THE LIMITS OF MY OWN PERSONAL "SPIRITUALITY"

Our Gospel lesson about Jesus' baptism

            is downright peculiar viewed from the angle

            of spirituality and religion today.

It is currently a popular notion that spirituality

            is best done privately, by the individual,

using his or her own critical thinking.

That is a very attractive way to go about spirituality.

I get to figure it out for myself.

Knowing that I am smarter than St. Thomas Aquinas,

            holier than St. Athanasius, and humbler than St. Francis,

            I can devise a better spirituality than Christianity.

I can invent better rituals than the ones practiced by millions

            of lesser people over the millennia.

I can make up better stories than the Bible and craft a better Creed

than the Council of Nicaea.

The most convenient thing about private spirituality

            is that I basically get to make up my own God.

And that is great.

The God I create will not ask for any of my money,

            or even any time I do not already want to give.

The God of my making will not infringe on my political convictions

            with Biblical social morality.

The God I invent will never ask me to take up my cross.

No, the God of my creation will be the shield and sustainer of my ego.

There are a few problems with my private little God.

First, as I say, he works for me because he works for me.

He is the shield and sustainer of my ego.

But all the name brand religions – Judaism, Christianity,

            Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and the rest say

            that my ego is the problem.

My ego is the prison of my soul.

So my private little God is on exactly the wrong side

of the spiritual project

            that should dismantle ego,

not fortify its prison walls.

Second, when I die, the God of my creation dies with me.

In the world of private individual spirituality,

            I am the Alpha and the Omega.

So when I turn the lights out, that’s all she wrote.

Third, the God of my own creation won’t connect me with other people.

Worshiping my own God in my own way in my own place

            at my own time is convenient, but lonely.

St. Augustine said what we all know from experience.

The joy of life is found in human friendship.

We don’t make friends in a private spirituality.

So let’s flash back to 30 A. D.

If anyone had the qualifications to do private spirituality,

            it was Jesus.

But he didn’t do it.

He prayed and studied at synagogue,

            worshiped in the Temple,

            and was baptized by John.

He wasn’t too good for the faith of his ancestors

            or the seekers of his own day.

Jesus didn’t have his Holy Spirit experience off by himself.

He had it in the Jordan River with John.

So John also saw the Spirit descend on Jesus.

When Jesus came up from the water,

John heard the voice of God

When Jesus was baptized, when Jesus had his encounter with God,

            it wasn’t just so he could get himself in the zone.

It was for the sake of others, including John.

The next time John saw Jesus, he didn’t say

            “Master let’s go off and have a private guru and disciple chat.

            Tell me your secrets so I can be a spiritual hot shot too.”

Instead he pointed Jesus out to his friends and said,

            “If you are looking for God, go follow Jesus.”

So they followed  him, and when Jesus asked then, “What do you seek?”

            they said, “Where are you living?”

They just wanted to be where he was.

So he showed them his place and they stayed with him.

One of those disciples, Andrew,

            Immediately brought his brother Peter to Jesus.

They were forming connections.

Jesus shared his experience with John,

            John passed it on to Andrew       

                        then Andrew brought in Peter.

They were all looking for God together.

They weren’t each making up their own God.

They were looking for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

            the God of Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel.

They were looking for the God of Moses, Samuel, David, and Isaiah.

Their hope was grounded in promise made to their ancestors.

Nothing private about this.

It’s a group project with the group spread through the centuries.

And Jesus taught them about the Kingdom of God.

He told them where to look for it.

In the 1960s we started privatizing the translation.

 We had Jesus saying “The Kingdom of God is within you

(2^nd person singular)”

-- meaning look inside yourself to find God.

But actually Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is among you

(2^nd person plural).”

The Kingdom of God is in the relational space between you.

It’s about the relationships.

If you are on your way to the altar with your gift to God

            and you remember you are at odds with your brother,

            stop right there and make peace with your brother first.

Forgive. Share. Tell the truth. Give more than is asked.

God on earth resides in human connections.

All of this adds up to three things for us.

First, it makes a difference for how we treat each other

            in the Church.

The other people in Church with are not just fellow consumers

            of the sacraments.

