“…LABOR FOR THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE…”

One day not too long ago, a woman came to me for her monthly spiritual direction session—we’ll call her Eileen, shall we? As we sat together, she poured out her frustration at her seeming inability to maintain a spiritual practice.

 

“If I try to pray,” she said, “I just feel like a fake. And meditation? I’m terrible at it! I feel like a spiritual failure.”

 

What complicated her situation was that, like me, Eileen had been raised in a conservative Christian home, and was, in fact, a preacher’s kid. Because of this she had a pretty well-defined notion of just what constituted spiritual practice, devotion, and discipline. The tragedy was, none of it was working for her.

 

Part of the problem, of course, was that while her theology had evolved, her notion of how to deepen that understanding had not.

 

I certainly sympathized. As a good little southern Baptist boy, I knew that any successful Christian life required twenty minutes of quiet time with God, twenty minutes of Bible study, and twenty minutes of intercessory prayer, all before breakfast.

 

And does any of that stuff work for me now? It does not. Even if I had not struggled with it myself, I would know that Eileen’s struggle is not unique—it is one that I encounter frequently.

 

I asked Eileen if she had heard of the four Hindu yogas—she had, and we reviewed them together. First, there is Bakhti Yoga, the way to God through devotion. Then there is Karma yoga, the way to God through serving people. Third is Jnana Yoga, the way to God through intellectual study; and finally, Raja Yoga, the way to God through meditation.

 

The wisdom of the Hindu system is that there is not just one way to God, but many, and that different people have different talents and proclivities. What works for one person may not work for another, and this is okay. God is not picky.

 

The tradition I grew up in was, without a doubt, a Bakhti tradition. One came to God through love and prayer and devotion. The intellect was not highly valued, good works were almost bad words, and meditation would take you straight to hell.

 

But what I learned is that I am not a Bakhti person. I am a Jnana person. I am never so near to divinity as when I am reading theology, or engaged in a rollicking good philosophical conversation. That, for me, is communion as efficacious as any we receive at this altar.

 

And once I figured this out, I was able to embrace the way I’m wired, spiritually, and let go of all the unrealistic expectations of my childhood. Not only was I happier, but my spiritual life got better—because I stopped judging myself for not doing what I was never cut out to do, and was able to focus my energies on things that actually worked. What a concept!

 

It’s too bad that the intellect has gotten such a bad rap in the Christian tradition. It was not always so. And in our parent  tradition, Judaism, the intellect is so revered that it has been deified.

 

I’m not kidding about that, and it’s not hyerbole. In our reading from the book of Proverbs we see a poetic motif that appears again and again in the Hebrew scriptures—that of the Father imparting wisdom to his child.

 

For the Jews of the ancient world, Knowledge WAS salvation. In a world where illiteracy was the norm, and where ignorance ruled, knowledge was the one thing that stood between the Jewish people and oblivion.

 

Not only knowledge of how to read and write, but most especially, knowledge of the Law, of what God required of them, and promised them for their faithfulness.

 

This salvific principle was so important, that the Jews personified her as the Lady Wisdom—Sophia, in Greek—through whom the whole world came into being, and through whose mouth and ministry salvation was visited upon the Jews. Sophia was seen as the firstborn of God’s creation, a kind of deity herself, through whom God’s glory was made manifest.

 

In the early Christian tradition, Sophia was revered as well, and in fact, the most glorious basilica in all Christendom is Hagia Sophia in what is now Istanbul.

 

But the Lady Sophia evolved in the Christian imagination. She wasn’t just God’s right-hand gal, she became the second person of the trinity, who became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The man Jesus, in early Christian teaching, is the mouthpiece of the goddess, Sophia, bringing her saving knowledge to the world.

 

This is just the Orthodox version of events—the myth evolved even further in Gnostic thought, and in many other systems, but that is beside the point. What matters to us today is that reverence for Knowledge is an ancient and integral part of our tradition, one that has been neglected and deserves to be resurrected.

 

As I was working on this sermon, it struck me that it isn’t just people that fall into different categories in their approach to God, but that churches do, too. When I think about our parish, it seems pretty obvious that we are not, as a whole, a Bakhti group. We don’t get our spiritual jollies by singing “Oh, How I Love Jesus” around here. And though many of us have a private meditation practice, it is not something we normally do together. And as for serving God by serving others—you know as well as I do that we need to work on that one some more.

