and others resist. The occasional member takes umbrage that anyone would suggest a need for more spiritual devotion, as if we’re any of us in some danger of spending too much time with God.

The spiritual life is always experimental, as the Israelites and Moses learned. One of their early laboratory studies came back to bite them, so to speak.

“What if we send our leader up to the mountain,” they apparently wondered, “to have our relationship with God for us?” So Moses spent his time with God on the mountain, and he came back with the results. “There’s a lotta stuff we gotta do,” Moses said, “and also quite a few things we can’t do.”

“Okay. Kind of burdensome, but okay, if that’s what you came up with.”

“Also,” Moses says, “we have to keep going across the desert, even though we get discouraged, even though it looks like we’re lost, and even though we are not enjoying ourselves. The good news is that we’re free and we have a God. The bad news is, for the time being, mostly everything else.”

You have to have a really sparkling personality to carry off leading people with a message like that, and Moses knew from the beginning he didn’t really have it. He wasn’t even much of a speaker. Moses was a plodder, but one who could come up with a spectacular stunt at just the right moment. He had several stunts, which were doozies, and by spreading them strategically across forty years of wandering, Moses managed to lead everyone who survived to the promised land. It was between stunts that things usually got sketchy with the people.

The setting, this time, is typical. Everybody keeps trudging across the sands. Sometimes they have to fight enemies, who are always better armed. Water is hard to come by, and all they’ve had to eat since Exodus 16 has been manna. I don’t know how good manna tastes, but even my favorite ice cream would get tiresome with three meals a day of it for forty years. And so just about everything has gotten tiresome, which is what starts the current bout of complaining.

Moses has been wanting to take the people on a direct route through Edom, but the Edomites won’t let them on their toll road, which is, anyway (a toll road, that is) the kind of thing only a moron Edomite would think up. [Author’s note: Edom is a red state and the legendary home of Indiana’s Hoosier progenitors.] So the Israelites have headed off the long way around Edom and wound up having to fight some Canaanites, which went all right, but warring takes it out of you. Now, they’re tired of everything: the battles, the desert, the hostile locals. “And we detest,” they say, “this miserable food!” They’re fed up.

This attitude has always annoyed God, at least in the Old Testament—I think it always does. Fed up people annoy God, and the aftermath of discontent is never pleasant. This time God sends poisonous serpents to bite them, and they’re dropping like flies.

“Help! Help!” they’re yelling—to Moses, of course —“Make it stop!” In good times and bad, Moses is the one who has to work it out with God. The people really don’t want to have to work out their own issues with God. They’d rather not think they have issues with God.

I know how those people feel, do you? I want to think it’s Moses’ fault we’re always having a war, and I pretend our surrogates for Moses—the president, for instance—can come up with the spectacular stunt we need just at the right time. And I want to think it’s the president’s fault that poor people can’t get fed and don’t have medical care. I want to think it’s the president’s fault our farms are turning in to tract homes, our ice caps are turning into beachfront property, and our TV and radio airwaves are turning into sewers.

So you know what I did? (I told you on Ash Wednesday, but maybe you weren’t around to hear it.) I turned off the TV, and I turned off the radio, and I leave the newspaper untouched on the breakfast table. I gave up current affairs and opinion for Lent. I have no idea whether or not the president or any other leader is doing the right thing, at the moment.

All I can think about, every day, is whether or not I’m doing the right thing. If we’re ruining the land, what am I doing to deal with it? If there really is global warming, what am I doing to raise my consciousness and public awareness about it? If the human eagerness for war keeps thwarting the holy mandate for peace, what am I doing to make war unpalatable by making peace irresistible? I ask myself only about my personal responsibility, because there’s no one else in the room to take it for me.

It’s just a spiritual experiment I’m conducting for Lent, and it could end up meaning nothing. But don’t you wonder what it would be like if everyone stopped watching the president and admiring the president and disdaining the president, and if all people that on earth do dwell simply did every responsible thing they could to leave our land, our planet and our world cultures intact for endless generations to enjoy? Would it matter, if we did, what a president or a prime minister or an ayatollah thought of to, or wished, they could do? Who would they do it with, if we were all personally responsible?

And that’s what Moses is dealing with—and what God is dealing with—in trying to convince people to be more personally responsible, rather than daring their leader to be responsible for them. It turns out that God’s idea of leadership was to take people who could be responsible for themselves, remind them of their unifying vision, and point them in the direction of fulfillment. Moses has been doing too much. He’s not only been carrying the spiritual water for the people, he’s been producing the water to quench their thirst. He’s been doing all the talking to God and taking all the guff when the people can’t handle it. Moses has been, as the family systems folk say, overfunctioning.

God takes matters out of Moses’ hands. The people do get Moses to pray to God for them, yet again, but God, for once, doesn’t make Moses fix it. God does give Moses an idea, and when Moses implements it, the people do their own spiritual work. God has Moses fashion something that looks like a poisonous snake, fasten it to a pole and tell the people to look at it. People will actually have to look, for once, at the devastating spiritual toxin they’ve created for themselves. When they get bit by their own poisonous creation, they will die, but if they look at the spiritual toxin, they will live.

