Bishops' Blog

I Want to Talk This Morning About ...

I want to talk this morning about ‘spirituality.’ It is surely a popular topic, one that a wider audience seeks than those who go to church, for sure.  It is worth noting at the outset that it is a modern word. At the time of the Reformation it meant the domain of bishops instead of kings, in other words all this, which is certainly not what we mean by ‘spirituality’ today.  What do people mean?  What books would you find if you typed the word into an amazon book search? Some would have an Eastern tilt- quiet, silence, even forgetfulness (which I am getting better and better at).  Nothing wrong with all that, but it’s what Christians try to do before they pray. In other cases it would pertain to an experience, perhaps of the vastness of the world, or its mysteriousness, or a surprising sense of calm, or a sensations of a new kind of awareness. Again nothing wrong with all that. But what are we to make of these? Where do they come from and where do they go? On our own they offer no answer.  Spirituality as our culture thinks of it amounts to a big question mark, though questions are good!  Finally we can take note of the fact that spirituality makes us wonder how to put all this together with our bodies. Maybe spirituality indicates a full night’s sleep, or genetics, since it is after all a sensation, but how do these parts fit together, body, mind, imagination?  We are left to wonder, which after all is a good start. Still, it all could go off the rails. These days everyone is interested in AI, and the story behind it is that we are maturing and outgrowing our bodies, soon we can digitize everything including our spiritualities, and don’t worry you will barely feel a thing…Enough to make one want to unplug it all and head for the hills…

At this point, I want to offer a different story, a specifically Christian one, with the help of a famous eastern orthodox theologian named Alexander Schmemann, if you are interested you could get your hands on a book called For the Life of the World, which is of course a phrase from our Lord in this Sunday’s Gospel.  In the beginning, we humans were made by God to enjoy him and have access to his blessed presence. But we were not made to be angels, pure intelligence without bodies. No, we are embodied creatures made for God. The missing piece of the puzzle was the created world around us. We could pick any fruit of the garden, and it would remind us of Him. The world was made to be enjoyed, a world created like us, but whose fruits whispered in their sweetness of the Creator.  We had a real but indirect access, so long as we recalled that we were not the Creator himself, hence the rule about not touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Beatitude involved both access and boundary.  Before the fall all the world was, to Adam and Eve, like a sacrament, something that wasn’t God but invited you into His tangible presence. After the fall, instead of Garden’s fruits, we devour one another in order to satisfy our egos.

At this point let’s take a step, for a moment, back to our first question. Think of a sunset over a lake in the evening, and the brief moment when it became more than a tranquil scene, a moment that borrowed a touch of eternity, and awoke a longing for which you don’t in yourself have the words. A sacramental moment: such was the whole world, for our first ancestors, according to God’s intention for us, until we went and spoiled things.

The world as a sacrament is something we have tastes and glimpses of. Now someone might retort in this way- sounds like pantheism, in which we make of the world a god, though the true God is never a thing.  And they would be right. We can turn the experience of the world into just such an idol, as our original forebears did. The taste and glimpse are not themselves God, are they?  Make the world a god, and we are really, once more, making ourselves a god! A great deal of what passes for spirituality is really some kind of pantheism of other, and that isn’t what we believe, though you can see how it is a bread crumb on the way to the true answer- what is what that orthodox theologian was on about!

“the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

So now we come to the answer, which we find in our Gospel reading .from John 6. The linchpin is the incarnation of Jesus the Son of God. We humans have no answer to the conundrum of brokenness and spirituality. But God breaks the impasse, and gives the answer in his Son. He has entered the created order which He made, and which He never abandoned, though we cannot equate that order with him. Jesus the linchpin, and the centerpiece, Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and bodily resurrection changing our relation to the created order of which we are a part.

So, it is not the sacraments themselves that take us back to the garden, exiled though we be- it is Jesus bodily risen, who reaches out his own presence to us in Word and Sacrament, really literally bodily spiritually. That being said, you can see what the sacramental life is meant to be for us, a restoration of that relation to God through his creation, for us who are also His creatures- bread, wine ,oil, water, hands, rings, and so forth.  Ours is the deepest and most mysterious of spiritualities, and the most material of religions too, as the great Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said.