 

No, my friends, it’s time to face the music. We are a Jnana parish. Probably this is one of the reasons that I have always felt so much at home here—and maybe you have to, for this very same reason. We approach God largely through reason, through questioning, through intellectual exploration and learning. It is not for nothing that the little group that came forth from St. Clement’s named itself “The Grace Institute for Religious Learning.” Learning, Knowledge, Wisdom has always been at the center of our spiritual life together. And I am heartened to see that it was a virtue and a path to God that was revered by the framers of our Congregational parish, too—so much so that they enshrined it in our parish covenant. As we “labor for the progress of knowledge” we grow in the Spirit, we are faithful to our call, and we liberate others to thinking deeply and critically about their own faith.

 

On this father’s day, I think it appropriate to honor the wisdom of our spiritual fathers—those Jewish sages who taught the love of Wisdom to their children at their feet, the church fathers who saw Jesus as the incarnation of Wisdom herself, the scholars and doctors of the church throughout the ages that have challenged our assumptions and kept theology evolving alongside their cultures, and the fathers (and mothers, of course, but they have their own day) of our own parish, those Congregationalists that met on this spot in 1892 and covenanted together using the same words we do this morning, and those who followed another revered Father—Richard—from St. Clement’s to a new destiny together.

 

Finally, I remember one of the fathers of this congregation, Robert DeVelbiss, a very learned man indeed, who owned more books than his little house could comfortably hold.

 

More than anyone else, Robert challenged me as a preacher, because he knew more than any person I had ever encountered. There quickly developed between us a very friendly competition. Because I wanted to delight and surprise Robert, I worked really hard to discover esoteric little nuggets of Christian history to insert into my sermons. Sometimes he knew about them, but just as often, he didn’t.

 

I remember waiting excitedly to talk to him at coffee hour. He would shuffle up to me and wag his soaked cookie in my face and pronounce his judgment. If he said, “Good sermon today, John,” I knew he had won the game that day. If he said, “I didn’t know about so and so!” Then I held my head a little higher, because I had won the game that day.

 

I still delight in coming up with surprising little nuggets from our weird and wonderful tradition, as well as from other tradition. And it does my heart good that you enjoy them, because, you know, this stuff wouldn’t fly in just any parish. Thank God we’re not just any parish. We have something really unique, here, folks. I can say things from this pulpit that would get me strung up in another church. Stuff that you will never hear in any other church. That makes us special. It means we have something really valuable to offer the world, among many other good things we have to offer.

 

So don’t feel bad if we don’t pray as earnestly as other people, or don’t have a soup kitchen. That’s all good and important stuff, and we can work on that in the future, but let’s also acknowledge the things we’re good at in the here and now, and that stayng faithful to that is one way that we stay faithful to God, and faithful to our call.

 

And I gotta tell you, when I told Eileen that stuff about Jnana, you could just see her whole body relax. She began nodding, recognizing her own path with that relief that you feel when someone finally articulates something you have felt was true for a very long time, but could never put it into words. She reads theology and the mystics voraciously. The pursuit of knowledge is for her a variety of salvation, a path to God, a way of being faithful. And realizing that opened a way before her that bore much fruit in her spiritual life. I think that’s true for a lot of us. So instead of apologizing for what we’re not, why don’t we proclaim the salvation that God has given to us in abundance. Let us pray…

 

God of love and power,

In your infinite wisdom

You sent Jesus Christ to proclaim

Your saving knowledge.

Help us to be true to the yoga,

To the path, that you have set us upon,

To fearlessly purse the progress of knowledge,

in ourelves, in our community, and in the world.

For we ask this in the name of Wisdom made flesh, even Jesus Christ. Amen.

“….WALK IN THE WAY OF CHRIST”

This week I finished reading that contemporary classic of chick travel memoir, EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Call me a hopeless romantic, call me flaming, call me Zha Zha if you must, but I loved it. I totally captivated me. I bought into every step of her journey, and I now count myself as an official convert to armchair tourism.

 

Only one thing bothered me, and that was the fact that she seemed to think that Christianity had nothing to offer her, and so instead she embraced Hinduism. Now, I LOVE Hinduism, it was my concentration at grad school, and truly one of my favorite subjects. But here’s what bugs me—Hinduism is no less patriarchal or unjust or filled with charlatans or fundamentalists as Christianity is. When something is at a distance, you don’t see all the defects. But since in our culture, Christianity is up close, too often people see nothing BUT the defects and reject the whole thing out of hand.

