Lord Jesus, help us to more fully receive and reflect your light. Amen.
Some of you might remember those magic-eye pictures that were extremely popular in the 90s. At first glance, they appear to be just random dots of color – but if you stare at them, a 3D image will pop out. If you don’t look long enough, the image appears to be flat. But with a bit of time, the image becomes alive in three dimensions. This is how I hope that we’ll see our faith as well – that when it exists in three dimensions, it becomes vibrant instead of flat.
The three dimensions that I have mind are outward, inward, and upward. A faith that is active and alive has to have all three dimensions: outward towards one another, inward in terms of spiritual depth, and upward meaning connection with the transcendence of God. This is our calling, our vocation, as followers of Jesus – to follow his example in all three dimensions. As St. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, though he doesn’t talk about a three-dimensional faith, it’s exactly what he describes. He addresses the letter to “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” The words “sanctified” and “saints” are the same in Greek – it means something that is set apart for a holy task.
Things that are “sanctified” don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be chosen. Beloved, God has chosen each of us and all of us together to be a sanctified people. We are given a holy vocation and calling. This is clear from the very beginning of our sacred Scripture – humanity is created to be an image of God, to be God’s caretakers of Creation, and to be a vehicle of God’s blessing. It is as Isaiah noted – we are to reflect the light of God to the world.
St. Paul further notes that we have been enriched by the grace of Jesus and we are not lacking in anything that we need for this saintly mission that we have been given. We though live in a professionalized world – where some people do this, and others do that. The result being that we’ve outsourced religious and spiritual things to the “professionals” – those who are ordained or are in holy orders. And thank God for those who are called to be visible witnesses in the world and have taken vows to dedicate their lives to the Gospel in this specific way.
It’s one of the things that excited me about coming to Grace and St. Stephen’s – we are blessed with such a robust presence of those in religious orders. We have about a dozen members who have taken vows in various Christian communities and monastic orders. And across the Episcopal Church, there are about 30 different religious communities that people are a part of. Having such a strong foundation of spiritual depth and discipline in a congregation is a true gift, and so we thank those of you in holy orders for your ministry among us. Many of them will be wearing habits today as we mark Religious Life Sunday – so if you have questions about this particular way of following Jesus, I’m sure they would be excited and delighted to speak with you.
Central to any religious community is what is called a “Rule of Life.” Simply put, a Rule of Life is a set of core commitments, priorities, and values. A Rule of Life can include things like time for daily prayer, meditation, physical activity, service in the community, weekly church attendance, generous financial support of the local church, or time with family and friends. And the thing about a Rule of Life that is so essential to grasp is that we all have one. We all have routines, rhythms, and norms that our life runs on. The question is not if we have a Rule of Life. No, the question is: have we chosen our Rule of Life, or have we fallen into one?
As I’ve been starting to think about what our identity and calling as a parish is, I’ve been thinking in terms of being a three-dimensional church – one that has a clear outward, inward, and upward focus. And, more importantly – being a church that equips and empowers all of our members to have a three-dimensional faith. Because this is what our world needs from us right now and what God calls us into.
In First Corinthians we heard that we have been enriched in speech and knowledge just as the witness of Christ has been strengthened in us. The gift we have is our witness to the most excellent way of Jesus, the way of love. This witness is the gift that the world needs and which has been entrusted to us. And, friends, the world is a hot mess right now; utterly lost and adrift. The world might not be looking to the Church to help, but God has given the world the gift of the Church for moments such as this.
The purpose of religious vows and a Rule of Life is to develop in us the difference Christ makes. The Archbishop of Paris in the 1940s put it this way, “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.” God has called us to be witnesses to this blessedly different way of being.
Being inspired by the witness of our members in religious orders, I am asking all of us to think and pray about what an intentional Rule of Life for you might be. Specifically, choose one, just one, priority or focus in the outward, inward, and upward dimensions of faith.
When it comes to the outward, we must remember the truth that Martin Luther King wrote about in his letter from a Birmingham jail, that we are “tied together in a single garment of destiny.” We’re all in this together, and so to ignore the needs of our neighbors not only does them harm, but it robs us of the wholeness that God intends for us together.
Several weeks ago, David Brooks wrote a great piece called “The Great Detachment” in which he wrote, “You can build a culture around loving commitments, or you can build a culture around individual autonomy. But you can’t do both.” How true that is. We must choose what sort of people we will be – a collection of individuals who are pursuing our own truth, wins, and values, who sometimes collaborate and sometimes collide as we make our way through life; or will we be, as St. Paul describes it, the Body of Christ: a unit made up of many parts that maintain their distinctiveness, yet are working towards a common goal.