Of course as soon as we think it is the sacrament itself, and not Jesus here with us ‘in with and under’ it, as the Lutherans, we do astray. The Church catholic will not save you, for it is human all too human, like us, but Jesus who has promised in his reliability to be there, reaching out in human word and physical sacrament, He can, and has promised so to do.

It has become popular to talk about evangelical catholicity these days, which I reckon is an advance from the days in the history of Anglicanism when the two sides were busy suing each other. Evangelical catholic is a good definition of our tradition, confusing though the expression may be. But what isn’t confusing is that the words together point to our true spirituality, for ‘catholic’ means sacramental, creaturely, and ‘evangelical’ means ‘so long as you remember that Jesus the incarnate and bodily risen there is reaching out to you.’

So this morning, with this verse of the Gospel in particular, we celebrate a spirituality as wide as all creation, as earthy as food, but a spirituality as narrow as this one figure Jesus, himself the door through which we creatures are herded into eternal pastures. Amen.

Metropolitan Dream Center Prayer Breakfast

I want to thank Margaret for her kind invitation. She is obviously a brave person, and in many ways. Look, she’s gone and invited another of these Episcopalians to speak. Because we come with a lot of baggage. I mean, literally. Forget all those stone churches with leaky roofs, iffy AC, and plumbing back to the horse-and-buggy era. There’s a lot more baggage in the bargain- Cassock, cotta, surplice, chasuble, maniple, stole, tippet, rochet, chimere, cope, beretta, mitre, purficator, burse, corporal, chalice, aumbry, dalmatic, zachetta, mosetta (this part sounds like Italian dinner), thurible, vimpa (even I had to look that one up!), monstrance, chrism, fermentum, gradual, epiclesis, no mas! we get the idea! To be sure, you can be Church without any of it- Word, people, water, bread and wine, faith- and you are good to go? Why do we do all those add ons? Old fashioned? Retro? I am the wrong person to answer the question, but I can say this- the add-ons says this- this is special, this is different from the everyday, this is holy, take your shoes off here, keep silence for a moment. In a world full of the strife of tongues, here is truth, a world that sometimes feels like a hall of mirrors, here is clarity. Forget the hardware, but remember this- the Word brings its own authority, and we mark that, on every side, with exalted song, with walls, with silence, a thousand worshippers or two or three, there the Spirit will be found, there is authority, of the kind that makes us not constrained, but free!  All of this brings me back to Margaret! Each branch of the Church has its own way of raising up leadership. But what we all believe is that real leadership calls on us to open our ears to the Word, points to Jesus who is the Word, points to him in his or her life of self-sacrifice and humility and hope. And in doing that, in a way surprising to the world, is found real authority, that is what I have always seen in Margaret James, the kind of authority that shines outward from the heart, which I think makes her my right reverend bishop! Amen!

On to my task, which begins with thinking together about II Chronicles 7, containing as it does our verse this morning: ‘reach up to heaven in order to bring it to earth.’ But first, what was happening in that chapter? Talk about fancy and impressive worship with not a little baggage! The First Temple, built by David’s son Solomon, in the holy city of Jerusalem, on Mount Zion- king, priests, Levites, musicians, with trumpets and doubtless drums and tambourines,  and a vast host of worshippers, right out the door and half way to Egypt! And then the mind boggling part- twenty two thousand cattle sacrifices, along with one hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goals, a river of blood, the sky thick with a cloud of smoke, the fire for the offering from heaven itself, and then the feast- talk about barbeque!  And none of this 55 minutes and we’re back in our cars! The celebration went on for a full seven days unceasing! Puts the Episcopalians to shame!  God's voice was heard in his word, and he promised that they could come to that place and lift up their distress and they would be heard. They could confess their sins and be forgiven. They could count on God renewing their covenant in his mercy when their hearts had grown cold.  There was a place where they were sure to find God, where they would be heard, forgiven, renewed. Lest we be too elated, Brothers and Sisters, the last words of the chapter from the Lord are a sharp shift.  II Chronicles 7 is full of worship, wonder, and benediction.  But at the end of the chapter, the Word from God becomes one of judgment- a day will come when, because of sin, this spectacular temple will be a pile of rubble, a byword to passersby.  We cannot help but think about Jesus’s prediction that not one stone would remain on stone, and the way those passing by the cross, soon thereafter, would revile him.  The Lord is preparing us to think about the Temple in a very different way