And they do it. They thought Moses would have to do it. They thought the spiritual life was the responsibility of their spiritual leader, but they find out they can have their own spiritual life. God isn’t letting them off the hook, not this time.

This became such an important idea to Jesus that he used it to describe what he himself would mean—what his cross would mean—to people for their spiritual restoration. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” To look at the image of our Lord on the cross, Jesus seems to say, is to look at the devastating spiritual toxin we create for ourselves with our ingratitude, with our avoidance of spiritual responsibility, with our avoidance of God. All you can wonder, at that point, is, How did it all come to this?

But that is not the point. Jesus is not interested in how it all came to this. “I come not to condemn,” Jesus says. He is not interested in who did what, in what on earth got into our head, in what it is about you and me and everyone we know that is ending so tragically, in whose fault and whose problem and whose punishment we can make it. For God so loved the world that God gave this image of sorrow for us to look on as a way of shocking us into forgetting all the stupid, pointless, arrogant spiritual assumptions that allow us to think we can continue to neglect our spiritual life.

Neglect is all it is, and neglect is what it is. You don’t have to be some evil doer to bring down all the grief of the cross on your world. You just have to neglect your spiritual life. You just have to leave up to Moses or Jesus or their current surrogate to do the spiritual heavy lifting. Accepting your spiritual responsibility is the remedy for neglect.

Our son Russell picked up this idea somewhere along the line. When we have dinner around his family table, he knows his dad is the professional prayer-giver, but he knows, too, that he can think up the spiritual things that matter to him, to his family, to those with whom his family breaks bread, and to him in whose name the bread is broken. Russell, in his simple, frank way, asks the blessing. He lifts up to God the joy, the longing, the thanks and the hope of those gathered in the dwelling place of his family. I have no idea whether or not he is comfortable with this, but Russell knows when he is responsible for the spiritual life. He lives in his own spiritual home, and he will ask his own prayers and be answerable for them.

That’s all God wanted from the Israelites. That’s all Jesus asks of us. Maybe we’ll get it wrong. Maybe we won’t say it well. Maybe Moses could do it better. Maybe Jesus would wince at our fecklessness. Maybe it won’t stop poverty, the ruin of the planet, all our wars, or the cross. But none of that is what God asks us to think about. What God asks us to think about—and what Jesus suggests the cross as a meditation for—is the idea that we live with an enormous responsibility and an intriguing opportunity. What God asks us to think about—what God suggests we consider as an alternative to the spiritual equivalent of the long, tortuous and fiery death of a snake bite—is the possibility that no human crisis is impossible for the earnest personal commitment to stand near God, praying and listening, waiting and trusting.

These stories are given to us, one about Moses, the other about Jesus, as spiritual anchors to hold to in challenging times. All the Bible’s stories work like this. They give us an image to recall to remind us of something. When we forget our spiritual responsibility, there is the look on Moses’ face, perplexed and frustrated: “What can I do for these people? Why don’t they understand?” And there is the deep sad love in the face of Jesus, who has run out of words and miracles.

They love us, these two, and they would do anything for us. They’ve already done more than perhaps is good for us. They would die for us, if that would help, and they did die out of love for us. Remembering that turns out to be too hard for us, much of the time. And yet if we do remember how loved we are, we will take up our spiritual work. We will still our desires and move nearer to God. Whether we give half an hour or five minutes, whether we do the work every day or every week or so, however fervently we pray or quietly we wait, we will have done what God has asked of us, and that will be enough. Amen.

March 19, 2006 - Frontiers for spiritual territories

3rd Sunday in Lent
19 March 2006
Exodus 20.1-17; John 2.13-22
Frontiers for spiritual territories
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006


My brother and I, when we were kids, played Monopoly with Carl and Johnnie Youngreen. I don’t know who taught us how, maybe our parents. Somehow, we learned the rules.

Well, we didn’t learn the rules, as in, the rules written down by Parker Brothers. We played by the rules of the Wareham & Youngreen Brothers. If you paid a fine, you put the money in the middle of the board. The next player to land on “Free Parking” took the money. If you owned a property, you could buy houses and a hotel, even if you didn’t own all of the same color. The rules never allowed any of this, but that’s how we played. We ignored one rule and made up another one.

That’s how everyone plays Christian ethics, too. You’re not even supposed to admit it out loud, but it’s true. We ignore some things and make up others—not only us, but Jesus, too, but I’ll get back to Jesus in a few minutes.

Now, take the Ten Commandments.

“Remember the sabbath and keep it holy.” That’s one. The Bible is very explicit about this. You’re not supposed to go to work . . . but I go to work. When my kids had part-time jobs, they got scheduled for work, and I let them work, even though the Ten Commandments say I shouldn’t let them. The resident aliens in every town I ever lived in have worked on Sundays, and I never did a thing about it, even thought he Ten Commandments say I shouldn’t let them work, either. Also, you’re not supposed to do work-type things around your house on the sabbath, but everybody I know does stuff at home. So much for the sabbath commandment.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.” I think it happens all the time, people wishing they lived in the house up the street, but that’s not the real problem with this commandment. The problem with it is it continues the list of property a man is not supposed to covet of his neighbor’s—not his neighbors wife or slave or ox or donkey or anything else that belongs to him. That attitude about women is frankly unacceptable, but there it is institutionalized in the Ten Commandments.

