With a little help from Evelyn Underhill who was recognized on the liturgical calendar this past Wednesday, I have learned some important things about my spiritual journey this week that I would like to share with you this morning.
Most notably, I have discovered that the more firmly rooted I find
myself in the life of God—through worship and prayer and the reading of
scripture—the more aware I become of the great chasm that exists between our
world and the world God reveals in Christ.
In particular, I become deeply aware of the pain and heartache of this
world and find myself saying, “it shouldn’t be like this.”
Consequently, I have learned that my
birth into the kingdom of God is not some escape to a utopia free from pain and
worry. Instead, my being born into the life
of God makes it abundantly clear to me just how broken and devastated our
earthly kingdoms are set in contrast to God’s heavenly kingdom made known in
Christ.
Remembering a passage from the Book
of Revelation, I find myself identifying more and more with the souls in heaven
who cry out from beneath the altar of God saying, “How long must your people
suffer, O Lord?”
As one priest suggests (Barbara Brown Taylor), our Christian vocation calls us to see that the
world is not the way it should be but we are to love the world the way it is. I believe this is the vocation of Christians
because this is the vocation of Christ—to love a broken and sinful world.
And like those who call out from beneath the altar of God in heaven,
the primary way in which we find ourselves moved and inspired to act on this
love for a broken and damaged world is through prayer. Left to our own devices, I am afraid we would
all spiral into an abyss of chaos and nothingness. Without the knowledge of this radical love
that God reveals so fully in Christ, we would all eventually disconnect
ourselves from anything and everything that is good and holy and right.
But prayer, even in all its clumsiness, has the power to recreate and
renew our heart and our soul and our eyes to see the world as God sees the
world. Prayer not only opens our eyes to
see the Eternal reality of God but also opens our eyes to see how God in Christ
loves a world that often times is so unlovable. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said just this
week, “to start praying is to take an enormous risk-we change and the world
around us changes.”
On Wednesday evening, about 40 gathered next to the bridge to hold a
prayer vigil for those who lost their lives in the mass shooting in Orlando. It was hot and muggy. We couldn’t get the PA system to work. I was in a bit of a frenzy because the
conditions weren’t ideal. But as God has
the tendency to do, God showed up despite the circumstances. God tapped me on the shoulder a few times and
reminded me that his presence was near.
While Psalm 23 was being read, two of our parishioners who are both
under the age of 5, offered what I will call a spontaneous liturgical
dance. And just when the reader read the
part of the famous Psalm that says, “my cup runneth over” the two children
dropped a bottle of water that spilled out all over the ground.
Immediately, God’s reality was made visible. In the beginning when the earth was a
formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep the wind of God swept
over the waters. The wind of God swept
over us on Wednesday—something even our most articulate prayers couldn’t
manufacture.
After the prayer vigil, I met two tourists who happened to be taking
pictures in front of the bridge at the time.
The tourists were from Orlando and expressed deep appreciation for the
vigil and asked for our continued prayers.
Surely, the Spirit of God connects the human family on a deeper level than
even the best laid human plans.
The image of God was reflected in the diversity of the crowd. In the face of the young and old, the black
and white. In the face of those who go
to church all the time and in the face of those who rarely if ever go to
church. In the face of preachers and
politicians and city leaders.
In the face of the rich and the poor, the privileged and marginalized. In the face of both the gay and the
straight. In the face of both Jew and
Christian, male and female. In the face
of a people who long for a world this is set free from the destructive forces
of pride, prejudice, intolerance, hatred, and indifference.
As I looked out over the crowd gathered in prayer, I was reminded of
the passage from Galatians that we just read.
“There
is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer
male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” God, through prayer, moved me again to see
the world as God sees the world.
Again my heart began to ache
because the world that we live in often looks so different than the world God
creates for us in Christ. I have to
imagine that Jesus’ heart ached too when he prayed the words, “your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Unlike
God’s heavenly kingdom, we live in a world that still treats people based on
class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and the list goes on. We live in a world that is crippled by the
sins of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Simply put, we are too often
driven by fear of the other mainly because we don’t know the other. And if we really want to get right down to
it, this fear causes us to notice the sin of the other instead of looking for
the image of God in all people.
As a
straight, white, male, I am becoming more and more aware of my privilege in
life. I am becoming more and more aware
that in this society I am the least likely person to be discriminated against
based on color, gender, class, and sexual orientation—mainly because people
like me hold most of the power. There is
no door in this society that I can’t walk through.
A few months ago, as I was
struggling with what to do with my place of privilege—I didn’t ask for this,
right?, I asked two female clergy in the diocese to help me figure out what to
do with it. I’ll never forget their
response. They said, “use your position
to give voice to those who have no voice.”
So this morning I want to give
voice to one of my best friends who is gay.
Like me, she went through the discernment process for ordination but was
not granted the opportunity because of her sexual orientation. I am still convinced that she would have made
a lot better priest than me.
She and her friends are
in a lot of pain. This past week’s mass
shooting in Orlando has accentuated that pain.
My friend and members of the LGBTQ community are children of God
regardless of one’s opinion on their lifestyle.
Our vocation as Christian is to simply love as Christ loves us--and let that be enough for us all to find healing.
Like Paul said to the Galatians,
we are no longer held hostage by the law.
Instead, we are granted life through the gift of faith. And the gift of faith simply calls us to trust
that loving Jesus is enough. The gift of
faith tells us that our love of Jesus will give us access to a life where we can
quit dwelling on our sin and the sin of others.
Our love of Jesus has the power to produce fruit that gets us beyond discrimination
and fear and see other's in the light of God.
In a letter to a spiritual
directee, Evelyn Underhill writes, “As your favorite St. Augustine
said, 'Love and do what you like!' If you like wrong things, you will soon find
the quality of your love affected." In other words, we would do well to pay attention to how our love of Jesus produces the fruit of the Spirit and let that be an indicator of the faith given in Christ--and not get bogged down in what scripture may or may not have said about a particular issue.
Underhill goes on to say, "This same condition of love governs
everything else...It seems to me that your immediate job must be to make this
love active and operative right through your life…Try to see people by God’s
light. Then they become 'real.' Nothing helps one so much as that...When you
have learnt to live within the love of God in this human and healthy sense, the
question of sin will cease to be such a bogy as it is as present.”
Beloved, we live in a
world that is broken and crying to be heard.
May we have the grace to put our ego and pride and opinions aside and listen to the
cry of the marginalized. May we have the
grace to join them in prayer and call on the love of Jesus.
And may our love of Jesus
grant us all a vision of what it means to live in a world that is finished separating
the other into different camps based on gender, class, religion, and sexual
orientation. May we have the grace to
see in the other the image of God and let that be enough. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment