Easter 6A – George Yandell
A visitor to a congregation I served in the mid-1980’s sought me out in the coffee hour. His name was John. He said, “I was taught the commandments in the Church I grew up in. I was taught to fear God, because God punishes those who don’t keep God’s commands. I have heard those same words from Jesus. But the people of your congregation worship in a way that downplays fear and highlights love. Why is that?” I talked with John further and found he indeed had much to fear. He had lost his job and his medical insurance, his marriage had ended in divorce, and he had just been diagnosed with an illness that required immediate treatment, but he couldn’t find a doctor to treat him without insurance. He believed God was punishing him because he hadn’t been a good enough Christian.
If you listen closely to the reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning, you might realize Paul’s address to the people in Athens keyed on their fear. All the idols Paul pointed to in the Areopagus showed what the people loved: their gods and their virtues, the blessings and graces the gods bestowed. The idols also demonstrated what they feared – those same gods were jealous of attention shown to the other gods, and would become angry and call down violence on their worshippers if they failed to worship each god properly. Of all that Paul saw, one thing spoke more eloquently of fear than all the others – the altar to an unknown god. It was erected just in case there was a god out there of whom the people hadn’t yet heard about but was powerful enough to make them sorry if they offended him or her. Paul tried to win over the people to the God of Jesus by exploiting both the Athenians’ fear and their compulsion to be devoted to all their gods.
The answer Jesus gives to his disciples’ fear of losing him is to keep his commands – which are summed up in the one supreme command, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The love of the Father and the revealing of God’s Son within the life of his disciples means that loving is everything. Jesus promised that his disciples would receive a new companion, the Spirit of Truth. So the message for all ages of Church is to know the Spirit, revealed in loving one another as those who are loved by Jesus.
To repeat: We can sum up the commission of Jesus to disciples of every age as “know the Spirit”. Know the Spirit as the Spirit unites us in loving. The Spirit abides in our midst for us to love God and one another.
As it was for John the visitor, our spiritual quest as Jesus followers often takes us down trails that twist and turn, and often moves us farther and farther from our supposed destination. To be a human being is to be spiritual, even if many of us don’t consider our life a spiritual search. In the heart of every human is the god-core that the creator planted in us, as Paul told the Athenians. Our life search, while seeming to be spent in families, towns, congregations, places of work, PLACES all around—our search is actually a quest to come home to our core being. To search and plumb the depths of the soul, to give and receive support from others as they seek their own souls’ essence– that’s the way the spiritual journey goes, ideally.
The mystical Spirit abiding in us offers believers a road map, an assurance for seeking God: Abide in God, abide in Jesus. Again and again, remain and continue remaining in God’s spirit, which is God’s own self.
There are at least 3 distractions, 3 roadblocks that keep us from living from and remaining in God:
- Prideful self-concern. Self-concern is OK, up to a point. We need to look out for ourselves, to be healthy. But when our egos swell, and our wants and needs become so strong as to become addictive, then self-concern has overwhelmed us, and we become lost to our own soul. We become attached to that which is not God.
- Participating in and building systems of living that tear down communities, and destroy other people. The great revelation of the last part of the 20th century and into the 21st, is that all living things are connected and depend on one another for life. When we unwittingly, or knowingly, chose products, services, or life-styles that may seem perfectly fine, but at their source cause poverty, environmental degradation, or alienate people one from another, we wreck the delicate ecology of our communities. But more than that, we disconnect ourselves from the ecology of our soul. The interconnectedness of all beings and all souls is at the heart of living in the Spirit of Love.
- Worshiping our understanding of God, rather than worshiping the God of our understanding. A wise friend of mine once told me that a grave distraction from living in God’s embrace, is when we worship what we believe about God, rather than who God actually is. We become certain we alone know the way God is, and we fall into the trap of worshipping that understanding. The horrible cost to us is getting cut off from God’s ongoing surprises. To worship the God of our understanding is to open ourselves, seeking continually that which renews, surprises, and offers deeper and deeper loving of God and God of us. That understanding actually implies that we stand under God, and let God’s being cascade into us. That’s true worship.
There are two attitudes the great faiths teach that keep us pointed the right way, that keep us seeking God within us and in our midst. They’re humility and patience. Living humbly, giving way to God within and among us, diminishing ego needs- that’s the attitude that allows God’s grace to flow in us, and leads us into our God-core. Remaining in our core, living from our center, our soul, which is God’s soul, requires patience and practicing humility in all things. Rumi, the great Sufi mystic & poet, wrote about humility in the poem, Why are You Milking Another?:
“Strip the raiment of pride from your body: in learning, put on the garment of humility. Soul receives from soul the knowledge of humility, not from books or speech. Though mysteries of spiritual poverty are within the seeker’s heart, she doesn’t yet possess knowledge of those mysteries. Let her wait until her heart expands and fills with Light: …. for we have put illumination there, we have put the expansion [of God] into your heart. When you are a source of milk, why are you milking another?”
These things are true for all seekers of God: We are intertwined with all others in our world. We need them, they need us. We especially need those most different from us, to teach us how God lives in them. We learn from their souls the knowledge of humility. This is what Jesus meant when he talked of his father’s abiding in and animating us through the Spirit.
Any pursuit that doesn’t lead us toward God, that doesn’t support our mutual souls’ health, God works to love into spiritual wholeness. God intends us to seek and accept that guidance, so we can be more and more loving and humble.
Remaining in God, living in the Spirit of Jesus, is all that’s required of us. Being faithful. Thankful appreciation of all with whom we’re connected comes through being faithful. Finding grace is not the intent of living in the Spirit, but it is the predictable result. As we are fed and nurtured as God’s people, God’s Spirit feeds us, sheds God’s light on us, and makes our hearts intertwine until all remains is thankfulness. By humbly, patiently being faithful, we find our bliss.