Singleness of Heart

Luke 9:51-62 

I’ve been feeling crunched for time a lot recently. Anyone else?

There’s so much to do; so much that is important.

Like the planning that we are doing in our RenewalWorks process to create a culture of spiritual growth here at Trinity; related work I’m doing to help promote spiritual growth and discipleship in our diocese; working with the Vestry to start plans for a future capital campaign that will make our buildings stronger, safer, and hopefully more accessible;
nurturing friendships and family relationships; keeping up with the information and action needed to be a good citizen; worship; celebrating and grieving at need with all of you; the emails that move all that along;

and, of course managing healthy meals, clean clothes, and the vacuuming that never seems quite done….

Except for the vacuuming, I love most of it. But despite the longer sunlight, there just aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week.

So I’ve spent some time over the last month or so trying to sort out priorities. Maybe if I can just decide what’s most important, it’ll make it easier to figure out how to manage my time, my energy.
And after a month or so of reflection, pro and con lists, consultations with friends, retreat, spiritual discernment…well, it all still seems important.

I know I’m not the only one who lives in a world where everything is important. Where too many things – many of them good, life-giving things, but not all! – demand our time and attention, energy and heart – more of each than we seem to have in a day. 

So I am not all that happy with Jesus, today. He seems to have no sympathy for all these important things that you and I have to do.
“Let the dead bury their dead” he says to someone who has to take care of their responsibilities to a dead or dying father.
Caring about your family shuts you out of the kingdom of God, he seems to say to another person. And to the enthusiastic volunteer who pledges to follow Jesus where ever he goes, Jesus says: “You’re not going to like camping.”

So much for the welcoming Jesus I go looking for in scripture.
This actual Jesus is tough.

Today, Jesus makes clear that wanting to follow him, to love like Jesus and be loved by him; longing to be close to God, to share in God’s healing, generous work, doesn’t remove all the barriers in our way.

We may still have trouble, like that village of Samaritans, with the fact that some of Jesus’ religious attitudes and priorities don’t fit with our own.

We may find it hard to share with anyone, even God, our hurts and scars, our failures and griefs.

We may have other holy obligations, like the person whose father needs burying, obligations we are called to by empathy and justice and what’s just right. We certainly still have to care for and about our families. And some of us (me), if not all of us, may struggle with abandoning the comfort of our predictable days and nights.

Today, Jesus seems to have no sympathy for multitaskers. Or for those of us who don’t have too much to do, but feel like we’re not ready to take on all that God may ask, or that God has to offer.  Jesus seems so inflexible about all the important relationships and the natural demands on our time that many of us are juggling, even as we try to follow Jesus.
In fact, Jesus wants all of us, not just the part of me that feels ready, the part of you that feels presentable, shareable, and not too busy right now. Jesus wants all the uncertain or ugly or busy or struggling bits of us; wants us whole.

Jesus is telling these folks on the road to Jerusalem – telling you and me – that you cannot be a part time disciple.
Can not have a relationship with Jesus or with God that is part-time, secondary, or even one among many priorities. Two thousand years ago, Jesus obviously already knew that thing I just learned this winter in our RenewalWorks workshops – that being busy is the single toughest barrier to growing in relationship with God.
So Jesus tries to show these disciples that relationship with God, following Jesus, has to be a twenty-four-seven, whole-self commitment. Like breathing.

I have had that realization more than once over the course of my life.

Some of those times, the realization that God is not a part-time relationship has inspired me: I’ve been energized to pray more, to throw my whole heart into this relationship, to improve my focus on God. (I’m not precisely competitive, but I do like to excel…)

And other times, I’ve immediately wanted to give up. To quit the whole Jesus business. I have enough full-time jobs already, thank you. How can I add one more thing??

How can I add one more full time thing to so much that I’m already trying to prioritize, to manage, to keep up with? When it’s already impossible to have that “balanced” life all the blogs and magazines tell me to have.

And Jesus doesn’t have any give to him. Not today, anyway. Today – most of the time, all of the time, actually – Jesus is all or nothing.

And that might really be good news.

Good news for an overscheduled, priority-juggling world. Because putting God first; committing ourselves full-time and full-self to what Jesus is up to here and now, in our hearts and lives and world, is one thing that will bring all the other things into balance.

We don’t have to stop loving our families, fulfilling our responsibilities, nurturing our friendships, answering emails, working out, calling our Congresspeople, putting dinner on the table, folding the socks or excelling in our jobs. We just have to stop doing those things instead of following Jesus. Stop letting those things crowd out the yearning for closeness with God, and the love of God that God has planted in our hearts.