They are the sacraments. They are the body of Christ.

They are the face of Jesus.

If we want God the way we want him, we have to keep him private.

But it we allow the God of Jesus to appear to us,

            he will show up in the curious guise of each other.

Second, if our faith is relational, we have to share it.

Like John the Baptist, we naturally point people toward Jesus.

Like Andrew we go find someone we care about and tell them

            where to find Jesus.

We know where that is. It’s right here.

One of our parishes recently reported that 85% of their newcomers

found their church through their web site.

But we still have churches that don’t have web sites.

That may reduce their chances of meeting a newcomer by 85%.

But it gets worse.

We have churches you can’t find on a GPS,

            churches that aren’t even in a phone book,

            churches with small signs hidden behind shrubbery.

I am very pleased to see St. Christopher’s beginning

            to let Boulder City know you are here.

In one of our congregations a middle school boy

            was listening to a classmate tell him about her unhappiness.

He said to her, “You need Jesus” and he invited her to church.

She’s now a regular at the communion rail.

Maybe you’re not that bold,

            but can you wear a cross?

If you find anything good about this Church,

            could you mention that in a conversation?

We meet God in the connections we make with people.

When we don’t make those connections, we are missing God.

           

The third thing about relational faith is that it calls us to care for people

            who are not like us, people we don’t even know.

Like Deacon Ann Langevin’s project to buy solar lanterns

            for our companion diocese in Kenya

                        so they can have light in rural villages with no electricity.

We have two ways to share the light of Christ.

One is the send people solar lanterns.

The other is to invite someone to church.

Both ways are connecting to people in caring ways,

            looking for Christ in them and with them.

That’s the Christian religion.

It’s often inconvenient.

It costs money – like $9.50 for a solar lantern.

It costs time. It costs attention.

Eventually, it costs us our whole life.

But that’s where the love is. That’s where the joy is.

That’s where we find our hope for all eternity.

IT'S A DESERT OUT THERE

When the bishop candidates came to Nevada

         for a week-long bus tour,

our third stop was in Las Vegas.

One of the Church ladies said to us,

         “You do understand this is a desert. Right?”

She probably meant it literally.

Not everybody gets the beauty of a desert.

But she might have meant the resources are sparse here

–     not many people, not much money.

The cultural climate is as harsh to religion

as the physical climate is harsh to animal life.

In many ways, it really is a desert out there.

On the Galilean mountainside, people were hungry.

It would be natural to send them off somewhere

         to find food.

But Jesus didn’t want to do that.

He worried what would become of them

         along the way.

So Jesus said to the disciples, “Let’s feed them here.”

They replied,

         “You do understand that this is a desert. Right?

Where would we get enough bread in the desert

         to feed this multitude?”

It was the primal message:

         “We don’t have enough.”

To which Jesus said, “What have we got?”

“We don’t have enough” is the universal game stopper.

To which Jesus responds every time, “What have we got?”

Often we come back at him with, “We don’t have the right stuff.”

What kind of fish do you suppose they blessed and shared

on the mountainside that day?

Chances are it was Tilapia, the main fish in the Sea of Galilee.

But when they made the movie The Greatest Story Ever Told,

         the Sea of Galilee was portrayed by our own Pyramid Lake.

We don’t have Tilapia in Pyramid Lake;

         so the Tilapia were portrayed by Kooyooe.

Different lakes have different fish.

Suppose the disciples had said to Jesus,

         “Well we have two fish, but we have no salmon,

no cod, no trout, no kooyooe.

         We don’t’ have the right kind of fish.”

Jesus said, “What have we got?”

“We got tilapia.”

“Ok then on tonight’s menu we are serving tilapia.”

They had five loaves – of what?

They had Galilean bread – a filling but course bread

made from barley, not wheat.

Suppose the disciples had said to Jesus,

         “We have five loaves alright,

but we have no garlic bread, no Nan, no pumpernickel,

                  no German black bread, no whole wheat or Wonder bread.”

Jesus said, “What have we got?”

“We got barley bread.”

“Alright then”

So they blessed and shared barley bread and Tilapia,

the bread of Galilee the fish of Galilee

         to feed the people of Galilee.

