Running the race

Yesterday was one of my favorite days in New York City. The marathon took place with thousands of runners gathered from all over the world, participating in a great parade through all five boroughs. Many if not all runners had folks standing on the sidelines cheering them on, a great cloud of witnesses.

I don’t know how often it is the case that the NYC marathon coincides with observance of the feast of All Saints. I suspect given the calendar it’s more often than not. I am struck with the overlap between the two.

Our scriptures, as they reflect on the ministry of saints in the world, often frame that ministry in terms of running a race. St. Paul, at the end of his life, writes as mentor to Timothy and says “I have run the race. I have kept the faith.” The letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus running the race that was set before him. It invites us to do the same.

Our liturgy picks up the theme. In one of the prayers as part of the eucharistic celebration of all saints, we speak of saints as lights in their generation who have run the race. And the collect which may or may not have been read yesterday in church, printed above, asks for the grace to run without stumbling to obtain God’s heavenly promises. (Note: no extra charge this week to get the collect for yesterday, as well as the collect for All Saints observance. A two-fer this Monday morning!)

The spiritual journey is definitely more of a marathon than a sprint. It calls for training, for discipline, for practice. Unless you are the spiritual equivalent of Rosie Ruiz (a generational reference) or George Santos (a more contemporary reference), there is no faking participation. It calls for practice. It is not a matter of circling a track dozens of times. It is a movement from here to there. Perhaps we can describe that destination as becoming more and more like Christ in the words of our mouth, the meditations of our hearts, and maybe most of all, in the ways we act. How would you describe the aim of your spiritual journey?

This spiritual marathon involves challenges like heartbreak hills. There may be moments when the runner hits the wall, even if we feel like we’re in good spiritual shape. That has happened to the best of the saints. If you want to get a vision of what the marathon looks like for people of faith, read the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11. And while it is in many ways an individual pursuit, there is also great encouragement that one does not run alone.

The Feast of All Saints makes sure we recognize that, as we not only join with saints around the world, we claim to be part of the great communion of time linking us with those we love but see no longer, linking us with great heroes of the faith who have gone before. Think of them like the crowds lining the streets of the city, cheering the runners on, saying things like: “You’ve got this!”

All Saints observance invites us to think about the race we are running. Where is it headed? Where do we find energy? How have we trained for it? What’s the prize at the end of the race? St. Paul, spiritual marathon runner, described the prize in his letter to the Philippians. He said he was pressing on toward the high calling of God in Jesus Christ. Maybe we can claim that same goal this week. What would that mean for you?

-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!!

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Faith, Hope and Charity

If you’ve been to a few weddings, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. It’s a beautiful hymn about love. I hate to disappoint, but the fact of the matter, Paul did not write it about marriage.

Full reading of Paul’s letters indicates that he didn’t always think marriage was all that great an idea. That’s his issue. Paul wrote this hymn about love in a letter to a community of faith, to a church.

He had his work cut out for him. The community he was addressing faced all kinds of challenges. There was discrimination between poor and rich people. There were arguments about sexual ethics, about money, about leadership, about religious rules. In other words, there’s nothing new under the sun.

With all those arguments taking place, Paul proposed the image of the church as the body of Christ, a compelling vision of unity out of diversity. What will make that functional? Paul says it’s all about love, detailed in this chapter that is at once realistic and also hopeful about human interaction, especially in a faith community.

This hymn to love is punctuated by the mention of faith, hope and charity (love), referenced in the collect we heard in church yesterday, printed in the column on the left. Paul writes: And now faith, hope and love abide, and the greatest of these is love (I Corinthians 13:13).

Yesterday’s collect suggests that faith, hope and love are gifts. As we gathered yesterday as a faith community, we prayed for those gifts. That’s good for us to remember, as religious/quasi-religious/spiritual folks. Sometimes we take our experience of spiritual virtues like faith, hope and love as merit badge, as if God is lucky to have us on the team. And maybe, just maybe, God should show a little more gratitude.

As I reflected on what it means to pray for these virtues, I was reminded of Jesus’ conversation with his disciples on the night before he died. He told them he was giving them a new commandment, that they should love one another. That will be the mark of their discipleship. It’s always struck me that my own vision of love was not something that could be commanded.

But the kind of love which Jesus referenced is clearly what is expected of us as followers of Jesus, as part of the Jesus movement. It comes as decision. It comes as commitment. It’s as much an action as emotion. It’s not always easy, especially in the church. Left to my own devices, I fall short of fulfillment of that commandment. So we pray for the grace, the strength, the equipment to love what God commands, to love love.

And as St. Paul tells us, the greatest of faith, hope and charity is love. Both faith and hope will someday not be needed. Some day we will walk by sight, not by faith. Someday, hope will be fulfilled, not deferred. But love will always be at the core, central to our life with God and with each other.

Pray this week for an increase in the gifts of faith, hope and love. To the extent that you have those gifts, give thanks for them by exercising them. To the extent you wish to grow in those virtues, ask God to increase them in you, that we may more and more each day obtain what God promises.

-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.

