Everyday Religion

July 27, 2015

In this summer of “the people’s lectionary,” our readings come from a variety of sources. This morning listen for a word from God from the work of early 20^th-century Lebanese-American writer and poet, Kahlil Gibran, from his book The Prophet:

“And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn. 

      Your daily life is your temple and your religion. 

      Whenever you enter into it take with you your all. 

      Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute, 

      The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight. 

      For in reverie you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures. 

      And take with you all men: 

      For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair. 

      And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles. 

      Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. 

      And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain. 

      You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees."

The word of the Lord.

This passage from The Prophet prompts for me another one of those chicken-or-egg questions: does our image of God determine our religious practice or does our religious practice determine our image of God? Put another way, which comes first, my prayer or the God to whom I pray?

The “correct”– and by “correct” I mean orthodox – answer is clearly that God comes first. After all, the opening lines of our canonized scripture proclaim, “In the beginning, God ….” In other words, before all else, there is God. Fundamental, it seems, to the nature of God is eternity.

I’m not at all certain about the nature of God, but I do know that it is my nature – if not human nature – to question received orthodoxy. So I want to tug at the chicken-egg question just a bit, and suggest, in the tugging, that, while God may well be eternal, we can only come to God by way of our own cultural context, the practices of our faith within that given cultural context, and the bounds of our own individual experience in any given moment.

Those practices, traditions, and experiences can be a limit to our ideas about God, or an invitation to broaden them.

To take but one example – albeit, a crucial and determinative one – we need look no further than the vocabulary Gibran uses in his writing. Following the linguistic and theological conventions of his cultural context, Gibran employs exclusively masculine pronouns to refer to both God and to humankind. He thus reinscribes an unquestioned patriarchy.

To note that and name it as such is no more to criticize Gibran than would remarking on the inability of fish to climb trees be to criticize the fish. Gibran, like each of us, was shaped and limited by his own cultural context.

The most creative of us – and certainly, Gibran was among the creative class of his day – can still see but a short way beyond the horizons of our time. God may well exist, as one of the songs in our hymnal puts it, “beyond all names,” but we call upon God using the names that we have been given, and we cannot speak beyond what we can name using the language we have received.

Religion, at its most limiting, does nothing to help us see beyond what has been named for us, for, at its most limiting, religion is a lens focusing us on the past. However, at its best and most challenging, the religion that we practice can be a lens through which to glimpse a future otherwise lying out there beyond our own limited horizons.

The word itself suggests both possibilities. The common etymology of religion connects it to the Latin lige, from which we get our word ligament. Thus, religion as re-lige, means literally to be tied or bound back, and, specifically, to be bound back to a tradition. But another etymological option suggests that the root might just as easily be lege, from which we get our word legible. Thus, religion as re-lege, means to re-read. The richness of these various etymologies taken together suggests the religion might also be understood as being bound to a tradition of rereading.

That understanding has the distinct advantage of being, in fact, just the kind of religion that Jesus practiced. Recall how often he said, “you have heard it said … but I say to you ….”

Each time he employed this strategy he was re-reading the sacred texts of his people. For example, “you have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

An eye for an eye was the law of Jesus’ faith. It was the wisdom he had received. It was the lens through which he learned to see and understand justice. It was the sacred text of his people. And he reread it, twisted it free and rendered it anew.

If Jesus is for Christians in some sense, the lens through which we see God, then given this pattern of reading and rereading sacred texts what kind of God do we see?

It might be more telling to ask, rather, what kind of God do we hear? For we speak so often of the calling of God to the people of God, and of the vocation to which we are called. Voice is crucial, and again, Jesus is worth hearing on the matter.

For one thing, Jesus listened for the voice of the one whom he called Abba, father. Jesus called upon God, in other words, in an intimate and personal way.

On the one hand, in calling God, “father,” Jesus reinforced the patriarchy of his culture. On the other hand, at the same time, Jesus listened for God in and through some unusual voices. To be sure, Jesus certainly heard God speak through the tradition of the law and the prophets and the contemporaneous teachers of Israel. But beyond those traditional ways of listening and learning, Jesus quite clearly listened to voices speaking from outside the tight circle of the tradition.

In particular, Jesus listened for God in the voices of those on the margins of that tradition. For example – and not just any example, but one that calls so much into question – Jesus listened to the voices of women.