There’s been a lot in the news recently – and even how I refer to these events is a walking a tightrope of unintended inferences and interpretations – Venezuela, Washington, Greenland, Ukraine, Sudan, Iran. But the one that seems to be stirring the most up among us is Minneapolis. I’ve been thinking and praying long and hard about if, as your pastor, I should say something, what to say, and how to say it. And while I do value the approach that says the Gospel, when preached faithfully, speaks directly to whatever is in the news; I also believe that silence speaks just as loudly as words and that the Church’s task in these sorts of moments is to help us think about such events theologically, through the prism of Christ’s mercy and love.
As far as what happened on January 7, I’ll leave the commentary to the pundits. If I were to see ICE show up in my neighborhood, I really don’t know what I would do in the moment. I’d like to think that I would be a presence of peace and justice, but I really don’t know what I’d do once the adrenaline starts to flow. I don’t know what would happen when anger and fear come into the picture. Nor if I had been in the position of the ICE agent, do I know what I would do. Again, I would hope that I would remain poised and professional, but I really don’t think any of us know how we’d react. I think we know how we’d hope to respond, but until we’re in that moment, I really don’t think we know.
As a priest, what deeply disturbs me is how our society is responding to this tragedy. The news is not a window that we look through and then pronounce judgments. Some might choose to live in such glass houses – looking out and offering rebukes and opinions on everything. But I really don’t think that this is what we are called to or what the world needs out of the Church in this moment.
Instead of being a glass window, the news is a mirror that shows us something about ourselves. The fact that a sworn officer of the State had an encounter with a citizen that ended up in her death is a tragedy. A tragedy. But we’ve turned it into a tug-of-war, taking tired, predictable, and short-sighted sides as though looking through a window instead of looking at this as a mirror and saying “This is a tragedy. What have we done to get here? And what do we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
We have accepted violence as normative in our speech to one another, in our attitudes towards those we disagree with, in the forms of entertainment we consume. We so often refuse to consider things from another perspective – we don’t have to agree, but closed off in our glass houses, we can’t even listen. We’ve accepted a dysfunctional legislative system that creates vacuums which evil and division love to fill. We look at such events as windows, being convinced of how wrong “they” are, while refusing to look in mirror and ask, “What does this say about us?”
Whether we like it or not, we, followers of Jesus, are reflecting something back to the world. Is it willful ignorance, quiet acquiescence, fearful inaction, wrathful blame, or is it the light of Christ? If we don’t like what we see in the mirror, it’s not going to change with sharper words towards others.
Our patron is St. Stephen – someone who summoned tremendous courage and took a bold risk for faith and ended up being killed for his witness. In that letter from Birmingham, King laments that the Church used to be a thermostat that sought to be a transforming force in in the community, but now acts as a mere thermometer that simply records what is happening around us. If we are to be a thermostat, we will need St. Stephen’s courageous witness as our example.
King reminds us that it’s about us, not me. So even if you think that you are above reproach and are on the right side of history – we, most certainly, are not. Both Scripture and history are written in the plural. When it comes to the outward dimension of our faith, this is a summons, a challenge, to truly look outward. Not to people who are just a different version of us, that’s inward.
I don’t know what the right answer is in every situation, and I don’t think we’re going to find it alone. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. But I fear that we’ve become too good at hating them. And I get being fed up. I get being angry. I get being sad. I do. But I also know that hate does not lead to reconciliation, and that hate always consumes the hater. And maybe this is where our vowed brothers and sisters can help us – they’ve made a commitment to being with one other, even if they disagree, even if they find one another annoying. Maybe if we look in that mirror and only see one side, we can pray for the wisdom and strength to do start by addressing that.
I’ve spent more time on this “outward” dimension than I intended to because I discerned it was my sacred calling as your priest to spend the extra time on this dimension. And so, briefly, the inward and upward dimensions do deserve a bit of reflection.
An inward Rule of Life is seen in the Gospel text from John in which Jesus invites us to “come and see.” It’s an invitation to go deeper, to take time to meditate and pray. It’s amazing what 5-minutes of just being quiet and focusing on our breath does for us. Having a practice that takes us deeper develops the courage and compassion we need for that outward work. Our monastic friends can help us to cultivate the inward life of faith.
When it comes to the upward, as we heard in Psalm 40, it’s about praising God. Having practices that connect us to God in a posture of praise is so vital because they remind us that God is God and that we are not. And this is an essential truth in being God’s agents of justice, mercy, and peace. Because if we are to be a thermostat but think that we also get to pick the temperature, well, trouble follows. An upward orientation in our faith saves us from the traps and temptations of idolatry. Those in religious orders have so many tools to help us in praising God in all things and above all things.
We have been given a revelation of the light of the world in Jesus Christ, a light that is solely lacking and desperately needed in this moment. God has called and equipped us, the Body of Christ, for a time such as this. By focusing on how we receive and reflect this light in three-dimensions, inward, outward, and upward, we not only have a faith that is vibrant and alive, but we become witnesses to the blessed difference Christ makes.