I have with me an illustration, thanks to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth.  Now modern art has a lot to do with human struggle in this modern time we live in, when many think they can live without God, or have a bone to pick with him, or think we make up our own truth. Modern art often describes very eloquently the confusion in which the children of this age live.  But one sculpture caught my eye, a ladder from ground level up to the upper windows of the museum (by Martin Puryear in 1996). It is rickety, not an easy climb. Does it stop at the ceiling? Is it hopeful or doomed? Is it going up or down?  Do we build our own, or can it be found? Predictably, the artist is not giving you an easy answer!  But a ladder to the sky, that is what we human beings long for, what every religion and every ancient myth sought. A ladder to the sky is what sacrifice seeks to be- Zion the place where the sky parts and the voice, the presence, the promise, the fire, the blessing, all come down.  And where the blessing comes down, the earth, otherwise a desert, blooms and comes to life.  Sacrifice up, then blessing comes down- so we humans might think.

You can tell where I am going, the first chapter of the Gospel of John, Jacob’s ladder, the opening to heaven, where angels ascend and descend, where? Upon the Son of Man, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Every promise given to Solomon and the people of God fulfilled, but in a surprising new way!  For us as Christians, we start with God’s own Son descending to us, born in a stable, refugee, man of sorrows, the crucified who counts his death to the credit of us his betrayers! Jacob’s ladder, but coming down to us. The lamb that was slain, but first for us, while we were yet sinners.  But of course, says Paul in Ephesians, the Lord bowing downward to us in Jesus is itself an ascension most wonderful, so that our Lord but also our brother at the right hand of the Father. First Christ, then us, first downward, and then us able to stand. First he becoming sin who knew no sin, so that we might become, what we are not on our own, the righteousness of God.  The question mark over than ladder in the modern museum is answered!  And then what of us? We follow in his footsteps, as we are enabled, in works of witness and service, the kind of thing the Metropolitan Dream Center is all about. And that becomes, says then man who wrote our prayer book, Thomas Cranmer, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, lifted upward in response.  Our verse this morning from II Chronicles 7 is just right- touching heaven to change earth. It’s a bit like a divine roller coaster. He comes down, that he might go on high, so that we might life up our praise to heaven, so that we might change earth as he empowers and directs. Down and up, up and down, the order and rhythm all God’s, often in spite of ourselves.

This is after all a prayer breakfast, so let me close with a word about what we are here together for the Temple foretold by Solomon is the risen body of Jesus, which is as ecumenical as you can get, and utterly one be you a Baptist or Pentecostal or Catholic or Episcopalian, bring what baggage you will.  The Temple where we are surely heard, our sins miraculously forgiven, where rain comes to our dried lives, our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving consumed in fire- this is anywhere and everywhere, where the name of Jesus is uttered. That is Zion, to which the nations flow!   Our prayer book says that Eucharist, thanksgiving should be offered ‘at all time and all places,’ even the most distressed and hopeless in the world’s eyes, in every place and every moment, this room, in this beautiful setting, on this morning, with the certainty that our prayers reach to his ear in heaven, and our expectation of hearing, also in prayer, his mandate to be his servants of change on his earth. And we praying this morning, says Peter, stones in his temple, all together his royal priest, whatever the world may say, in our prayers, says Paul, built up as sinews and muscles into a mature person in Christ on the last day.

I am most grateful for his time, and for the remarkable and encouraging ministry of the Metropolitan Dream Center, and pray for the manifold blessings of the Holy Spirit on every one of you, Amen.