The gospels are filled with stories of Jesus listening to women and being transformed through his relationships with them. Clearly, women were honored and respected leaders in the earliest gatherings of Jesus’ followers, and while we know the names of a handful of these women – Mary and Martha prominent among them – it is safe to assume that there were many others for, as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza put it so compellingly, the earliest people of the way practiced a discipleship of equals.[1]

Jesus listened for God among the marginalized – women in a patriarchal culture, the sick in a culture that judged illness as moral failure, the poor in a culture that did not value them – Jesus listened for God in the voices of the marginalized because Jesus understood God as one who cares equally for all. While the root of this understanding of God clearly grew in the rich soil of the Judaism that shaped Jesus, his own life and practice of listening for voices from the margins tapped that root more deeply.

In addition to providing the lens through which we see God, Jesus also provides a crucial lens through which we see the possibilities of human life, as well.

Gibran’s words insist on the importance of the everyday, and of the entire expanse of human experience to our experience of the divine. How we live matters, and attending with care and compassion, with love and concern in our every endeavor marks our worship of the God who loves all.

As Paul put it in his letter to the Jesus people in Rome:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

In other words: your whole self, your whole life is your appropriate offering to God. In one of the great exhortations in all of scripture, Paul goes on to describe what this looks like in practice:

“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”

This, it seems to me, is everyday religion.

Still, it is not enough to do this merely among those who look like us and act like us, who talk like us and walk through life like us.

If God is beyond all names, then it stands to reason that we need to expand our vocabulary if we are to speak accurately about the Divine, and all the more so if we would pretend to speak with the Divine. Thus, our practices of everyday religion need to expand, as well.

For example, in our conversations with God – that is to say, in our prayer life – we would do well to listen to the prayers that arise from the margins of our culture and society, our traditions and our church. In doing so we open ourselves to richer and deeper understanding, such that we might see ourselves and our world differently when we hear, for example, what W.E.B. du Bois called Prayers for Dark People.

In his small collection of such prayers, we can hear both the voices of those long silenced, and the voice of their Creator, as the people pray:

“Remember, O God, thru’out the world this night those who struggle for better government and freer institutions. Help us to realize that our brothers are not simply those of our own blood and nation, but far more are they those who […] strive toward the same ideals. So tonight in Persia and China, in Russia and Turkey, in Africa and all America, let us bow with our brothers and sisters and pray as they pray for a world, well-governed – void of war and caste, and free to each asking soul. Amen.”[2]

When we practice our faith in a discipleship of equals – that is to say, when we pray together in a community that intentionally reaches beyond its own traditional boundaries of insider and outsider and rewrites its relationship of center and margin, we are getting closer to making of our everyday religion an authentic path near to the heart of God.

For we still have so much to learn about the path and the prayer that draws us into that pulsing power of love and justice that beats now and always from the center of all that is or ever will be. Amen.

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[1] Elisabeth Schussler Firenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroads, 1983) throughout.

[2] W.E.B. du Bois, Prayers for Dark People (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980) 22.

Run With Perseverance

July 19, 2015

In this summer of “the people’s lectionary,” our readings come from a variety of sources. This morning listen for a word from God from the New Testament book of Hebrews: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” 

The word of the Lord.

We have a lot of runners in this congregation, and runners know a little bit about perseverance on a focused and particular scale. Runners know their own land-based version of Dorrie’s mantra from Finding Nemo: just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Just keep running. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

If you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, pretty soon you will have gone so much further than you ever imagined.

To be sure, there are limits. At some point, our bodies break down, but most of us never get close to finding those limits. We don’t know what we can accomplish if we just keep running … or swimming … or whatever it is that marks and defines the race that is set before you.

We don’t know what we can accomplish because we are so easily entangled. I like that translation because it puts me in mind of getting my shoelaces tangled or tripping on a vine during a trail run or even of getting caught in the mass of runners in the first mile of a race. I know what it feels like to be easily entangled when I’m trying to run the race that is before me.

Of course, the author of Hebrews also suggests other entanglements: “let us throw of everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.”

Which begs several questions:

·      What hinders you?

·      What is sin?

·      What entangles you along the way?

I’m going to start with the most obviously theological of those questions – what is sin – because it may be the question that most confuses us.

Too often, we define sin simply in moral or ethical terms, that is to say, in behavioral terms. To sin is to behave badly, for example, to cheat or steal or lie, to covet, dishonor or disobey in more Biblical terms.