You’ll notice, people leave out these uncomfortable parts of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse version they argue about in, well, courthouses. This is exactly the reason, as I’ve said before, that we shouldn’t be imposing them all over the place, whether people believe in our religion or not. For now and then, people look up the unexpurgated version of our Ten Commandments, and they find out what it really says, there. They can see the problems for themselves. They realize we’ve left some things out that we’re embarrassed about, and they start to wonder why we aren’t shooting straight with them about our famous religious laws. When this happens, we don’t look entirely honest, which is a problem, if honesty and integrity is what the Ten Commandments is all about.

But we really have nothing to be embarrassed about, as long as we hold to the Ten Commandments, as we understand them, among ourselves. The world has changed, and our culture has changed, so how we obey the Ten Commandments has changed. Like friends and brothers playing Monopoly, we can all agree on the rules that are rooted in the tradition, hone to the spirit of the rules, and vary from the tradition only to the degree that we all understand and are fair with one another about them. We still hold the basics very closely: No murder, no theft, no adultery, no lying about your neighbor; worship God and nothing else. We even keep the sabbath, in so far as keeping it means we set aside time for God.

So we have some good core rules to live by, and most of them are excellent rules for both Christians and non-Christians alike. Even though Jesus loosens the rules for special circumstances, he still insists on most of them. The apostle Paul carries on at length about our freedom not to follow religious laws slavishly, but he clearly believes in limits. Some of his limits are a little dumb, like the one about women covering their heads in church. (So what? Really!) But most of Paul’s limits still mean a great deal to us: Don’t get carried away with drunkenness; no gossip, slander, malice, selfishness, conceit, jealousy or abusive language; don’t horde all the food to yourselves, while others are going hungry; do not be conformed to this world; and the one that maybe all of the other limits add up to—do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. Limits.

There are limits, and it’s good for us to know them and keep them. The spiritual life is by its nature ethereal, elusive and fraught with ambiguity, so we are helped a great deal by having some frontiers marked, in the sense of boundaries that mark where we belong and don’t belong, limits that have served the faithful well over many generations. Things are difficult enough in the spiritual journey. It may be hard to know what prayers to say, to know what Jesus means some of the time, to know when we’re insisting on enough Christian training for our children or when we’re forcing more on them—or perhaps just the right things but at the wrong time—than is good for them. So many things about the spiritual life are hard, but laying out certain frontiers can be relatively simple. It’s a comfort to have them. This is the conservative side of any coherent religious community life.

Now, there are also times when a new limit, or a nearer boundary, has to be set. Strange to hear it from me, I suppose, but sometimes we have to decide to be more strict than before. That’s what Jesus decided the day he stormed into the temple courtyard and started throwing things. They’d made a shopping mall out of the one little patch of earth reserved for the faithful to gather and be with God. People had come to believe, and not for the last time, that faith in God and faith in the free market is the same thing. Jesus saw this as a problem. There’s nothing in the Ten Commandments about it, but there was something wrong.

Jesus didn’t have a rule to give the traders to make them stop, and he didn’t think he needed one. Something was wrong, and it was time to straighten everybody out. What they were doing was not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, and the religious authorities seemed to be completely content with it all. Nor had Jesus petitioned a court for an order or proposed a piece of legislation. He just said: This is wrong, and it has to stop. Makes you wonder about the megachurches with their beauty salons, fitness centers and coffee bars. We don’t have that problem, here. Not us.

We do have gossip. It’s the currency of choice in the free market of influence in mainline churches, and I suppose that’s why the Alban Institute folk keep reminding churches that, if we stop it, the cleansing effect will have a transforming influence on congregational life. Once or twice a year, typically when we’ve just spent a half-hour trying to solve a problem that refuses to be solved, we talk about how we know about a problem through rumor and gossip but don’t know how to solve it. The problem is always presented by elders who were told something by a few different anonymous people who purport to represent certain other people indicating that someone or other has been doing things wrong.

We talk, at this point, about whether we really want to make decisions based on such data—or not make them, as so often happens with gossip and rumor, when the data is so murky and ambiguous—and we’ve always been unable to decide to lead the church in changing the accepted norm of gossip as a force in church governance. People have the right, after all, to say whatever they want, confidentially, to whomever they want. It’s freedom of speech. If it’s good enough for the Bill of Rights, it’s good enough for our church. Not only that, if dissatisfied people actually talked openly to other, possibly satisfied, people, they might argue. They might find out their disagreements are with each other, not the leadership. They might argue and become upset, and they may not now how to work out their disagreements. We might look like a troubled church.

The problem is, really, simply practical. You get three people each talking to three elders. And those three elders have come to session, not knowing who the other elders have been talking to, because, hey, it’s confidential! So three elders have been talking to three people, which adds up to nine, and the nine, we are given to assume, represent one or two other people. So we’re up to 18, maybe 27.