The trouble with what those would-be disciples in today’s story say to Jesus is not that they have other things to do. It’s that they say, “let me just do this first.” Jesus is inviting us, calling us – no, insisting on dragging us – into that whole-life, whole-self closeness of God which he himself has. A closeness that makes it natural to say, “It is time to take up my family responsibilities, but first, as I do this, let me rest in the presence of God.” Or “It’s time to manage this mass of work tasks, but first, while I do this, let me recharge myself in the purpose of God.”

When I am in that God-first, whole-self place in my mind and heart, it is easier to balance all the opportunities and responsibilities of my life; it is easier to keep up and clearer to prioritize.
I’d like to live like that all the time, so I see why Jesus wants us to realize and rejoice that you can’t be a part-time disciple; or live in partial relationship with God.
I just, well, forget sometimes. Until Jesus, or someone like Jesus, reminds me.

Until Jesus reminds me how much God wants to give us what we pray for at the end of our Eucharist today: the strength and courage to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart.

Today, every day, Jesus is inviting us into that glad singleness of heart: demanding that we plunge into that focused, whole-hearted, relationship with God that can handle all the fears and hurts and failures we live through; that joyful, complete, relationship where we hold nothing back. Jesus is demanding that we plunge into the purpose of God now, before we’re ready, not as soon as we have time. Inviting us to dive completely into that purpose of God that can balance and clarify all the tasks and responsibilities and information and demands that fill our everydays.

Jesus wants all of us, all of each of us, so that Jesus can fill and strengthen us with that divine purpose; so that Jesus can heal and renew all of us with that holy love that fills his own heart.

And I know that no matter how busy I am, I’ll always want that.  Don’t you?

Invited In

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; John 16:12-15

How do you usually get an invitation these days?

More often than not in my life, an invitation is a few words; a text message: “Hey, what are you doing for lunch?” Or a Facebook post or an email about an event, with the assumption that if the creators can just get the information about what’s happening in front of me, I’ll want to join in. 

And most of the invitations I isssue go out by email, come to think of it.

I also get an occasional beautifully printed wedding or anniversary invitation, or a phone call from a friend who would like me to visit, outlining plans and hopes and how good it will be to spend time together.

There are a wide variety of ways that you and I get invited to events and occasions; a wide variety of ways we get invited into relationship – as many ways to invite one another, in fact, as there are means of communication between one person and others.

And God uses all of them.

Including some that aren’t very usual these days, like the town crier. We heard about that this morning: Does not Wisdom call and understanding raise her voice? On the high hills and by the road, at the crossroads and the gates: in the town hall and the mall and the coffee shop and the internet?

Wisdom is trying to get your attention everywhere. Every possible place that people go, every kind of communication: Wisdom is there, calling out an invitation to all living people to enter into relationship with God.

The author of the Book of Proverbs pictures Wisdom as a person, and as an aspect of God known and distinct from the beginning of creation, as a co-worker and friend of God, sharing in the planning of the universe and celebrating the delight of armadillos and azaleas and riptides and human beings.

Centuries after Proverbs was written, Christians would start identifying the person of Wisdom with both the Holy Spirit and with Jesus, separately and together, but the most distinct, consistent feature of the portrait of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs is her invitation into true, healthy, holy, enduring relationship with God.

Wisdom issues that invitation to all living people, every single one of us created by God, without exception, without regard to qualifications or pre-existing relationships.

In a spirit of celebration and delight, Wisdom goes high and low and uses print and mail, text and email, TV and radio, Facebook or Twitter, even LinkedIn or Match.com, to invite every single one of us into honest, faithful, wholehearted, lasting relationship with God.

Jesus does the same thing, by the way, all his life long, with his teaching and parables and miracles, and his living example, right up to and through and after death. Jesus keeps on inviting his disciples, Gentiles and strangers and outcasts and you and me, all into deep, truth-filled, transformative relationship with God. In fact, Jesus invites us explicitly to imitate and to share his own relationship with God, and promises that the Spirit of God is going to be here with us to keep leading us into – or deeper into – that relationship with God that is just like Jesus’ relationship with “the Father”, just like our relationship with Jesus, because they are one and the same… and here the whole relationship invitation gets circular and swirly and we arrive at the heart of the relationship and the theological theme of today.

