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.
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.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
10:56 AM
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