Hi, Anxiety.

The anxiety with which we all contend is nothing new. Epictetus, first century Stoic philosopher said: Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems. Around the same time, Jesus spoke about anxiety in the Sermon on the Mount:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  

It sounds like Jesus was referring to the earthly things in the collect we heard yesterday in church (see above). To address anxiety, he tells disciples to change their perspective, to look up:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

He continues with another example of anxiety-free living:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 

Jesus invites disciples to a heavenward perspective. He says:

Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.

How have you handled anxiety, in yourself or others? I have found that the least effective way for me to address someone else’s anxiety is to tell them not to be anxious. I have found that the least effective way for me to address my own anxiety (along with my own resentment and envy) is to try to power through it, to will it away. In my experience, the only way that anxiety has been lifted is by grace, a gift from a power greater than myself, by divine intervention. It’s led me to pray the prayer from Psalm 51, offered on Ash Wednesday among other times. The prayer? Create in me a clean heart.

No doubt about it. There’s plenty about which we might reasonably be anxious, on a global scale and in our own lives, as we look at the church, as we pray for friends and family members, as we project our own future, as we raise kids. We certainly can focus on those things. Wherever anxiety comes from, whether real or imagined concerns, our faith tells us that its relief comes by looking beyond the anxiety, or maybe more to the point, looking above the anxiety. That can involve trust. That can involve gratitude. That can happen in worship.

C. S. Lewis, who wrote a good deal about a heavenly perspective, put it this way: If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next…Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.

Add to that a word from preacher C. H. Spurgeon: Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths. And a final invitation to do our best to take ourselves lightly, offered by Rabbi Ed Friedman: A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.

How will you respond to anxiety this week?

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

Synergy

In our exploration of the spiritual life, we can come up with all kinds of ideas about who God is and what God expects of us. It’s easy to fall into images of God as a person or presence requiring us to prove ourselves, maybe like a college admissions committee or a prospective employer or the policeman who pulls you over for speeding or rolling through a stop sign (not that that’s ever happened to me). It’s easy to imagine that we have to show ourselves to be worthy of God’s attention and affection.

The collect we read in church yesterday (above) suggests another way of looking at things. It says that in the spiritual journey, God is working with us. We can see that kind of holy synergy in a passage from the letter to the Philippians, a letter which we’ve been reading in the Daily Lectionary. In that letter, written by Paul from a first century prison cell (Imagine what that was like!), Paul describes a holy synergy. In chapter 2, vv. 12, 13. He writes: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Do you see what I mean about synergy? We are to work out our salvation. We are not potted plants. We have a role. We have responsibility, ownership, stewardship. But it is indeed God who is at work in us to make it happen. That sounds like yesterday’s collect, which addresses God, saying that without God’s help we are not able to please God. In that collaborative process, where God’s powerful grace encounters our active gratitude, we pray to be led by the Holy Spirit, asking that the Spirit direct and rule our (unruly) hearts.

There is freedom here, the recognition that we are not alone, that it’s not all up to us. God is not sitting at the monitor getting ready to press the “smite” button when we mess up. We can believe that is true because of the incarnation, because Jesus came to live among us, to share our experience.

Along side the freedom, there is responsibility. Grace is not cheap. As saints through the ages have shown us, grace can be costly. For reasons that sometimes mystify me, God calls on us and maybe even counts on us to be part of furthering the Jesus movement, and building his kingdom. When that call feels daunting, as it did to so many biblical characters, we are not alone. When that call invites us to do things we’re not sure we can do, to do things we’re not worthy to do, a prayer like yesterday’s collect can reassure us that we’ve not been left hanging. We can give thanks that we have not been left alone:

Our hearts need to be directed, indeed they need to be ruled by the loving power of the Holy Spirit. How might we open our hearts to be so ruled, so guided this week? How about this synergistic idea: We will with God’s help.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

Something to boast about

One day in Lent, a bishop kneels at the altar rail, and pounding his chest, says: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. A priest comes and kneels next to him and says the same: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. A seminarian walks in, kneels and repeats: I am nothing. I am nothing. I am nothing. Priest leans over to the bishop and whispers: Look who thinks he’s nothing.

The point? We can brag about just about anything. Yesterday’s collect (above) brought to mind one of the greatest hymns in our tradition, Hymn 474: When I survey the wondrous cross. In particular, I remembered this stanza: Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the cross of Christ my God.

The collect speaks of those who make their boast of God’s mercy. Consider the things we boast about, or are at least tempted to boast about. We boast about education, zip code, income, about where our kids were accepted for college. We boast about tennis serve or golf score or how fast we can run a mile. We boast about being woke or being anti-woke. We boast about being orthodox or progressive. We boast about how religious we are, how well we know the liturgy or scripture or music. We can even boast about how humble we are.

The collect also speaks of God’s resistance to confidence in our own strength. So a related reflection: think about where we place our confidence. Both how we make our boast and where we place our confidence speak volumes about what we think is worthwhile, what we value. They say a lot about our identity.

