Sixth Sunday of Easter Sermon

There’s a paradox within our humanity, we humans made in the image of God. Why did God make us physical creatures, who perceive and interpret the world through our senses – seeing, touching, hearing – and yet place within us a yearning for something more, something that cannot be seen or touched or heard? Why does God call us to faith in God, when this God of our yearning is so maddeningly illusive? It seems a vastly inefficient system.

So I must conclude God has a very low value for efficiency. If all God cared about was our getting to heaven, then why not make an end of it all right now? Take us to you where everything is revealed and all is made well, and be done with all this suffering!

But God doesn’t operate that way. God seems highly invested in the long journey. Look at the lives we’re given: we are born and slowly learn and mature, wading through a long adolescence, and an even longer adulthood, that often involves a very slow decline at the end. Look at nature itself – this dynamic yet slowly evolving creation – of continents migrating centimeter by centimeter, of species evolving over thousands of generations. Everywhere we see a creation that continues to become, but only over vast stretches of time.

God is no hurry, with anything (it appears), including our own spiritual formation. We’re the impatient ones. We’re the fast-food generation that wants instant results, and assume God wants the same.

But, no. God is like the clouds on a quiet winter day in the Pacific Northwest – those low clouds slowly filtering through the fir trees, unhurried, unanxious, unhindered by anything in their path. Quietly, with stately grace, the clouds make their journey through the firs. And so it is with God in us. Our formation in God is a slow journey, revealed not in a day or a season, but in a lifetime.

And throughout this life – through the raising of children and going to work and taking the dog to the vet and playing stupid games on our phones – through all the stuff of being physical creatures in a physical world, there beats deep within us a pulse that wants more, that senses a “substance” – a reality, a truth, a beacon – beyond the everydayness of our lives.

It is as Paul described: God created us to inhabit this earth that we would search for God, and grope for God (Acts 17:27). And if we were so designed for this life, there must be value in the searching and worth in the groping, no matter how frustrating it may be and how long it must last.

And if this be so, then there must also be peace, for we are living as we were created to live. But it’s a strange peace, I admit. It’s a peace – not that everything is okay as it is – but rather, it’s okay for things not to be okay, yet. If discontent in your life, in your job, your relationships, your relationship with God, then okay. Okay. It’s part of the search, this necessary wandering by which our yearnings are clarified and refined: I want more, that “more” we’ve named “God.”

God wants to be found, but not without a search.

But then – here is the mystery of the whole thing – Paul writes that we were made to search and grope for God, “though indeed he is not far from each of us. For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

What can this mean? that the God we have sought and groped for all our life is not far from us, that – in fact – we have been in him all along. Jesus uses similar language in the gospel: “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).

This is what we seek. This is what we are groping after: an intimacy with God so all-encompassing that it can be said, God is in us and we are in God. This is the language is of inhabitation, of existing in another. Which might sound like a lot of philosophical nonsense, but it is, in fact, the first reality we ever knew.

Our lives began in the womb. From our origins, we knew of no existence other than one of inhabitation, nourished by and within our mother, living to the beat of her heart. And throughout our lives we continue to seek security and belonging within another space: we come home at the end of the day, and lock our doors at night. We snuggle in our beds, beneath the comforting weight of blankets. We cuddle in each other’s arms. When I am feeling weak and vulnerable I still yearn for a lap that is big enough to hold me, arms long enough to enfold me. We long to inhabit a space of safety and comfort. We long to live in God.

But more than that – paradoxically – we are searching to discover God living in us. We sense that our soul, our inmost being, is somehow resident in our corporeal bodies. We feel something in our heart, or know something in our gut. We express our strongest convictions, from deep inside us. And it is in this deep interiority of our own being that we want God to reside. As Catherine of Genoa wrote, “My deepest me is God.”

Perhaps that’s part of what can make the Eucharist so intimate: when we take the bread and the wine, we are consuming it – consuming God – taking God into our bodies to be absorbed into us.

“I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

This is the reality we seek. But it is not a reality easily lived into because – much though we may desire it – it requires change. And change is always threatening.

My theory about the spiritual life is that it’s all about gradually letting go of the coping mechanisms we’ve accumulated over a lifetime, in order to find ourselves in God.

This world is hostile and threatening. So as we grow, we adopt a series of ways to help us survive, subtle skills that become intrinsic to our survival – so intrinsic we don’t even recognize them as things separate from our own identity. Beautiful people learn from early age that people are attracted to their beauty, and so they develop a whole way of living and behaving that is based on their charm. Others rely on humor. Or the reverse is true, we keep people at bay with our sharp tongue, a toughness that says, “I won’t allow myself to be hurt by you.” Or we go shopping. Or we eat.

We all do this, layer upon layer of coping mechanisms, a forged identity to help us survive this life. And, by the grace of God, we do survive by them, for their season. But also, by the grace of God, they will not satisfy to the end. They cease to be our friends. And so our spiritual formation necessitates a gradual stripping away of these coping skills we’ve relied on. Bit by bit, God peals them back and says, “The time for that is ending. It’s time you find your truest safety – I in you, and you in me.”

And as lovely as that may sound, this change does not come without enormous resistance. Because, even when our methods of coping cease to satisfy as they once did, it’s all we know. Like children clinging to abusive parents, we keep going back, wanting their love, trusting the only things we’ve known to depend on, grotesque though they may be.

And into this chaos steps God, who will not leave us orphaned. And we confess. We confess our weaknesses, our fears, our addictions and we pray, “Oh God, come. Come and help. I don’t want this anymore. I want you, but – my God, I’m afraid, and I don’t know how to find you.”

And, more often than not, the way God meet us is through the companions we’re given along the way. But for them to be true companions, who can meet us where we are and hold us towards the light, we need to be honest with where we truly are. For only in honesty and vulnerability, can we ever be fully known and can the promise of love and healing bear any weight.

We have plenty of excuses not to share honestly.

• We’re Episcopalians; we don’t bare our souls. We use the prayer book.
• I wasn’t raised that way.
• I don’t want tobe all touchy-feely.

But beneath the excuses lies the same old fear: It’s too scary. I don’t want anyone to know these things about me because I will be rejected.

I remember, years ago, attending a retreat designed specifically for clergy wellness and healing. So I went in with a deliberate posture to be as honest and vulnerable as I possibly could be. And sure enough, there came a point when I knew the time had come. I sat down in a chair opposite an older priest and said, “Sam, I am afraid, and I want your help, that I would believe this gospel I preach is true for my life, too.” And I proceeded to reveal plainly to him the deepest fears that dwell within me. And in return, he spoke, with words unlike any I’d ever received. It was life and it was light and I walked away with a freedom and hope I hadn’t known in a long, long time. But none of it would have happened had I not chosen to be honest.

This is what confession is: We come before God and one another, no longer trying to protect ourselves with a shellacked version of ourselves. We come – opened wide and vulnerable – and what greets us there is love and a profound intimacy.

That is why people often find Alcoholics Anonymous or other twelve step programs to be such a truer experience of church than the actual church they attend, because there they are honest, fully known, supported, and given hope. But when they come to church, it’s time to begin faking it again.

Well who wants that? I don’t.

I want life – the true, real life – in which God is God and I am the man God made me to be: in God and holding God, in you and holding you.

It is always frightening to step out from the pattern of living we’ve come to rely on. It will take vulnerability and companionship and significant help as we stumble into new ways of being ourselves.

And it will take hope.

So hear Jesus’ words afresh, his words for you: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth….I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.… Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:16-18).

This is the gospel of the Lord.