 

It isn’t until people go and immerse themselves in another religion for a few years that they finally realize “Huh, this religion is just as screwed up as the one I left behind.” And of course it is. Religions are HUMAN inventions.

 

But one line from Gilbert’s book really jumped out at me. She said, “Since I don’t believe the Christian dogma, I can’t call myself a Christian.”

 

I know a lot of people who have excluded themselves from spiritual community for this very reason. “Because I can’t swallow this whole messy ball of belief whole, I have to leave the whole thing behind,” As if it WERE one thing, as if it were one monolithic structure that was fleshed out from the very beginning and endured unchanged for millennia.

 

But it’s not. People who have called themselves “Christians” throughout the ages have believed a wide variety of things, and worshipped in wildly disparate ways.

 

I have no problem whatsoever calling myself a Christian—I proclaim in proudly, in fact—in spite of the fact that I do not believe many of the things that the churches throughout the ages have enshrined as dogma.

 

And, in fact, if believing the dogma were a criteria, we wouldn’t be debating whether or not we are a Christian church, the answer would be no!

 

So if it isn’t tied to dogma, what does it mean to be a Christian? I believe it means one thing and one thing only: A person is a Christian if he or she reads the stories of Jesus, and finds there guidance for his or her spiritual life. That’s it. No matter what you think about God, about Jesus, about heaven, hell, or reincarnation, if you find meaning for your journey in the Gospels and you want to call yourself a Christian, you have my blessing. Spiritual orientation, like sexual orientation, is a personal and self-selecting thing, and no one gets to say what you are but you.

 

Our parish covenant, in fact, provides for us a marvelous metaphor for just this sort of identity: “Our purpose is to walk in the way of Christ.” Note it didn’t say, “Our purpose is to accept the Nicene Creed” or “Our purpose is to buy into the Roman Catholic Catechism.” “Our purpose is to walk in the way of Christ.”

 

That is a liberating image. It is also open to many delightful interpretations. It can mean walking the road that Jesus walked first, or points out to us, or it can mean to walk our own road in the same fashion that Jesus did his—with integrity, sincerity, and courage.

 

In fact, in the oldest gospels that we possess, the gospels of Mark and Thomas, Jesus doesn’t ask anyone to believe in him, or god forbid, to worship him. He asks them to follow him, to walk the path that he himself is walking. As a community of faith, this is what we are endeavoring to do as well.

 

What is very interesting is that “The Way” was the name that very early followers of Jesus picked for themselves, long before they were called—or called themselves—Christians. They were simply those who walk the Way. “The Way” is also one way to translate the Chinese word, “Tao,” also known as “the Way of Heaven.”

 

In his short ministry on this earth, Jesus showed us the Way of Heaven, and we who follow him are those who have been inspired to walk that same road, with whatever insights and hardships that journey entails.

 

Last week, Ric preached about God’s will, and he got me thinking. A lot of people talk about figuring out God’s will for their lives, as if there is some master plan, and if I don’t figure out what it is, I’ll miss the boat. But I don’t believe that God cares nearly as much about our DESTINATION, as God does about our CONDUCT on this road. God’s will isn’t that we go to this place or that place, but with how we treat each other along the way.

 

Are we kind? Do we love our enemies? Are we good to those who hate us? Do we bless those who curse us? Do we feed the hungry? Befriend the lonely? Return kind words for angry ones? Do we visit the sick or those in prison?

 

THIS is the Way of Jesus, and no other.

 

The way of Jesus isn’t about what we BELIEVE, but about what we DO. You can believe that Jesus was no more than a fair-to-middlin’ philosopher, but if you strive with everything that is in you to love your neighbor as yourself, then you’re a Christian in my book, if you want to call yourself one.

 

In our church, according to the covenant we profess together, conformity of belief is not a virtue that we pursue—and probably most of us would not consider that a virtue at all.

 

What we do pursue is unity in purpose, in action. We are committed to walking in the Way of Christ, which is not a Way of Dogma, but instead is a Way of Love. It is, in fact, the Way of Heaven. Let us pray…

 

Holy, holy, holy

God of power and might,

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Help us, as we walk our winding ways,

To glorify you with our lives,

Not by what we profess to believe,

Nor by our words, nor even by our identities,

But by the concrete testimony’s of our actions,

Help us to love those we encounter every day,

Especially those who are hardest to love.

And let us not weary on this path,

But follow it to its end,

An eternity of communion and intimacy with Thee,

For we ask this in the Spirit of him

Who blazed this trail, even Jesus Christ. Amen.