Now it’s a movement! unless it’s just three people, but how do you know? Well, you don’t, but if you give three people what they want, you may get lucky and make 27 people hysterically pleased. And what’s the harm?! Nothing, unless the three anonymous people want something changed that 50 people like very much the way it is, thank you. The 50 never get represented. They didn’t talk to anybody. Why would they? They’re happy! and happy people don’t gossip. They just carry on, blissfully unaware that their leaders are being influenced to displease them.

So the leaders either proceed as before, distracted and on edge about the displeasure of who knows how many, or they lurch in another direction, hoping they can quell the rumored distress. You can see where it all leads.

Now, your current leaders have been more courageous about all this than any session full of elders I’ve ever seen. They arranged for the three open meetings after worship set up for people to talk about their church with each other—honestly, in the open, and with a disciplined structure to make the conversation coherent, meaningful and safe. What happened? Well, some dissatisfied people talked to some satisfied people, and they found out their disagreements were with each other, not the leadership. Consequently, the conversation got to the point where it wasn’t as coherent, meaningful and safe as intended. People argued and became upset, and they didn’t figure out, not in those particular meetings, how to work out their disagreements.

Well, all right, that was predictable, but what an amazing revelation—in the biblical sense of the word. We are dealing with simple disagreements, which can always be worked out, but only once we know we have them. Either people will finally be able to accommodate each other, if there’s a way to do that, or they’ll figure out a new way to order church life that will give everybody everything they always wanted but never asked the whole church for, or they’ll find out that they were really never meant to all be in the same church, wanting different things.

So that’s a great start, and if we’re ready to stop using rumor and gossip as a way to influence leadership decisions, something truly transforming may happen. And Jesus won’t have to storm in here and start throwing things just to straighten us out. We can probably, on our own, figure out limits worth setting for the spiritual and common health of the church, which is a very satisfying part of being grownups on the journey of faith.

There’s a third thing the faithful do with the frontiers of spiritual territory, which is to press the boundary a little further out. We don’t have time to talk about that part, right now, though it was very important to Jesus, who thought it was okay to loosen up on who was clean or unclean, whom to eat with, how much to forgive, and when a sabbath rule is good for us or just another burden.

The main thing to consider right now, for us, is that if we’re going to hold firmly to boundaries in most areas and tighten up in one or two other ways, it’s worth asking where we can give ourselves some slack without doing any harm. Are we trying to be perfect in ways that would make us feel adequate but are not the measure of our devotion to God? Do we try to enforce rules that have nothing to do with spiritual health and wholeness? Do we demand fastidious social graces but lose our knack for showing Christ-like grace?

It’s a great thing, understanding the frontiers of our spiritual life—both where the boundary lies and where the new vista stretches out before us—which is to say the place where things shift from safety to danger, to look at it one way, or from confinement to adventure, to look at it another way. We are always choosing whether to hold the limits, draw the limits tighter or stretch the limits into new territory. Faithfulness is not doing one of the three all the time but knowing when it’s time to do the right one. Amen.

March 12, 2006 - Road hazards on the spiritual journey

2nd Sunday in Lent
12 March 2006
Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16; Mark 8.31-38
Road hazards on the spiritual journey
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to talk you into working on your faith, to develop your own spiritual practice. Some of you have been working on it. If you have, you may already know that the spiritual life, like the rest of your life, moves in fits and starts. You may have already run into a real problem, something about your spiritual life that is troubling you, and your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. Or you’re rebelling against some idea of God or truth or goodness. Or there is some injury to you or tragedy somewhere that has thrown your spiritual life into confusion. These are road hazards along the spiritual journey, and they were common from the very beginnings of our faith. Here are a couple of stories about people at different places on the spiritual journey. Listen, and then we’ll talk. [You can read the scriptures, above, now.]

The Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face.

That’s exactly what I’d do. I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but Abraham and I are a lot alike, only God never bothered to tell me, at the get go, that my offspring would be exceedingly numerous. I have five offspring, which, I think we all agree, is exceedingly numerous. If God told me on my way into the marriage chamber that this would happen, falling on my face would’ve been just the start of it. As it happened, God, in her popular disguise as a kit from Walgreen’s, told me about my impending offspring one at a time. Probably God knew better than to give me more lead time. It would’ve been a mistake on the order of God’s design for the ostrich, which, as birds go, was a disaster, as everyone knows.

Still, what an interesting way to launch into your spiritual life. You get a direct message from God, which would be novel enough for a lot of us, and then you get this promise of progeny. There’s a hitch—you have to be more than exceedingly good; you have to be blameless—but you figure it’s worth trying for, given the opportunity. The risk/rewards analysis leans in your favor. You’ll give it a go; you’ll take the bargain.

Abraham does give it a go, which Sarah thinks is ridiculous. When she is reminded of the bargain, after it seems to be working against her, she laughs out loud. This is how we know God could well be a woman. Sarah would be smitten with sores all over her body, if God were male, or a plague of bad hair, but nothing really happens when Sarah laughs at God’s ridiculous bargain, which shows you God understands—which shows you God, at the very least, has a strong feminine side. So, anyway, there is a bargain, a promise, a covenant.

