James 1:19-24
19 Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry. 20 This is because an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness. 21 Therefore, with humility, set aside all moral filth and the growth of wickedness, and welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.
22 You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves. 23 Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. 24 They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. (CEB)
“Tales of the Five People You Meet in (the) Heaven(s): Stories of Fellow Travelers,” Week Five
It isn’t an individual flight this time. It is the story of another minister, a story that helped inspire this entire sermon series. Last summer, a devotional written by the United Church of Christ pastor Rev. Lillian Daniel made the rounds on my Facebook online newsfeed, as friend after friend of mine breathlessly commented on the boldness of how this devotional was sticking it to the “spiritual but not religious” folks out there. Here’s what Rev. Daniel wrote:
"On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo. Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?
Like people who go to church don't see God in sunsets! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories, and our deep tradition.
Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.
Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church."
This is it—the final Sunday of our sermon series! Today marks the fifth and final week of this sermon series that we are exploring together during the church season of Lent, which is traditionally meant to be a time of repentance, prayer, and confession for Christians the world over. It is, then, a journey of inner discovery, and of understanding anew the amazing power of God’s grace. But unlike Christ in the wilderness, it is not a journey of discovery that we are required to make alone. Indeed, many of us thrive on journeys only when we have a companion to travel with—and so I’ve created this sermon series, “Tales of the Five People You Meet in (the) Heaven(s),” a play on the title of Mitch Albom’s 2003 book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” Based on my own experiences of travel when the person sitting next to me suddenly learns that I am a Christian cleric, the first week’s story, of the mothers who prevented their college-bound daughters from sitting in the same row as the shady, sketchy fellow (that’s me!), was a story where my vocation was not revealed, but in the stories of weeks two and three it was, to a Seattle-area schoolteacher and to an aging Eugene beatnik, then last week to an off-duty airline pilot and devout Pentecostal Christian, and today…well, I suppose from my colleagues!
Consider it a glimpse into the obviously warped mind of your pastor! We as pastors are walking, talking representations of that thing that has caused so much anger and consternation, yet offers people the vital tools of fellowship and community and accountability in their spiritual journeys with God—the church. And, like the church, we have our own shortcomings. If you have come to church…this church…looking for perfection, then, I’m afraid, I will let you down. The only question will be when, and how.
In the spiritual-but-not-religious world, that isn’t a concern. God never lets you down, because, I have to think, God in many such scenarios is simply an idealized version of yourself—God is an ideal Eric, or an ideal Bob. We begin to worship, if not quite ourselves, a version of ourselves. It becomes self-involved navel-gazing, and our spirituality suffers because of it.
James knew this—hear again what he said: “They are like those who look at themselves in a mirror, for they look at themselves, and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.” What he is saying is that we cannot be trusted to hold up a mirror to ourselves, because we would only hold that mirror up to the most attractive parts of ourselves, not our problem areas, not those areas that call out for improvement and growth. We forget what our whole selves look like, and it is the whole self that God demands of us—the good along with the bad. The ugly along with the beautiful. God demands the exact same of this world that He created—as Lillian Daniel conveys, we are more apt to find God in the sunsets, in the beaches, in the mountaintops, but what about finding God in the less pristine parts of nature? In the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? In Yucca Mountain? We are not only holding up a mirror to ourselves and seeing only the things we like, we are trying to do the exact same thing to God’s creation—we hold the mirror up to the world, and we decide to see God only in what we happen to like. We hold the mirror up to each other, to God's children, and decide to see God only in what we happen to like about them.
And so we treat the church the exact same way. We see in the church only those things that already confirm our beliefs and thoughts about it. If we think that the church is sexist, then when some bombastic church leader gets on television and says that women should stay silent in church, it confirms that bias. If we think that the church has a political agenda, then when we hear a pastor make some outlandish statement in support of this or that presidential candidate, then it cements that perception. We look at the church, and we see what we want to see. What worries me the most, though, is that we do it to people—we see only what we want to see in people, and sometimes, if we don’t like that person, what we DON’T want to see in them is God!
I see it all the time, in how these strangers, and many, many more, have in turn treated me—that, as soon as the cat was out of the bag, as soon as they knew that I am a pastor, their entire demeanor and attitude towards me changes, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. I wasn’t Eric anymore, I was whatever the church had been to them, and, I gotta be honest with you—that’s an immense burden to carry, and I don’t really think that I am up to it. I cannot speak for the entire church, none of us can. The way the church has hurt people in the past—I meet spiritual-but-not-religious people who assume that I must be out to hurt them as well, or that I only want to be able to control them, to tell them what to do and give them lots of rules to follow. All of those things they are worried that I will do, they violate exactly what James is telling us to do—be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger—but they are what I, and we, are all associated with now! And so we turn people off from church, and become unable to fulfill one of the greatest spiritual callings ever—to support and guide and challenge one another in a way that you simply cannot do by yourself.
And believe me, there are times when I think to myself that it would be so much easier if I did every single one of those things in this stereotype, if I was quick to judge, if I preached angry sermons, if I fought fire with fire. But then I stop, and I recall the pilot, and the tattooed Eugene native, and the teacher, and the mother, and I realize that all of them, and all of you, deserve a community of love, not of fear.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
March 25, 2012
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