The theological theme of Trinity tells us that God – Jesus, Spirit, Wisdom, Creator, Father, Son, One, All – God keeps inviting us into this central relationship because relationship is central to who God is.

Two thousand years after Jesus, even more centuries after God’s people first began to describe the Spirit of God, or the Wisdom of God, as the active presence of God, you and I have inherited the vocabulary of “the Holy Trinity”, of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” to describe the way that God relates to God, as revealed through the collective human experience of God. We’ve inherited, and we regularly repeat, a basic story of God: Almighty, creative, and unified, who is also Jesus in a particular time and place, distinct from and entirely unified with God Eternal, who is also the Holy Spirit, the force and effect of the presence of God when we don’t know how else to describe God.

We call that story “The Creed,” and recite it often as if it’s a collection of facts and stated beliefs, when it’s actually more of an attempt to describe what can’t be explained: to hear color, see sound, or measure and weigh love.

But it still conveys, somehow, the truth that we have learned through thousands of years of experience with God: that from the very beginning to the very end, God’s whole being is in relationship.

And the story of our faith is the story of being invited into that relationship, to grow closer and closer to the heart of God, whether we first encounter God as Jesus of Nazareth, as the dancing, electric wind or deeply quiet voice of the Holy Spirit, or as the eternal and all-powerful Creator of all things.

Some of us – probably a relative few – find the logical impossibility of three-in-one a natural understanding of God. Some spiritual extroverts may revel in the confusion and crowding of all the persons of God into one relationship.

Many of us, though, make sense of that relationship mostly by knowing the “persons” of God one at a time – by studying and following and imitating Jesus, perhaps. Or by worshiping and praying to the all-powerful, eternal and original, creator or father face of God. Or by seeking and following the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the faceless, fiery and gentle movement of God in our lives as individuals and communities. All of them continually inviting us to grow closer to Godself.

Any way we begin our relationship with God, any way we grow in that relationship, the truth of that relationship is known not in linear logic, but in experience and story, in the language of the heart.

At the top of your program today there’s a picture of that truth. It’s one way – though hardly the only way – to envision the story we tell of the God who invites us in. Three curves reach out and swirl back toward the center, three different ways of encountering and knowing God, all inviting us in, all in motion, none of it linear, all of it rooted in and pointing toward the center. And at that center, the root of all, and the connection of all: love.

The image you see there is one you’ll start to see more often over the summer and into the fall, to represent this congregation, developed in consultation with the Vestry and staff and a few other leaders. The Vestry liked the sense of growth and movement, and the heart at the center as an image of ourselves, of our relationship with God and one another.

You yourself may not see what I just described in that image. You may see more. You may see less. Someone else will see something entirely different than you do. That’s  not unlike our encounter with God the Trinity: the same true thing, experienced differently from time to time and person to person.

Behind and beyond whatever you see, whatever I see, whatever we draw or say or do, is the same original and eternal invitation: the voice of Wisdom, the voice of God, calling out to each of us, to everyone we don’t know, and to all of us together, to enter into relationship with God, to join ourselves with the heart of the true, abiding, faithful and transformative relationship of God, with who God is, now and forever. 

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Comfort Zone

Acts 2:1-21

How many of you hear the Pentecost story – this story of disciples set alight, telling the story of God in languages they don’t know, the public, noisy, fiery spread of the gospel – and just can’t wait to be lit up by the Spirit and jump in?

Excellent. I think God has a use for you!

And who hears this story and thinks it sounds thrilling – for someone else to do? Exciting, sure, but not easy; not natural for you, even distinctly uncomfortable?

That’s usually a majority among communities that have been Christian for a while and have gotten comfortable with our faith the way it is. For those of us who don’t find our own faith story startling and new. It’s not surprising if many of us here this morning find it hard to get out of our comfort zone.

But it might not actually have to be that hard.

This Pentecost story is also very much a story of God moving right in to people’s comfort zones and meeting us there.

Think about the wonder and amazement of the crowds. “Aren’t these people Galileans? How on earth are we hearing them speak each in our own native language?” Hearing in the language of my birth, my childhood, the language of home.

Many of the people in Jerusalem at that time would have spoken Greek, the common language of the Roman Empire. They would have understood perfectly well if the disciples had proclaimed God’s deeds of power in that common language.  

But the Holy Spirit lights up the disciples to speak to them each in the language of home. In their first language, most natural and comfortable.

When the Spirit wants us to listen, we’ll hear in the language of our hearts.