For a long time, Abraham keeps his side of the covenant, and God’s side of the covenant is, well, hampered by delays. Sarah doesn’t get pregnant and doesn’t get pregnant and doesn’t get pregnant. Her servant girl has gotten pregnant, and Sarah doesn’t get pregnant. But eventually, Sarah has a child, a son. One. So much for “exceedingly numerous.” Still, there’s a son, Isaac. Isaac grows into somewhere around adolescence, at which point God tells Abraham to execute his own son as a sacrifice to prove his faithfulness. If Sarah had known how much more ridiculous God’s promise was when it just seemed funny to her . . . Well, the whole thing is beyond laughter, now.

And that is the spiritual life for you. When it’s about to begin, as it began one day for Abraham, you’re going along in your regular old life for the longest time, thinking, on a good day, “Shoot, this is not all that great, but it seems dumb to quit, now.” And then God happens to you. There’s a promise.

Our friend Dave Kochanczyk, here—right while we were having lunch, only moments before he opened his fortune cookie and became the chosen one—was telling me about a moment when God happened to him. It was when his first child, Martin, was born. That moment, when Dave saw him, was a moment of such wonder, beauty, grace and love, Dave had no word for. It would be accurate to call it a miracle, but that didn’t do it justice. Here was life, if not exceedingly numerous, at least exceedingly holy. There was nothing in Dave’s experience to which to compare it.

Life can be like this, you realize, when God happens to you.

And then other things happen and other things happen and other things happen. And then, eventually, something entirely other happens, like Abraham having to execute his long awaited son, or else—like any death you didn’t expect, like any death you can’t accept, like one day realizing you never lived up to the promise of your potential, like your most dearly beloved breaking your heart, like your future being taken from you by a tumor, like finally having everything you ever wanted and finding out you could really care less.

And then, you have a spiritual crisis on your hands. This is also what Peter ran into, with Jesus. Everything has been going along swimmingly. Jesus is teaching wonderful teachings, healing people with wonderful healings, feeding people with wonderful feedings and dissing officious authority figures with wondering dissings. Then Jesus drops the offhanded comment about his having to suffer greatly, be rejected by all the religious authorities everybody looks up to, and be killed. Jesus seems to say something else that happens after that, but Peter doesn’t seem to hear him.

Peter doesn’t want anything to do with suffering or rejection or killing. It is a huge disappointment, and his spirit us utterly deflated. This turns out to be a spiritual problem, and not a little one. Peter argues with Jesus: “Make it not so!” Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan!” He says that to Peter, which seems, you must admit, harsh. Satan, for crying out loud. “You,” Jesus says to Peter, “are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Well, I wonder, why not both? Don’t we always have to keep our mind on human things, even while we give as much attention as we can, say an hour a week, to divine things? But Jesus says that there is something about the spiritual life that lets go completely of desire for whatever is at hand, humanly speaking, and attends to divine things. Then Jesus explains himself, and I must say, the explanation makes things worse.

“If you want to be my disciples, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me. If you’re trying to stay alive, you’re already dying. If you surrender your life, though, you’re fully alive. You’re free, entirely free, if you believe the story of life I’ve been telling you all along. But give everything up, if you want to be alive. Look at everything around you, and give it up. Notice every detail of every charming thing, and give it up. Remember all the blood, toil, sweat and tears it took to get you where you are and to win your battles, and give it up. Give it all up,” Jesus says, “because I’m giving it all up. And then, everything will be just fabulous.”

This is a problem, spiritually speaking, don’t you think? Because everything is not exactly fabulous, not yet. Everything at this moment, not to put to fine a point on it, stinks. It is entirely not okay to give up the very things that matter most, the things that we love, the son Abraham waited for so long, the son Dave Kochanczyk hadn’t realized would be such a miracle, the little satisfactions, like a nice car or a luxury cruise or taking a sick day for a walk in the woods.

Or maybe Jesus is just talking about the day that comes for a lot of us when giving it all up would really not very much matter. If you were to give your life up for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the gospel, or for no particular sake at all, that would be fine. Because, honestly, what difference does it make? Not caring very much at all is a spiritual crisis, too, another road hazard on the spiritual journey.

So what do you do, when that happens? What do you do about the potholes in the road of prayer and personal communion with God? What do you do, especially, about the places where a storm has washed out the road altogether?

The first thing to do is stop and take a look at the situation. When you’re driving, you don’t think, “Well, it looks like part of the road is gone. I think I’ll just keep driving and see what happens.” That would make no sense, but in the spiritual life, we seem to lose our good sense. When we come to a bad patch of road, we just keep going, as if ignoring the problem would make it go away. How many people do you hear tell you that, when they came to a spiritual crisis, they kept praying harder in the same way they were praying before? that they keep the image of God in their mind the same as the image of God they always had before?

I remember the 1988 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco. When our television sets were all working again, we saw film of this car hanging halfway over a broken off piece of the Bay Bridge. That guy probably wasn’t trying to make it over the missing part of the bridge. There was an earthquake, and he just hadn’t been able to stop in time. But everybody behind him did, because it only makes sense.

