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.

---

[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.