And the Spirit isn’t grabbing the attention of strangers who’ve never heard of God before. These are “devout Jews,” immigrants who had moved to Jerusalem from places near and far to be close to the center of their faith, to live more deeply into their relationship with God.

The Spirit lights up the disciples to speak to them about the deeds of the God whom they already know; already want to know better. Peter interprets the experience for them using scripture they already know, familiar words from the prophet Joel, a vision they may have been longing to see become real.

The Spirit gives them – us! – what they and we are already looking for; opens up our understanding with the truths we already know, the stories we already love. Invites us to grow in the relationship with God that we already have, however devoted or distant it feels right now.

The Pentecost experience – that experience of being filled with, lit up by, the Holy Spirit, may not really be so hard.
God really does come to us right in our comfort zones, really does speak the language of our hearts, really does teach us to find what we are looking for in stories we already know, even love.

God comes to us within our comfort zones, and the Holy Spirit lights us up so that we don’t get stagnant there.

So that we don’t get stuck, and lose the love, the joy, and the freshness of the miraculous story and powerful love that come to find us where we need God, where we already are.

Because God wants to get close to us in trust; not paralyze us with fear.

It’s true that when the Holy Spirit moves into my comfort zone, or yours, that safe, familiar space gets stirred up. Sometimes it’s the noise of a storm wind, the shocking brightness of a living flame around you – like the disciples felt that first Pentecost, while they were sitting together in the comfortable, holy space they had made for themselves by prayer and celebration, by telling each other the stories and reminding themselves of Jesus’ promise to send that Spirit to help them, to defend and encourage them. The bright, noisy Spirit stirs them up to share the comfort of their community; share their assurance of God’s promises; share their favorite Jesus stories with people who were waiting to hear them in the language of their hearts.

Those disciples don’t have to invent anything new, plan an “elevator speech”, a compelling sales pitch, or find the perfect words of comfort or inspiration, either. Those lit-up disciples simply tell the story they already know, the story of Jesus that they love.

Peter tells the story he already knows – and knows that his audience knows – the vision of Joel, the story of the promises of God that we’re all already longing for.

It’s an expanded comfort zone, all of a sudden, for those disciples, of course. That’s what the Holy Spirit does to us; for us.

The Spirit doesn’t generally drag us unwilling into the streets, knocking on doors and forcing salvation on suspicious strangers. Instead, God comes to meet us inside our comfort zone, and widens and deepens the story we already know and love so that we can recognize and receive from God what we’ve already been longing for.

And then the Holy Spirit expands that zone. Makes your comfort zone, or mine, a place that reaches out to comfort others with what you or I already love and know, and trust with all our hearts.

On Pentecost, we remember and renew the covenant of our own baptism as a way to return to the deep trust of what we already know. To remind ourselves in the words of the creed that we know God as Father and Creator; that we know Jesus as human and divine, as a teller of stories and a story we tell; that we already know the Holy Spirit who fills us with life and makes the connections that create community.

Baptism also reminds us to live in that story, to let the beloved story of God shape our daily lives, our comfort zones. We promise again to take comfort in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers, the promise of God’s forgiveness, the challenge of God’s hope for the world in a daily, regular, life-shaping way.

We’ll promise to proclaim Good News the way the disciples did – with the story we already know, the love we already feel, sharing the language of our hearts with the language of someone else’s heart.

We’re also hearing from our RenewalWorks team this weekend. They have planned a lot of ways to refresh and deepen your comfort zone with God, to help us see all the room for God to work that we already have in our hearts, receive the gift that we are already longing for from God.

The spiritual growth we are embarking on as a congregation, and the growth we’re each invited to as individuals, is not necessarily a leap into the unknown or uncomfortable.

That’s why you’re seeing an invitation to refresh your familiarity with God’s story this summer; to get more familiar with the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, the books that are about the story we love.

To grow spiritually, to be disciples lit from within by the Holy Spirit, might not be as hard as it sometimes sounds.

It might already be within your comfort zone; it certainly grows from the language of your heart, the stories you already know, and the longing you already have for God.

I know that the Holy Spirit loves to meet us in that place of trust, and light up our hearts, two thousand years ago in Jerusalem, or here and now, today, so that we keep falling in love with the old story; so that the story stays fresh for us, and that we tell it, not only to others, but to ourselves, with deep and joyful love.

I love to tell the story, for those who know it best

Seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest;

And when in scenes of glory I sing the new, new song,

’Twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.

I love to tell the story. Twill be my theme in glory

to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.