Same thing with your spiritual life. If you’re in a crisis, or even just a funk, stop and look at the situation. Praying harder in the same way to your same idea of God is not necessarily going to work, and it could be dangerous. I know this isn’t the advice you usually get, but I’m sure it’s true. I would never have been able to survive the spiritual crises of my life, if I’d always clung to the same idea of God I had and the same kind of prayer I prayed when I was twelve.

Or to put it in terms of Abraham’s life—at the point where he thought God expected him to sacrifice his son Isaac—in the face of spiritual crisis, we need to have the spirituality of the grownup, not the twelve year old. Fortunately for Isaac, Abraham had learned to listen to his angels differently, and he realized that whatever it was he thought God wanted him to do was not necessarily the thing he should keep doing. Just as he was about to slit his son’s throat, he stopped and listened again. Then he saw a ram to sacrifice. God did not want him to kill Isaac, after all.

So when you hit a spiritual crisis, it is not necessarily a temptation to let go of your assumptions about God. It may be an imperative that you let your assumptions go, at least some of them.

Maybe you’re stuck on the question, “Why, Lord, are you putting me through this?” That’s a question that keeps searching the mind of God, but the first thing you need to do is search your own mind. “Why do I think God is putting me through this? Maybe I’m just putting myself through this. Maybe some jerk is putting me through this. Maybe it’s not something God can stop any more than God seems to be able to stop angry people from having wars or hungry children from dying. Maybe I need to adjust my belief about God and my expectations about what God is there for.” Those are all questions about yourself—your own thoughts and your own convictions—and if you can trust that God will be there through the trials of your spiritual shift, you will be able to answer them and begin to see another way.

This is what was happening to Peter. He had an idea about who Jesus was, and it was just hard as the dickens to adjust his thinking to who Jesus really was. Meanwhile, Jesus did two things. He continued along his path of faithfulness, disturbing as that was to Peter, and he hung in there with Peter through Peter’s distress. Well, Jesus did a third thing. He was brutally honest with Peter. Peter had to change his thinking about God, life, faith and everything.

That brings up another thing you do about spiritual road hazards. You call for assistance.

Peter had Jesus, which in a way we all do, and he also had companions on the journey. He had James and John and a Mary or two, and all of them were also having to reckon with their preconceptions and misconceptions about God. And since they all of them could hardly think of anything worse than to abandon the journey of the gospel of love that would transform the world, they were willing to move along the arduous and sometimes painful road from which there was no turning back. They thought they were going to cross the waters over an easy bridge, but an earthquake ended that idea. They were going to have to trek up along the shore until they could cross at, well, the cross.

What Peter had was a community of friends who were all trying to work out their faith. He could share his confusion, disappointment, longing and hope with them. If you look around, you can see a community of friends like that right here. We are still this band of pilgrims, we, who, however many times we’ve read Jesus’ story, are still surprised that God will be so exposed and vulnerable. We are astounded the cross is so inevitable.

So we have this community of friends, and we do rely on each other, which is not to say that we absolutely need each other, because somehow or other, God would get us through, no matter what. But we do have this mutual support, which is a kind of covenant we made when we joined this church.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that you are still in charge of your own thoughts, and you still need to sort out your own moods, expectations and attitudes. Your thoughts about God and your thoughts about the spiritual life are one thing. Your moods are another, and they’re not easy to manage, we all know. Most of us, most of the time, try to manage our moods by manipulating things outside ourselves—fixing something, making somebody do something, drinking something—and then our mood changes. But what we really need to do is simply find a way to soothe ourselves, so that we can quiet all that other noise, get rid of the distraction about how confused we are and remember that God is standing beside us—that Jesus is walking along beside us—as we are walking along the shoreline to the next place to cross the water.

That old hymn the choir sang for the anthem. If you go back and read through it, God never says, “Get on my shoulders,” like that old footprints in the sand story, which was so popular for a while. God doesn’t say that. God says,

Fear not, I am with thee, so be not dismayed,
For I am thy God and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous omnipotent hand.

But you do your own standing. God will do all sorts of things to support you, and you will do your own standing.

Get yourself quiet enough to remember this—that God will support you and that you will stand—and you will go on to the next thing. And you will find the place where you can safely cross the water. And you will be standing again in strength and peace, and will be on your journey. Amen.

Sermon - March 4, 2006 - The next step on your spiritual journey

1st Sunday in Lent
5 March 2006
Genesis 9.8-17; Mark 1.9-15
Step one
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

I guess if the flood God sent, out of wrath, had a good part to it, this would be it, the part with some dry land to stand on and the rainbow in the clouds. It was a rough voyage, of which we forget its full measure. For some reason, we remember the 40 days of rain, but we skip over the months and months, after the rain ended, of sitting in the ark, waiting for the waters to abate: one year, one month and 27 days, altogether. And then they got out on the ground, Noah and his family, and Noah built an altar. I guess he would. A God that wrathful you’d want to make happy as soon as you could.