In Biblical terms, however, the word we translate as sin – the Greek harmartia – is richer and more complicated than that. Though is did carry much the same sense of our word sin, it more literally meant to miss the mark. It was a term from archery, and indicated the measure separating your arrow from the bull’s-eye. We are just full of sportsing metaphors this morning!

By that definition, perhaps a richer understanding of sin is the measure of what separates us from God. Thus it is not merely about a single act but rather about the way we live, the way we run the race that is set before us.

So, if I am intentional about running the race in a manner that draws me close to God, close, that is, to the way of Jesus, what hinders me along the way? I’m reminded of one of my favorite songs from the Civil Rights Movement:

I’m on my way, to freedom land …

One verse has always struck me:

If you can’t go, don’t hinder me …

Sometimes, what hinders us along the way, are destructive relationships. Sometimes, often times, tragically, those are family relationships and those can be particularly entangling, incredibly difficult to repair, and all but impossible to disentangle.

There are no quick fixes nor easy answers to such challenges in relationships, and this is worship not therapy so we’re not going to explore them in depth or detail. In this context, all we can offer is the simple yet incredibly hard challenge to do all things in love.

Other relationships can equally hinder us, and while disentangling can be challenging some of the other relationships can be less therapeutic, as it were. I’m thinking, in particular, of our relationships to what the late Marcus Borg called the three great idols of contemporary American culture: appearance, affluence, and achievement. Another, less alliterative way of naming these idols might be looks, money, and status.

We all have relationships with these idols. We all care, to some extent or another, about how we look. If we didn’t we would pay way less attention to haircuts and the cut of our clothing. We all care, to some extent, about money, and we all care about our achievements and our status on the job, in school, in our neighborhoods.

The question – and here is where that definition of sin as a measure can be helpful – the question is not do we care about these things, but rather, at what point does our relationship with these idols of American culture become idolatrous.

Remember that the great sin in scripture was never disbelief in God, but rather it was always about worshipping the wrong gods. In other words, it was always idolatry. We get entangled with idols and they hinder us all along the way, drawing us further and further away from the way of Christ.

So, what’s the good news in this? The good news comes in the first phrase of the passage from Hebrews: “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”

In other words, we are not alone. We do not run the race in isolation. There are others with us all along our way. As one who has run a lot, I can say from experience that having folks along the side of the road cheering you on helps immeasurably in running the race with perseverance. I find it so much easier to cut short a planned training run when I’m by myself than I do if I’m running with a friend, and all the more so a road race when there are spectators lining the street cheering even for the middle-aged, middle-of-the-pack runners like me.

Obviously, the author of Hebrews was not talking about running events, but, rather, about our lives – about the several callings to which we are called. Our callings are many, and though they may include our jobs, they are not reducible to them. We are called in every single stage of our journeys: we are called to explore, to learn, to form relationships as young children; we are called to lasting friendships, to good work, to neighborliness, to doing justice and making peace, as adults; we are called to families of origin or of choice to be moms, dads, aunts, uncles, siblings at every stage of our lives; finally, we are called to death and to dying.

All along the way, we belong to God, and are called by God to run each stage of the race as it comes. Moreover, all along the way, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses – the saints of the church militant and of the church triumphant – that is to say, those living along with us as mentors and friends, and those who have completed their races but leave with us sacred memory and inspiration – the breath of lives well lived that still blows through our lives.

Because of this – because we belong to God and we are surrounded and upheld by so many others – we can throw off those entangling hindrances and we can, indeed, do so much more than we imagine. Just keep running. Just keep running. Amen.

So, two questions, again, for our conversation:

·      Who have been your witnesses in the great cloud of witnesses?

·      And, for whom have you been a witness?

The Art of the Commonplace

June 21, 2015

In this summer of “the people’s lectionary,” our readings come from a variety of sources. This morning listen for a word from God from the work of Kentucky farmer and poet, Wendell Berry.

“It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...
If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...
Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

The word of the Lord.

Perhaps it’s a bit odd to turn to a meditation on “work” in the middle of summer, when so many of us are on vacations, planning vacations, or just returning from vacations. On the other hand, what better time to consider work than when one has a chance to step away from one’s job for a while?

Moreover, in a summer during which we’re exploring “persistence,” work seems a fine point of focus.

What is our work? If you give it a moment’s thought, you’ll realize that we all have more than one answer to that question. My own work includes serving this community as teaching elder, but also includes husband, father, neighbor, volunteer, writer, activist, and a host of other titles I’m forgetting for the moment. Thus, work, as I’m thinking of it here, includes our jobs but is not reducible to them.