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Preserve/Persevere

No, this is not a word jumble. These two words, preserve and persevere, form the heart of the collect we heard yesterday in church (see above).

Perseverance is an attribute called for in the journey of faith. In the baptismal covenant, we promise to persevere in resisting evil, which includes repentance whenever (not if ever) we mess up. The collect we heard in church yesterday calls us to persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of God’s name.

As we pray for perseverance, we ask for God’s help, suggesting synergy between God’s grace and our grateful response. If perseverance represents our call, we ask God to preserve the works of God’s mercy. Our call to steadfast faith is supported by God’s steadfast commitment to us, with grace that precedes, follows and meets us where we are.

Implicit in the prayer is the idea that there may be threats to the preservation of God’s mercy. Those can come from within us, the refusal to believe that grace is what matters, that grace is sufficient. In the Ash Wednesday liturgy, we often include this warning from St. Paul: Do not accept the grace of God in vain. That reading makes me think about how I do that, day in and day out.

Threats can come from the church’s refusal to embrace grace and to set up all kinds of litmus tests, or to conduct ourselves in ways that would be unrecognizable to Jesus. (Gandhi said he’d be a Christian if he had never met one.) Threats can come from the church’s failure to live into the love of God and neighbor.

Threats can come from outside the church, in a culture that makes us think we are never quite good enough, that we have to prove our worth, or that worth is determined by being more worthy than someone else.

Also implicit in yesterday’s collect is the idea that it might be hard for us to persevere. The church’s recent encounter with COVID tested ability to persevere. It all made many folks, clergy and lay, want to throw in the towel. I’m wondering this Monday morning where you are sensing a challenge to perseverance.

We should not be surprised if perseverance surfaces as challenge. Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane was a struggle for perseverance. I love him for it. Paul spoke of the need to press on toward the goal of the high calling of Jesus Christ.

One of my favorite stories about Teresa of Avila comes from her travels as missionary. On one trip, the wheel fell off her cart and she ended up sitting in a mud-puddle by the side of the road. She reportedly shook her fist at heaven and said: God, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.

Martin Luther King spoke of a moment he was ready to give up, when he and his family faced repeated death threats. “I was ready to give up… In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud…. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying ‘Stand up for Righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared and I was ready to face anything.”

Dr. King persevered by tapping into God’s promise of presence, God’s steadfast commitment to preserve. We can tap into that same resource as well. Among other places, we discover perseverance through the life of the community, sharing with honesty the challenge of the journey of faith. The eucharist is offered to give us strength and courage as we face the world with gladness and singleness of heart. We are not alone in this journey.

Babe Ruth had this to say about perseverance: Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

So even when we strike out, we can anticipate a home run. Let’s swing for the fences, spiritually speaking.

-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!!

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Grace preceding and following us

There’s a part of the eucharistic prayer said each Sunday that has a technical/liturgical term. It’s called anamnesis. When you break down that term, it literally means not forgetting. Not amnesia. It’s the part of the prayer when we recall the good things that God has done for us in the past, a history of creation and redemption and hope for a new heaven and a new earth. History tells us it is easy to forget, so we are reminded As our world seems to be coming unhinged, the call to anamnesis matters now more than ever. We might think of it as the grace that precedes.

In that eucharistic prayer, we give thanks for things God has done for all of us together. There is also a way to look in the spiritual rear-view mirror and see where God has been active in our personal lives, grace preceding us on the individual level. Take some time today to think about where the Holy One has been active in your life. What have been the God-sightings?

And in the collect that we heard yesterday in church (see above), there is also grace that follows us. A favorite couple of verses come to mind, found in the second chapter of the letter to the Ephesians. For me, these verse represent the gospel in a nutshell. The author sums up the gospel this way:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we may walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10).

These verses describe the grace that has preceded us. It also points to the grace that follows. It speaks of the good works which God has prepared for us to walk in. Those good works, that way of life, is laid out for us. We might think of it as grace following us, grace accompanying us as we make our way forward in life.

When I read this passage with mention of the good works prepared for us to walk in, I think of my visits to big urban hospitals. I might ask at the information desk how to get to the children’s wing, for example. I am then told to follow the green line on the floor which will help me get there. I’m glad for that graceful bit of navigation. A gift, a grace that shows how I’m meant to move forward in life. Grace following me along the way. Grace actually paving the way. Have you ever been aware of that holy way-making in your life?

The goal of all of this is that we will be given to good works. God’s grace has gone before us, and will lead us into the future. That prompts a grateful heart for what has passed, and a hopeful spirit for what lies ahead. It allows us to keep eyes open in the present moment to see what good thing God has in store for us.

What will those good works be in your life this Monday morning? As you attend to those opportunities, remember grace that has preceded you (most especially the love of God from which you can never be separated). Embrace the grace that is promised to follow you all the days of your life. As the familiar hymn reminds us, ’twas grace that brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home.

-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.

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Except…

What do you make of the following phrases in the collect we heard yesterday in church (above)? The prayer refers to those things of which our conscience is afraid, and the good things for which we are not worthy to ask.