And I guess the altar worked. God made a series of interesting decisions. No more cursing the ground because of humankind, for one. No more destroying, God said, “every living creature as I have done.” [Gn 8.21] And finally, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” That’s when God put up the rainbow. I guess that felt good, more good to God, maybe, than to Noah. Don’t you wonder?

I wonder. I wonder about all Noah’s thoughts all those months on the boat, especially after the storm and all the excitement. Maybe Noah kept thinking about his relatives and friends. He must have had the typical assortment of rascally cousins along with the odd scalawag uncle, like a lot of us might remember having. They’re all long washed away in the waters and foam for their orneriness, by the time Noah remembers to think of them. Nor could he help but think of the cousins and nieces and nephews who had played together, and grew up and married friends and started families together—the ones that all seemed decent enough and great people to have around. They’re all gone too, the lot of them. They’re gone, all of them, along with all the ones that had brought God’s wrath down in buckets.

So Noah’s altar, for the sake of pleasing God with the incense of sacrifices, might also have had for Noah the sense of a memorial to it. He might have set a match to the altar’s fire in memory of at least the innocent youths of his lineage. Noah’s relief at the end of the great deluge might have been mixed with more than a little sorrow.

Then that wonderful rainbow: “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature . . . and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy. . .” All the scoundrels, from now on, will get a second chance. And all the decent people won’t be denied the decent life they were trying to lead. God will no longer destroy everything to make everything right.

Maybe at this point Noah wondered . . . why God hadn’t thought of that before.

God changed, that day. God had been the sort that fixed bad people by destroying them, which is a solution of sorts, except that God seemed to notice, when it was all over, that all the people that were fixed also were no longer there to enjoy. Death and destruction is not a solution to things gone wrong, God learned that day. The hard way. So God changed and discovered covenant as the way to drive away evil, right wrongs and repair relationships.

A covenant with humanity will be tricky. What agreements will God make with people? How will people interpret them? How hard will it be to keep them? What will happen when the covenant is broken? A covenant is difficult, full of ambiguities and eventually sure to come apart, at least for a while. If you’ve ever tried to keep an important covenant for a while, like a marriage, for instance, you know what I mean. They’re hard, covenants are.

But God chose covenant over death and destruction, because—well, I suppose because it leaves you with something still alive. Wrath kills; covenant gives life. Righteous destruction is a conclusion; covenant is a beginning. Judgment is a dead end; covenant is a life-giving journey. When God introduced covenant into the created order, everything changed, including God. Life with God became a journey.

I have a feeling our real spiritual journeys really do begin for us in about the way Noah’s did, with a crisis and a flood. During late adolescence, for instance, emotional crises about as serious as a cataclysmic flood overwhelm a young person. She’s become alienated from her parents, her complexion is possessed by Satan, she caught her boyfriend at whatever it is a boyfriend isn’t supposed to be caught at, these days, or she got caught at it.

Then she goes to a Christian retreat and listens to the gospel message of grace, forgiveness and peace, and the possibility of starting life over, life having just ended in such abject humiliation and tragedy the previous weekend, and the grace of that message rekindles hope. More than that, there is great good, the gospel message promises, to be done in the world—good that she can do, if she can forget her past as God has forgotten it, and the hope of doing good is so much more heartening than youthful missteps are humiliating. The flood of adolescent embarrassment supplied by the deluge of television, advertising, popular fashion and the shaming culture of today’s middle and high school is enough to tip anyone into despair, and the gospel message can be enough to pull a body out of the swirling waters.

Sometimes—too often, I suspect—someone calls the shame sin and convinces the girl its her very being that is the problem, and the evangelizer, armed with a Bible, offers a salvation of temporary relief at the expense of emotional need and dependency. But the power of the gospel of Christ is such that—either with the help of or in spite of the evangelizer—the gift of grace, the hope of faith and the joy of life overwhelm the shame of the daily slings and arrows of adolescence and young adulthood. You may remember the feeling. You may still be having it, in your more grownup and sophisticated way.

So begins, for many, the spiritual journey.

We restart our spiritual journeys, now and then, often prompted by a crisis and a flood. Your marriage comes into trouble or ends altogether. Your child gets into serious trouble or is hurt or dies. You lose your job or fail in business. You simply retire, which was supposed to be relief and pleasure, but you hadn’t counted on how much the changes would feel like such losses. In these times many people look inward, searching for the spiritual resources that are all that will get us through. And the spiritual resources are indeed to be found there, laid along a path and to be found during a journey.

For Jesus, the flood came first and then the crisis. It was a self-imposed flood at the river Jordan, and when he came out of the waters, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

I remember a time like that, myself. It was that college class I’ve told you about before, “Religion and Existentialism,” that I took in my sophomore year. Since I’m the kind that loves a spiritual wilderness, it was fascinating to me. I was ready to leave behind the comforts of the old Sunday school reassurances about the warm and cuddly Jesus who took care of all the little children and ready to face the facts of a world where so many little children Jesus was not protecting. I was ready to wonder about the things I suspect Noah wondered about. Who is this God? Why does God seem to do some awful things and not do other needful things? When the flood waters recede, what do I do with this empty world I’m left with?

