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.]
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,
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.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
1:52 PM
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