4th Sunday after Pentecost
On weeks like these – when I pull up the lectionary readings to see what I’ll be preaching on – there’s always something of a groan. Ahhhh. The readings feel so severe and threatening.
But you know, odd as it seems, once I slowed down and listened with my spirit, I actually found in these readings a kind of comfort, especially the gospel reading. It’s not “comfort-able,” like a good back scratch or a hot bath. It’s different than that. I find comfort in it, inasmuch as it’s drawing a topic out into the open that – much as I try to avoid – at a deeper level, I truly want to engage.
It’s like this time when Cynthia and I lived in a community house with six other people. The quality of our shared life was outstanding. But there was one member of the community who lived with us, yet not with the same community-minded spirit. For him, it was just a convenient place to live. And there came a time when he was planning on moving out and moving on, which was fine with everyone. But his circumstances changed and the easiest thing for him – what he assumed would just happen – was to carry on living with us. And we didn’t know how to deal with it – how to have that honest, difficult conversation.
Until one night at dinner, Cynthia simply said, “It surprises me, David, that you want to stay in the house, because it doesn’t seem to me that it really means that much to you.” We all stopped eating – forks midair; all our antennas zeroed in on the conversation she’d begun. Because it mattered so much. It was an important discussion that needed to happen, and she’d done what the rest of us were afraid to do.
And that’s how I feel about this gospel reading and the things Jesus is telling his disciples.
And in this case what matters – the important discussion he’s opening – is this elemental conversation about ultimate things: What does God intend for us in the end? What will God do with our bodies and souls? Will God welcome us? Or reject us?
And even if you don’t consider yourself to be a deep, theological thinker, of course, you’ve wondered about these things. Of course, you’ve felt a certain dis-ease about how God feels about you and the way you’re living and what God intends to do with you when your time comes.
And so there is a kind of comfort in this teaching, inasmuch as it’s a topic we actually want to have, even if we shy away from it.
And Jesus’ basic message here, is one we already intuitively know: Ultimately, everything is centered on God. God matters.
Which can, of course, lead us down any number of rabbit trails: Which God? Whose god? How are we to know, God? And, surely, (if we’re honest) God must be bigger than any definition we mere mortals can devise of him. Or her. Or it. Or them – or whatever insufficient names or pronouns we assign to God.
And, do you know whose wisdom on this I find myself returning to? My grandmother’s, who’d spent most of her life as an atheist, and by the end was probably more of an agnostic (meaning: one who doesn’t claim to know one way or another who or what God is).
I lived with her when she was in her mid-90s. Her dementia was quite advanced at that stage. But she dwelt in a kind of peacefulness. And every sunny day, she’d lay out on her chaise lounge, in and out of sleep, watching the clouds, and (in her words) mulling over the basic question of life, “I wonder what’s it all about, boy. I wonder what’s it all about.”
And you know? Even in the midst of dementia, a conviction took root in her:
- There must be a God, because there’s creation, and it had to start with something.
- And that God must be beautiful, because creation is beautiful.
That was the sum total of my grandmother’s theology. And, who knows, perhaps the dementia itself was an aid to its forging. She could spend her days, circling round and round this simple resolution: There must be a god. And this god must be beautiful.
For all my years of study and training and professional ministry, I should like to end my days in such a place, in a steady consideration that the source and center of all being is God, and that God is good.
Because that seems to be the core of Jesus’ message here. One thing matters in the end. God is the source. God is the center. God is the whole. Such that everything that is – you and me and every other created thing – is of God. And if that be so, then nothing is more necessary for our wellbeing (in this life, and the life to come) than a posture settling into this reality. It’s where we belong. “You are god. And here I am, before you.”
It’s like the flowers at the altar. That smaller arrangement on the right – it’s lovely in its way. But on its own, it’d be far too small for that space – awkward and out of place. But it’s not alone. It sits comfortably beneath the branches of the larger arrangement, which it resembles. And together, they are complete.
And so with us: Everyone is beautiful in their own way, adorned by their own distinctiveness. But the underlying sadness of this life is our existential sense of aloneness – of separation. Which is why, our soul’s deep craving is to find our place – our rest – beneath that large, bounteous arrangement, which is God, in whom we are complete, and never, never alone.
And that arrangement: It grows up and up and through the cross, and out the skylight, and fills the world – that everyone might come within the reach of Christ’s saving embrace.[1]
- S. Lewis, the 20th century British author, describes the season of his own conversion:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night … the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. [2]
Not all conversions are joyous, as Lewis well knew. Because conversion requires submission. It requires letting go of autonomy and independence and privacy, or as Jesus said, “losing your life.” And this can be a fearsome thing.
But let me also say this: I do not believe “conversion” is a “one and done” moment, as many of us were raised to believe, as if all that matters to God is that we “get saved” by confessing a certain doctrine or submitting to some ritual act.
Conversion is an ongoing experience, a process that lasts throughout our lives. It’s less about securing a reservation in heaven, and more about who we are becoming, that we are becoming more and more centered and aligned with the spirit of God, which – paradoxically – can often mean letting go of our “god-convictions” that had been central to our faith in earlier days of our formation.
I was talking with someone last week who described just such a letting go – and how terrifying and life-giving it was for him. (And lest you think me a heretic for sharing this story, hear me out through the end.)
It had been a long process for my friend. And it finally came to a head when he was praying and felt he needed to release the thing that was most precious to him – the thing that was the absolute hardest for him to release – and that was Jesus, himself.
“I had no idea what I was releasing or doing,” he said, “but I knew I was being asked to completely let go of Jesus. And that terrified me. So, with many heavy tears, I released Jesus. And in that moment, I remember feeling engulfed in God’s love and my paradigm being completely blown up into something that seems infinitely larger than what I used to know. By releasing my understanding of Jesus, I received a Jesus who is far more loving, accepting, and powerful than I thought possible.”
Like snakes shedding their skins, this lifelong process of formation – of conversion – keeps asking of us to risk letting go of that which once had protected us.
After all, it stands to reason that much of what we call “faith” is really just ideas about God that are under-developed, immature, contaminated, or just plain wrong! And that’s okay, so long as we keep turning, keep offering to God our desire for God, and with it, increasingly, offering the whole of our lives. “God, we are yours.”
And God’s gift to us for this journey into the mystery of God, is Jesus. Fully human, fully divine, he is the perceptible union between us humans and the Divine. The heritage of the church we have received through the centuries is trustworthy – a doorway (you might say) – a kind of portal into the living God.
It’s like La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. Gaudi’s basilica is a work of genius – one they’ve nearly finished building after more than a century. And what moved me most when I visited, was how the exterior facades depict such a literal telling of the Holy Family, and of Jesus’ life, passion, and resurrection. Carved in stone, the whole story of Christ is told – magnificently, joyfully, severely! It filled me with emotion, just beholding it. But when you go inside, the space opens up vastly before you, flooded with colored light – moving amongst the columns that feel like trees. The organ’s playing. The literalness of the exterior is transformed into something almost surreal – but alive – and universally accessible!
Can you feel what I’m saying? The structure of the church, and the story of its Christ – solid and good – once entered, ushers us into something far bigger and far more filled with light and life than we ever could have anticipated from the outside.
And we have been baptized into such a life with Christ, died and risen alive with him. And the life he lives, he lives to God. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”[3]
He can be trusted to be the way to the Father – to the Mother, the Creator – the God for whom we are made and in whom we find our truest selves.
[1] Prayer for Mission, BCP, p. 101
[2] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
[3] Romans 6:11