Work, understood broadly, is the common thread of our lives, but it is also the commonplace whose art we so often miss.

When Berry observes that he finds it “impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world signifies nothing,” I am confronted by an existential question: why do I do the work that I do?

To be sure, there are biological imperatives. At some level, we work in order to eat. On the farm – and, maybe, even in the garden – it’s pretty obvious that I work, therefore I eat. There’s an important truth in that axiom, which gets a bit less obvious the further we stray from the dirt.

But even at a distance as far removed from the dirt as the Wall St. corner office, it remains true that we work in order to eat.

Now even if it is only one part of the story and one aspect of the work, there is something holy about that perspective for when we get to that level we are also saying “we work, therefore we live.” Understanding, again, that our work is more than our jobs, more than what we do for money, and, ultimately also more than what we do for food, we work to give meaning to our time that we might truly be said to live rather than merely to exist.

There’s a chicken-egg question at work in this, though. Berry insists “it is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world signifies nothing.” To which I want to ask, is the conviction that life has meaning a necessary precondition to good work or is it a result of such work?

An unanswerable question and unresolvable tension in Barry’s observation rests here. The tension deepens Barry’s observation about religious traditions regarding work as a form of prayer, especially when we recall one of the great brief prayers in scripture, “Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief.”

Which is to say, sometimes we don’t come to our work convinced that any of it matters, that any of it makes any difference in our own lives, much less in the life of the world. Sometimes, we have to work our way into the conviction that the work matters, or, failing that, that the world matters.

Which is further to say, sometimes we find ourselves engaged in work that hardly matters at all on the personal and local level, much less on a global or cosmic scale. At that point, when we’re engaged in a mundane task of an insignificant job, we recall – sometimes with a fierce urgency – that we’re working in order to live.

Most of us have been there. Think back for a moment: what’s been the least meaningful job you ever had? Now, think back to what else was going on in your life at the time: what were the most important relationships you had? What creative outlets did you pursue? What volunteer opportunities did you engage? What were you studying at the time?

You’ll notice that I avoided the word “work” in describing the “what else was going on in your life at the time” of your most meaningless job. But, if you think back to each of those engagements – relationships, creative endeavors, volunteering, studying – you know that each and every one of those is also work if, by work, we take the most basic definition: mental or physical exertion in order to achieve a purpose or result.

In my own experience, such work is rich and full of meaning, and, what’s more, makes the whole of my life point beyond its own narrow limits of time and space and ability. That is to say, these various good works underscore the significance of this one life I have been given.

The real question, as always, is simply this: what will I make of the time that I have been given?

No matter the form or remuneration of the work, what am I making of the time spent at the work? Am I making a good marriage? Am I making strong relationships with my children? Am I making meaningful contributions to my community? Am I building up the community of disciples?

That last phrase might well strike you as particularly “churchy,” and perhaps even as peculiar to my job as pastor. But I want to suggest to you this morning that all of our work – our jobs, our various family roles, our activities in our varied communities – all of our work is the work of disciples.

“How am I a disciple at my job?” you may well ask.

To begin with, if by disciple we mean simply a follower of the way of Jesus, then we must acknowledge that when Jesus said, “follow me,” he didn’t mean on a part-time basis and much less so did he mean for a single hour set aside on Sunday mornings. No, when Jesus said “follow me” he meant every step of the way.

I recently rediscovered a phrase from a book Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza published in the early 90s: “the discipleship of equality.”[1] Fiorenza reminds us that the earliest followers of Jesus created profoundly egalitarian communities within the constraints of their historical context.

That practice remains a prophetic calling to us in all of our work and each of its various contexts. That practice of equality presents a particular prophetic challenge in our own time given the continued reified hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality in so many of the institutions in which we work. Moreover, in a historical moment marked by an economic inequality that can only be described as sinful, the practice of a discipleship of equality in all of our work can be seen as for what it is: prayer – the cry of the people of God for a more just and loving world, thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

Such a prayer is only possible when we believe that our work matters, that all of our acts have supreme significance. For when we engage our several callings, our various work from that perspective, then we begin to understand our work as prayer. Amen.

As a closing conversation, to be continued as you like over coffee in a few minutes, but kick-started now, let me pose two questions:

In what ways is your work a form of prayer?

How are you a disciple at work?

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[1] Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ecclesiology of Liberation (New York: Crossroads, 1993).