St. Paul spent a lot of time thinking about boasting, probably because in his life long struggle to be more Christ-like, he contended with his own ego. In several places he describes his upbringing that made him think he was really swell, that God should be really pleased to have him on the team. His family roots, his education, his moral uprightness, his commitment to tradition were all things he could boast about.

In his letter to the Romans, he talks about the ways in which boasting runs at cross-purposes to God’s saving intention. Perhaps looking in the mirror, he comes down particularly hard on religious people (translate: good church goers) who imagine themselves to be better than those profligate people out there, whoever they may be. Read Romans 2:17-22 to see how he speaks about people who boast about their relationship to God because they are so well instructed in religious stuff, so sure that they are guides to others based on their superior religious credentials. It’s not the most attractive quality of religious people.

The letter to the Ephesians, attributed to Paul, says in chapter 2, verses 8-10 that we are saved by grace, a gift from God. We are not saved by works (our accomplishments, religious insight, basic delightfulness) lest any person should boast.

So what does it mean to boast, to brag on God’s mercy? It means among other things that we don’t have to brag on ourselves. That can actually be quite freeing. It means as well that our confidence rests not in our own strength, great one day and fleeting the next. Our confidence rests in the fact that we are loved (and accepted) by a grace from which we can never be separated. Never.

So it becomes a boast that doesn’t divide us from other people, does not force us to compare ourselves with others, but invites us to see ourselves as “woven into an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,”, to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yesterday’s prayer invites us to boast in God’s mercy. So here are a few questions you might want to consider this week: Where have I experienced God’s mercy? How can I remember on a daily basis that I have received that gift? Can I see that mercy as the defining principle of my life, the thing that assures my value, my worth?

It doesn’t mean that others things we value, and are even proud of, don’t matter. It does mean that those things are set in the right place in our lives, giving us freedom to live into the way of love. To borrow a neighboring church’s tagline, in light of God’s mercy, we can celebrate our forgiveness.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog

True Religion

I suspect we have all heard people say that they are spiritual but not religious. The way I hear that comment is that being spiritual is a good thing. Being religious, not so much. There are all kinds of reasons why a negative view of religion might take hold.

On August 23, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about the precipitous decline in religious observance in our country. He attributes that in part to the ways religious leaders have embraced a particular political agenda. I can think of other reasons, including the ways religious leaders have abused power for sake of sex or money. In parish ministry, I’ve met too many people who’ve been wounded in encounters with church life. I often wonder why any of them come back. There are people who sense that religion is not relevant, indeed that it is terminally boring. One person said they prefer Rotary Club to the church, as the people at Rotary were kinder. Another person said they preferred attending a Durham Bulls game, a more successfully integrated gathering than any church he’d ever attended. You may think of other reasons to explain the decline.

Reflection on being religious is prompted by the collect we heard yesterday in church, above. It asks that God might increase in us true religion. So what is that true religion? How can we distinguish it from false religion?

The word “religion” is rarely used in the Bible. In the few times when it’s used, it’s not necessarily a positive thing. Jesus spent a lot of time and energy in opposition to religious leaders (the clergy) of his day.

But there is one passage in the New Testament letter of James which casts religion in a more positive light: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Maybe that gives us a hint about what true religion looks like.

In a new book on the teaching of Jesus, specifically on the Sermon on the Mount, Richard Rohr compares religion and the gospel. He says that religion is all the things you normally go through to meet God. The Gospel is the way you will see and think after you have met God. The Gospel is the effect of the God-encounter. He says that religion is the invitation. The gospel is the banquet, and by the gospel I take Richard Rohr to mean the good news of God’s grace, God’s unconditional love.

In this vision of religion, religion is not an end in itself. We may need to be reminded that it is a means, an instrument, an introduction to an encounter with the living God. In the 1930’s, Evelyn Underhill wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, with critique of the state of the church, and especially the clergy who had lost focus. She sent this reminder to the Archbishop: God is the interesting thing about religion and people are hungry for God.

Andrew Root, a Lutheran theologian, has written lately about how the church is in decline because the church has lost a sense of a transcendent God. We have domesticated the deity to the point where God is manageable, containable, limited, and not particularly relevant. His point is that the church is not the star of the story. God is the star of the story. For our purposes this morning, we might say that religion is not the star of the story. The liturgy, the music, the buildings, the brilliant sermons may all be wonderful, but they only represent true religion when they lead to encounter with the living God.

Our Christian faith finds that encounter in the person of Jesus, present now to us in all kinds of ways, in the preaching of his word, in the bread blessed and broken and given, in ministry to people in need as we seek and serve Christ in all persons. If religion does not assist us in these kinds of encounters, it may have lost its way.

Reflect on the meaning of true religion for you. How are you experiencing true religion? Are there ways in which you are engaging in religion that is not true? Can you see your religious practice as invitation to an encounter with God? Think about where you’ve had that kind of encounter. And carry this prayer with you this week, as you ask God to increase in us true religion.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule.  Sign up now!!

Learn more in our digital brochure.

RenewalWorks – Digital Catalog