They called it “the gifts of God for the people of God.”

There is always resistance to blessing

the simple gifts of the desert,

always the idea that we don’t have enough

or what we have somehow isn’t right.

1,300  years before Jesus,

when the children of Israel traversed the Sinai Desert,

         they complained  because they wanted Egyptian cuisine.

All Moses had to give them was the bread of heaven,

the food of angels.

But they wanted something from somewhere else.

They wanted Egyptian, Thai or Italian maybe.

Somewhere that has good food.

Moses said, “Sorry. We got no Pad Thai noodles,

We got no tacos.

All we got is the bread of heaven, the food of angels.”

There are several three points here.

First, we all get hungry sometime for something

-- truth, love, meaning, hope, serenity -- something.

My favorite line from the late poet Ann Sexton

         is as simple and as it is poignant.

I suspect it was special to Ann Sexton too,

         because she used it in two poems,

                  one religious, one not.

It goes: “O my hunger! My hunger!’//

We all hunger for something.

It goes with the turf of being human.

There is an emptiness inside us.

17^th Century philosopher Blaise Pascal called it

“the God shaped hole in the human heart.”

Second point: when we get hungry,

we think we need to go somewhere for what we need.

We look around our own personal wilderness

         and say, “This is a desert. I don’t have enough.”

We want a jazzier philosophy, a more exotic diet,

a new lover, a religion that is more cerebral

         or more emotional or more something we are not.

Because “This  life of mine is a desert. I don’t have enough.”

 The third point is God’s answer to our restlessness.

 Moses said,

         What you need “is not up in heaven so that you have to ask,

         ‘Who will ascend into heaven and get it for us?’

         Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask,

         ‘Who will cross the sea and get it . . . . ‘

         No, the word (of life) is very near you.

         It is in your mouth and in your heart.”

We have what we need right here

         to do the work God has given us to do right here.

We have the bread of heaven, the food of angels.

To be satisfied, all we have to do

is bless and share what we’ve got.

 Hemanos y hermanas, tenemos hambre.

The people of Nevada are hungry – spiritually hungry,

         existentially hungry, emotionally hungry.

We have what we need and we are the people

         to feed the Nevada’s hunger.

The point of the English Reformation

         was that the Church in England

         does not have to be identical to the Church in Rome

in order to be the Church.

After the American Revolution,

we discovered that the Church in  America

does not have to be identical to the Church in England

in order to be Anglican.

 The Church in Nevada does not have to be identical

to the Church in Chicago

in order to be Episcopal.

So let’s start with the basic point. We are different.

But different does not mean deficient.

It means different. God made us different

         to play a different part in God’s mission.

A Carmelite monk once prayed,

         “O Lord make me another St. John of the Cross.”

God replied, “No thank you. I’ve already got one.

         I need you to be you.”

Part of our difference is special assets, strengths, capabilities.

Why do you think the National Church

 makes movies of our Latino Ministries

and the work of St. Martin’s to show all over the country?

It isn’t because we’re deficient.

It’s because we do some things well.

Nevada is special.

We have turquoise, underground rivers,

         Area 51, entertainment extravaganzas,

         wild burros, and the rare but not endangered

                  Armargosa toad.

We also have the most interesting, colorful human beings

         anywhere in the world.

Do we have deficits?

Yes, we lead the nation in high school dropouts, suicides,

         divorces, and women killed in domestic violence.

That’s our mission field. That’s the hunger part.

That’s why evangelism isn’t about propping up

         our institution and meeting a budget.

It’s about saving people on the brink.

We’ve got a lot of neighbors on the brink.

Nevada is beautiful, wonderful, and endlessly entertaining.

Nevada is also broken, hurting, and hungry.

Jesus looked out at the crowd on the mountain

and said “I feel compassion for these people.”

That same Jesus sees this hunger of our Nevada neighbors

and says, “If you love me, feed my sheep.”

And someone says,

         “It’s a desert here. You know that right?

          We don’t have enough.”

But Jesus says, “What have we got?”

And someone says,

         “Well we have the Episcopal Diocese.”