I’m puzzling a bit about the things that our conscience is afraid. What are those things? I’m thinking it’s a reference to those inner thoughts that creep up that we hope will never ever get projected on a screen, or posted on social media, or shared with our loved ones. I won’t over-share and divulge what those might be in my own inner life, but I’m guessing we all have them. That’s why the psalmist’s prayer that the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in God’s sight is so important.

The premise and promise of our faith is that God knows those inner workings as well as we do. They represent no surprise to the Holy One, who still loves us. Which means that all we are called to do is to acknowledge them and ask for forgiveness. We join with the psalmist in asking God to create in us a clean heart and to renew a right spirit within us..

We also pray for the good things for which we are not worthy to ask. That’s a reminder that the blessings in our lives come as gift. Grace has been described as unmerited favor. While we are all tempted to think that blessings come to us the old-fashioned way, because we earn them, the truth of the matter is that we are surrounded by gifts that come not because we are spiritually remarkable but because God is abundantly generous, with a wideness of mercy wider than the sea.

Which leads to the key word in this collect: except.

We’d be a mess if we were left alone with those things of which our conscience is afraid, and if we were found unworthy of the good things we hope for. The freedom from fear and the access to goodness elude us, except for the ministry of Jesus. Except.

Our faith tells us our standing rests on the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ. That may irritate our inner toddler that says “I do it myself.” But it is ultimately life-giving and liberating news. It frees us from having to prove ourselves. And when we don’t have to prove ourselves, we’re more inclined to share God’s love with others. That freedom comes with our decision to put our trust in God’s presence with us, God’s advocacy for us, God’s forgiveness of us, all found in Jesus.

I appreciate Henri Nouwen’s vision of this decision at work in his life: “If you were to ask me point-blank: “What does it mean to you to live spiritually?” I would have to reply: “Living with Jesus at the center.” . . . When I look back over the last thirty years of my life, I can say that, for me, the person of Jesus has come to be more and more important. Specifically, this means that what matters increasingly is getting to know Jesus and living in solidarity with him.”

We have an exceptional faith, one that recognizes our fears, that recognizes how we fall short, but knows that’s all going to be okay. We pray for grace to live that faith 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

Holy busyness

Red says to Andy DeFresne: Get busy living or get busy dying. For me, that may be the most memorable line from Shawshank Redemption, a movie I could watch again and again. It is to say that we are all busy with something.

The collect heard in church yesterday (above) suggests that we are all running, in the case of the prayer, running to obtain God’s promises. It presumes that wherever we are in life, we are not standing still. We are on the move. Pope Francis preached a homily in which he said that there was no such thing as a stationary Christian. He said that a Christian is meant to move, that a stationary Christian is sick in his or her identity.

I’m with Red. We’re all busy with something. All running after something, whether it’s a lightning-fast sprint or slogging jog. We live in a culture that seems to regard busyness as measure of worth. I rarely meet anyone who does not describe themselves as busy.

With that in mind, it’s worth channeling the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau who said: It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? This Monday morning, I’m wondering what you are running to obtain. What’s keeping you busy these days?

A colleague used to wear this button in Advent: Jesus is coming. Look busy.

What would it mean to run to obtain God’s promises, to be busy in that way? Do we have role models? Jesus would often steal off by himself to pray. When I read about that in the gospels, my over-functioning self wonders: You had three years to redeem the world. Aren’t you too busy to spend time that way? Martin Luther, who had the modest mission of reforming all of Europe, said: I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer. A favorite book, The Book of Joy, describes the friendship between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. At one point, they enter a playful competition about who prays the most. Desmond Tutu gets up at 4am for an extended period of prayer. The Dalai Lama outpaces him, getting up at 3am to pray.

All of which is to say that holy busyness is not necessarily about more activity. As one pastor put it: More church activity does not mean more spiritual growth. Exhausted clergy know that.

Back to my question: What are you running to obtain? What are you running for? The call of the collect is to keep our eyes on the prize, a heavenly treasure. What’s involved in that process? It’s about spiritual practice. About spiritual exercise. A rector I admire named Doyt Conn compares his church to a gym, a spiritual gym, where people come to be strengthened, where faith is exercised. That can be a regular commitment to engagement with scripture. It can be daily quiet time, exploring the habits of prayer. It can be convening with others for worship, gaining sustenance from the sacrament. It can be a commitment to service, where we come to see the face of Christ in the faces of people in need, wherever we find them.

There are days when I feel like engaging with these practices. There are days I don’t. Sometimes I’m running on empty, spiritually. I’ve concluded that it doesn’t really matter how I feel. Jay, just do it. In so doing, I have the hope of joining St. Paul who said toward the end of his life: I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. (II Timothy 4.7)

This is not a matter of our superior will power driving us to this spiritual life. This is not teeth-gritting Christianity. As the collect indicates, we ask for the grace to run the race, to obtain God’s promises. That means the God is with us in all these undertakings. God’s power is available to us, available as a sign of his mercy.

As you run around this week, busy being busy, consider what it means to run to obtain God’s promises. What does that road race look like in your life?

-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.

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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