"A Spirituality of Life" -- sermon

           

         Some folk get along quite well in this life without being much disturbed by guilt. For instance, you may have heard of the day a funeral procession passed slowly down the road along the eighth tee of the golf course. A player stepped back from the ball he was about to drive, took off his cap, and bowed his head. When the procession passed, he put his cap back on, stepped up and drove the ball down the middle of the fairway. “Well”, said his partner, “that funeral procession sure didn’t interfere with your concentration.” “It wasn’t easy keeping my concentration”, replied the golfer. “After all, we were happily married for twenty years.”

            We don’t do guilt well here, either.

            This is something I say all the time, usually in the context of folk asking what we can do to get people to come to church more often. By “We don’t do guilt well here”, I usually mean relative to some other Christian traditions. We don’t tell folk they are committing a mortal sin if they don’t come to church each week; we don’t threaten them with eternal damnation if they just stay home. It’s not that we don’t think this might be effective – it’s just that we don’t believe it. But then again, you probably don’t, either.

            Now I say that we don’t do guilt well here, but personally, I do guilt pretty well in some areas of my faith life. Like, for instance, when I was off on sabbatical.  Now I know, intellectually, that one very legitimate part of being on sabbatical was simply getting rested and recharged, but there is a part of me, buried not-so deep down, which believes that I really ought to have been spending that time in spiritual practices. Like I did on my previous sabbatical, studying theology at Oxford, visiting churches in Sri Lanka, and going off to the Island of Iona, Scotland, living in community there for a week, attending worship three times a day in its magnificent abbey, really working at being more holy.

            And yet, truth to tell, when I was off on this sabbatical doing what I really love, what I am passionate about, which is sailboat racing, I felt fully alive in ways that I hardly ever do off the water. Being a part of a team fully dedicated to the same goal, being out on the water among magnificent surroundings, the intellectual and physical challenge, the total focus, the joy of competition, the satisfaction of sailing well and the elation of achieving, if not victory, at least close to it – it would not be a stretch to say, for me it was heaven on earth.

            “Heaven on earth”? Sounds rather, dare I say it, “spiritual”. But that cannot be, can it? We know what “spiritual” is – spiritual is what happens here on Sundays; spiritual is contemplative prayer, Bible reading, silence, centeredness; spiritual is going on retreat or on a mission trip.

            But maybe that problem lies in how we define spirituality, in the way we cordon spiritual matters off from the rest of our life. We divide life into the sacred and the profane, confining spirituality to what David Steindl-Rast labels the “penthouse of our existence.” He claims that spirituality relates to our entire existence, adding, “Someone will say, ‘I come alive when I listen to music’, or “I come to life when I garden’, or “I come alive when I play golf.’ Wherever we come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.” (Quoted in The Fully Alive Preacher, Mike Graves, p. 27). 

            A well-done re-make of the 1984 film, The Karate Kid, was released this year, and it has a wonderful illustration of what I am talking about here. A young boy, bullied by a group of thugs at school, longs to learn the self-defense skills of kung fu. He convinces the building superintendent, who apparently knows this martial art, to take him on as a student, but to his disgust finds that the training does not involve smashing bricks with bladed palms, or learning different ways to kick or strike with his fists. No, day in and day out, he has one drill, apparently inspired by his teacher having witnessed the boy being criticized by his mother for leaving his jacket on the floor. Repeatedly he must take his jacket off; drop it on the ground; pick it up; hang it up, put it on. And then repeat. Over and over again.

            After days of this, the boy rebels, yelling “I didn’t come here to learn this. I came here to learn kung fu.” The teacher calmly replies, “Everything is kung fu.” What he is saying, of course, is that he is trying to teach the boy more than a few kick-boxing moves – he is trying to introduce him to a new way of being, a way that includes self-defense, yes, but which also includes treating his mother, and everyone else for that matter, with respect.

            Perhaps what we need to do is redefine spirituality so that it takes seriously that we are social, embodied creatures, so that it does not fall into that trap of dualistic thinking which values the mind over the body, which forgets that the meaning of the incarnation, if it means anything, is that when God came into our earthly existence in the human form of Jesus Christ, everything became imbued with the holy. Perhaps we might try to imagine what a spirituality of life, of life fully lived, might look like.         

It will be different for each of us, of course. For many, prayer, worship, contemplation, silence, and so on, the usual spiritual practices, might be key religious experiences. And yet, a spirituality of life would allow for more, and would recognize that for others a meal with friends, a time of sharing stories with people, a walk on the beach, an afternoon in the garden, even a race on the briny, can be equally powerful. A question for each of you might be, “Where is it that you come alive? Can you see God in that activity, in that part of your life?”

This is the challenge I posed for myself in the weekly blog I began writing a few weeks ago. To quote: “Jesus tells us to "seek first the kingdom of God", and yet how often are we too busy to do so; let's look for God-sign among the dunes, on

Main Street

, everywhere!”  Many folk, including many of our members here, often find themselves elsewhere on Sunday morning, and so miss that time set aside each week for spirituality. But the truth of the matter is that even for those of you who attend worship weekly, each week still has another 167 hours in which your spirit might be attuned to the spirit of God.

But if a spirituality of life says that a life of faith is not confined to “churchy things”, to worship, to prayer, to meditation, to Bible Study, then why church? Why come to worship on Sunday? Or Bible Study on Mondays or Wednesday?  Maybe we can worship God on the golf course and that is enough. Here is what Barbara Brown Taylor, author of “Leaving Church”, writes:

“Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up . . . . That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them.” (Leaving Church, p. 165)

There are many good reasons for belonging to a church community and coming to worship on a regular basis, but perhaps one of the best reasons is they continually clue us into the ways in which God is at work in the world, in this community, and in people’s lives.  A colleague says that she views her role as a preacher to be a “broker of people’s experience of the holy” – her task is to share the stories of how God is involved in the world, not only as handed down to us in the biblical accounts, but also as experienced by people over time, and especially, today. As we listen to those accounts, it not only teaches us ways to be on the lookout for how God might be at work in our lives, it also helps set our expectations – after all, if we don’t expect God to show up in our lives, we are unlikely to look for its signs.

But of course there are many ways to listen, and using our ears is only one of the ways. We also listen and learn by observing, and by participation in a church community we can observe first-hand a community that intentionally seeks to form Christ-like people who embody and communicate, in word and deed, the good news of the kingdom of God. By participation in a church community, we walk side by side with, and work hand in hand with, a people who seek to be agents of transformation for the world, folk who live not just for themselves, but for others as well. And we not only observe them, they observe us; we receive, but we also give as well.

A spirituality of life is, therefore, a holistic spirituality, one which on the one hand celebrates the human experience of feeling fully alive in whatever sphere of life that might happen – on the golf course, in the garden, at home with the grandchildren, at a Patriots football game; and yet which, on the other hand, calls us to intentional engagement in the spiritual practices such as prayer, Bible Study, silence, and weekly worship. Perhaps today, a day on which we remember the Founders of this church community, we might do well to rededicate ourselves to this holistic spirituality.

Let us pray.

We give you thanks, O Founder of all that is, for the gift of grace which comes to us not only through this gathered body, your church, but also through your magnificent creation and the lives you have gifted us with. Awaken us to your presence here and in the routine of our daily lives, that we might ever turn our lives towards you, and live for your people. Amen.