That’s when God changed for me. God became more interesting, more subtle, more mysterious and more ambiguous? What the Bible calls Satan was probably for me just the fear that there may be no sure answers, and giving into temptation would have been to grasp sure answers before it was time. The wilderness is the place where things are not certain and easy, and that was not the time for spiritual certitude, not for me. So I’ve never felt sorry for Jesus being driven by the Spirit out to the wilderness with Satan. I know he was having the time of his spiritual life.

You are on your own spiritual journey, and you have some choices about how you will travel. You may find that some life changes cause you to look inward for the spiritual resources that will sustain you with insight and strength. Or you may follow your curiosity and be driven by the Spirit into a spiritual search that on the one hand unsettles your spiritual life and on the other opens up your spirit to exciting new vistas of faith and ministry. Or you may pretend that you’re not on a spiritual journey, that you have stopped at the place where you’re spiritually comfortable and need not consider.

You may suppose that your life will not bring you spiritual challenges or that the spiritual challenges are not your problem but the problem of your church to fix. Maybe the sermon will meet your spiritual challenge,, you hope. Or maybe if you could sing those old hymns again, the ones you sang so many years ago when you really were walking along briskly on your spiritual path, you will feel spiritually alive, again. But there is a time in grownup spirituality when you can’t hope for the spiritual responsibility to come from someone else. There is a time in the walk of Christian faith when you walk your valley, as the old spiritual reminds us, by yourself.

Thirty of you took the Natural Church Development surveys we passed out several months ago. The results showed us where our strengths and weaknesses are among eight key aspects of church life. The way you answered the questions has shown us that “passionate spirituality”—the deliberate practice of spiritual activity, including regular prayer, study and meeting together for spiritual growth and mutual support—is seldom evidenced in our life together, or for that matter, separately. We are not, generally, taking personal responsibility for our spiritual life.

Now, you’ve probably tried. You accepted the advice, at some point, that working on your faith should lead you to Bible study, and you went to the Bible study. It was okay, but when you got done, you felt as if you didn’t get the feeling everyone else was getting. The answers you were getting about God weren’t satisfying, and the questions you were asking about God weren’t being addressed. You don’t like being forced into a spiritual practice that is not “you,” and, come to think of it, that’s why you’re here at First Presbyterian Church. Here, you aren’t told you have to fit the conventional “Christian” mold of piety. Come to think of it, that’s why I’m here, too. You’ve come here for a reason.

To have come here for a reason is a very positive step along the path of the Christian life. You’re ready to walk this valley by yourself, if it comes to that. The problem is that too many of us have stopped there. We stopped walking the way the people pointed us, but we didn’t start walking another way. We just stopped walking. And that’s not good enough.

Lent is a good time to reflect on your responsibility for your own spiritual path. It’s the time when we stop and ask God to look over our life with us and ask, “Where have I been, spiritually? What do I want to keep from the journey, so far? What do I want to leave behind? Where do I need to go next? How do I get there?” This is what Lent is for, answering these questions. And then there is work to do.

Now, because you’ve come here, you’re not going to do this spiritual work the conventional way, and yet there are some guidelines for the spiritual path that will support you.

For one, since you are in the Christian tradition, the sources of our faith will guide you. Scripture is one of those sources, probably the key source for most of us. You will want to spend some time with your Bible. You can use the Bible to tell you stories, to deepen your emotions (joy, love, hope, peace and so forth), to ask yourself questions (“What is truth?” is a big one), to ask God questions (“How long, O Lord?” comes to mind), or to teach you about friendship, love, conflict and community.

Second, you will want your spiritual work to be deliberate. You may take an hour a day or and hour a week, depending on what your life can handle and how determined you are to travel the path, but you will have to dedicate personal time as seriously as you would to work, family, exercise or education. Grace is free, but spiritual growth is work.

Third, you will want to be actively producing spiritual fruit. Coming to church on Sunday morning is not the hour a week you can count for this part of walking your path. Sunday worship is a passive experience, even though you may be reacting to things you hear there. By active, I mean that you sit down and wrestle with your own response to scripture or write your own hymn or express your own vision of truth. Reading the daily installment of The Upper Room is a passive experience, even if that feels good. Your goal is not to feel good about the insight of someone else; your purpose is to discover and embrace your own spiritual insight.

Finally, you will want to enlist the support of friends along your path. There are simply too many ways to be blind to yourself, and friends see things you fail to see. Some of these things are wonderful gifts you have not learned to value in yourself, and some of them are nettlesome impediments to you. You have to work out your self-understanding with the support of others who know you. When Jesus went into to wilderness to work on his spiritual life, his conversation partners were God and Satan. Myself, I’m not good enough at this to do it the way Jesus did, but you could try it, if you like. Most of us, maybe everyone I’ve ever known, have to have this conversation with other people. They have to be people we trust, and they will have to be people who are on the journey, themselves.

Well, it’s been a dizzying ride from the end of Noah’s flood to the beginning of the rest of your spiritual journey. How you got all the way here is very interesting, and the most important thing to think about now is the next step you will decide to make. Amen.