Serving up spiritual nourishment for every follower of Jesus
Happy Feast of the Ascension of our Lord! This is a church liturgical celebration that often gets lost because it takes place during the week, but also because people sometimes don’t understand why it is important. The feast is profound because it brings together a number of different story lines in the Gospel, Continue reading “Ascension: Meditating on the Story”
A good definition of discipleship might be Finding God in All Things. This helpful insight didn’t come from me. It came from Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and he didn’t make it up either. He was just giving helpful wording to what Christians have done since the beginning. In the Scriptures, God makes it clear that he doesn’t live in temples or buildings made by human hands. He himself is the one who made everything, and instead of God residing in places, all places reside in God! God is an awesome being. God holds all things, and is beyond all things. Psalm 139 puts it well:
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the realm of the dead, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
— Psalm 139
There is no place we can go, no action we can do, no emotion we can feel that is apart from God. Our root faith of Judaism has much to teach us about how to live more deeply in this truth. A central virtue for Jewish faith is to sanctify the daily. We only spend an hour or so in church a week. But that doesn’t mean that God isn’t present to us in the other 167 hours of the week. In fact, to have a deep relationship with God, we have to know him more than the 0.5% that church represents in our week.
We need to walk with God not just on Sunday morning, but in our eating, in our working, in the decisions we make. We need to learn how to love God in our quiet, and in our business, in our joys and in our griefs. How do we do this? For today, I want to highlight an image.
One of the great images that Jesus gives us comes from the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-23). In this story, a farmer sows seed liberally, indeed wastefully. The seed goes everywhere. It lands on good soil and bad soil. Some of the seeds are eaten up by birds, some are choked out by weeds. Others don’t have enough soil, so they grow shallow roots and wither away. Some fall on good soil and there is an abundant harvest.
Jesus uses this metaphor to talk about the human heart. The seed is the word of God, and these ‘words’ are spread everywhere. He is not talking about the word in terms of the scriptures, but a bigger understanding of the ‘word’ as the presence of God in our world. These ‘words’ do not come like the dramatic presence that Israel saw in lighting and thunder at Mt. Sinai. Rather, these ‘words’ are hundreds of smaller graces that God uses to remind us of his love and presence in the world. These ‘words’ are given to encourage and transform our lives so that we live more and more like Jesus.
This story tells us that God is spreading his presence ‘wastefully.’ It is everywhere. There is nowhere that God is not spreading his ‘words.’ Our call is to listen. But we have to have ears that actually listen and eyes that actually see what God is doing. How do we do that? We nurture the soil of our heart. That is the subject for the next article.
As an adult, my biggest learning about Christian faith is that it is a whole way of life. It is no accident that the early Christians were called followers of The Way.
When I was a kid growing up in the church, I received A LOT of biblical teaching. This focused on God, salvation, atonement, incarnation, sanctification and redemption. Some of the teaching was great; some was much less great. As a child, I missed how the story of God enriched and upheld the story of my own life and gave me meaning and purpose. I learned a lot of facts about God, but I didn’t know God. I didn’t learn how to be a disciple.
When I came back to faith as an adult, it started with an encounter. Through the Catholic writer Thomas Merton, I met Jesus again for the first time, and he ‘looked’ so different than the Jesus I knew growing up. His teaching was challenging and compelling. I saw a vision for the kingdom of God that hit me deeply. It was a vision of a community marked by vigorous peace, love, justice and faith bringing good works and faith to those in need.
Meditating on Jesus’ death, I saw a profundity in the love of God I had never seen before, the miracle of transforming connection with God. In his resurrection, I saw a vision of a world renewed in the love of God. In the Eucharist, in the soft taste of bread, and the sweet taste of the wine, I tasted and felt the deep presence of God within me. All of this stayed with me long after I left the church building.
I found that questions were being answered, and new ones were emerging. At the same time, I was becoming more attentive to other people in a way I wasn’t before. Going to church in the inner city, I started to see human need in a way that I had found easy to ignore before. I wanted to talk to people about my faith and ask them questions about things that were hard for me.
As I started to look at the intricacy of nature as an example of God’s handiwork, I saw beauty where I hadn’t before. As I read scripture, I was meeting Jesus again and again. But I was still dealing with my perpetual weight issues. I still procrastinated and lost my temper at stupid things. I forgot to do things I said I would do. All of that became part of my prayer. I grew to love the quiet time in church before people came. I looked forward to singing, something I had never really payed attention to before.
For me, discipleship happened accidentally. I met Jesus, and he has been changing me for the better ever since. And I am so grateful for this path. May I walk it every day of my life (or at least most days.😊)
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
— Jesus giving his followers a mission and a purpose (Matthew 28:18-20)
The 21st century is an incredibly exciting time to be a Christian. This is not to say that there are not huge challenges. Even before the current pandemic changed the way we do everything, we were dealing with institutional decline and the rapid change in how we live. But from those challenges come amazing opportunities.
Perhaps the most exciting part of being a Christian today is that we have gotten a lot of clarity about what is and is not essential to living our faith. For instance, I believe we have gained perspective over 2000 years of Christian practice about both the dangers of clericalism and dogmatism, as well as the dangers that come from having no structure and no beliefs. We also have a tremendous amount of scholarship available alongside new insights about Christian history and scripture. Because we are far more ecumenical, we have the freedom to draw from a wide variety of scriptural prayer practices.
But most importantly, we are relearning the importance of making disciples. It is clear that Jesus really only gave the early church one task: to make disciples. What is a disciple? The word really just means a student. But this is not like the student in a classroom we think of today. To be a student in Jesus’ time wasn’t about getting information about the world. It was about forming one’s whole life around a teacher. You became a student because you thought that the teacher obviously knew something about life and how to live well. Being a student meant learning how to live like the teacher.
Here is something to consider: why did Jesus send his followers to make disciples rather than to build churches? The answer to this question is the key to what being a Christian in the 21st century will be about.
What will faith look like in the middle of the 21st century? Even now, we see faith growing to be less reliant on having an institutional church. There will still be an institutional church in some form, but I believe that it will no longer act as a gate keeper for the faith. Instead, the institution will be more a resource Continue reading “Worship and Service: Two Sides of the Same Love”