October 19, 2008 Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
I Corinthians 2:14-15; Romans 8:1-2,5-6; Galatians 5:16-18, 22-25;
Matthew 22: 15-22
Imagine you are sitting in a restaurant and a woman you know only slightly
comes in looking the way many people are looking these days. She looks closed
in on herself, preoccupied, anxious. She happens to glance up as she walks by
your table and you are surprised at the intensity that comes into her face as she
recognizes you. She leans over and grips your table and looks you in the eye and
pleads with you, saying, “You know what is going on with the economy. What
am I supposed to do? How am I going to get through this?”
What would you say?
That is what happened to my brother George recently. George is an
internationally renowned financial planner and Buddhist spiritual teacher, so he
has qualifications that would draw such a question, but many of us are asking our
friends or partners or ourselves similar questions.
In some ways the questions are unanswerable. No one knows for sure what
is going to happen. There is no precedent or road map for what the economy is
doing. Nor are the daily wild swings of the stock market any indication. We will
just have to wait and see.
But despite all that is unknown, there are some answers to the woman’s
questions. They are the same answers that the wise have found in all times of
crisis or hardship throughout recorded history when people have asked, “What am
I supposed to do? How am I going to get through this?”
George’s answer to the woman was, “Be calm, and play to your strengths.”
George meant his answer on two levels. On the practical, material level he meant
keep your cool and go about doing the things you can do, doing the work and the
caring for others and yourself that you can do—the things that you are strong at
and the things that make you strong.
But at the same time George was giving a spiritual teaching, because to be
calm in a time of danger and uncertainty requires spiritual resources. One of the
strengths we need to play to is the strength of our spiritual path. As the Apostle
Paul says, “To set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” The spiritual path can
open us in times when our impulse is to become closed. It can give us clarity and
courage and a peace that surpasses understanding when our minds are inclined to
be preoccupied and anxious.
This peace that enables us to be calm is a great gift, but it is only part of
what we gain when we set our minds on the Spirit. The other part is life.
To “set the mind on the Spirit is life” because, as our first hymn put it, “in
all life thou livest, the true life of all.” And as we will sing in our last hymn today,
If you but trust in God to guide you,
With hopeful heart through all your ways,
You will find strength with God beside you,
To bear the worst of evil days;
For those who trust God’s changeless love
Build on the rock that will not move.
To set the mind on the Spirit is to play to our strengths because it connects
us to God’s guidance and changeless love, that rock that will not move that will
enable us to bear the worst of evil days. That presence of God within us is our
true life. So to play to our strengths means to be our true self, to find the truth
deep within us that gives us strength and sets us free.
My brother George’s advice is ultimately a call to do what we were born to
do. It is a call to seek and find and fulfill our deepest calling: the love of God
within us that yearns to be expressed through the unique gifts God has shaped in
us. Wallace Stegner passes similar advice on from a father to a son in his novel
Crossing to Safety. He says, “Do what you love most. It will probably turn out to
be what you do best.”
The Christian spiritual path is designed to lead us to exactly that—the true
life we are called to live, a life that is marked with George’s calm and strength and
with Paul’s fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That is the life the church can help us
find in any time of hardship. It can help transform what may look like the ruin of
our life into the fulfillment of our highest calling in life.
Recently a couple I know found themselves lost in a massive dark cloud of
anxious thinking, and for good reason. One of them has been hearing rumors of
layoffs at work. The fear of losing half of their income and losing their home and
all the other unspecified hardships they felt looming was keeping them awake at
night and taking the heart out of their days.
So they decided to sit down over the weekend and make a list of all the
things that could happen so they could figure out what they would do. They hoped
that being mentally prepared would help calm them. They spread out a long roll
of paper and wrote, “best case scenario” on the left and “worst case scenario” on
the right. They ran through all the situations they could think of that the economic
crisis could inflict on them. They made notes about what they would do in each
case.
When they were done, they were surprised to see that most of what they
had been fearing fell toward the middle of the sheet—painful, but not quite as
terrible as they had feared. In fact, there was only one thing written on the far
right as the absolute worst case scenario, and it was this: “becoming people we
don’t want to be: fearful; angry; bitter; blaming; ungenerous; uncreative; unloving;
unspiritual.”
They were surprised at first, but they realized that yes, becoming people
they did not want to be would be far worse than losing their jobs or their home or
anything else they could imagine.
You might think, “Well, that is what they say now, but wait till trouble
really hits.” And maybe you would be right to think that. Plenty of people do turn
into people they do not want to be in the face of hardship and loss. But there have
been plenty of other people in history who have gone through terrible hardships
and been true to their highest and deepest, most spiritual self. Survivors tell of
some in Nazi death camps who managed to maintain their love and peace, their
kindness and generosity, and all the other fruits of the Spirit. Nelson Mandella
spent over twenty years suffering in apartheid’s prisons, but people talk about how
he kept his head held high and maintained the self he wanted to be even as others
around him collapsed into hate or despair. The Apostle Paul wrote of rejoicing
while he was in prison. Jesus forgave his executioners while being tortured to
death on the cross.
How can we be like them? How can we be calm and play to our spiritual
and practical strengths, whatever may come?
To answer that we need to do some digging in today’s scripture passages.
It may seem a little hard-going, because these are not easy passages, but the
treasures buried in them are worth the effort.
Here is some of the wisdom Paul offers us for our times of trial: “Live by
the Spirit….Those who are spiritual are able to discern all things….The Spirit
frees you from the law of sin and of death…To set the mind on the Spirit is life
and peace…Have the mind of Christ.”
Paul talks about how living by the Spirit fulfills and frees us from the laws
of ego and empire. His great insight is that when we have the mind of Christ,
everything else, including hardship or death, loses its power over us. But what
does it mean to have the mind of Christ? It does not mean just to read about him
in the Bible or think about him or even understand him. It means to go into the
true life of the Spirit within us so deeply that we crucify our unspiritual, selfish
self, as Paul says. Through that letting go and self-emptying we enable our true
self and mind of Christ to fill our being. Our job is to empty and give our all to
God. God does the rest.
It takes having some of the mind of Christ to understand that this is what
Jesus meant when he said, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s
and to God the things that are God’s.” The deep spiritual meaning of the teaching
is hinted at in an odd place in the passage—out of the mouths of those who are
trying to trap Jesus with a trick question. The Pharisees and Herodians say,
“Teacher, we know you…teach the way of God in accordance with truth and do
not regard people with partiality.”
These are both true. Jesus has set his mind so completely on the Spirit that
he entered the way of God and is one with God. He is the purest example of a
human living at the highest and rarest stage of faith development, called the
universalizing or unitive stage. Jesus has come to see things with God’s
perspective. He looks at the world and sees God in all things and all things in
God. He sees what the hymn describes, how in all things God livest, the true life
of all. That is why Jesus shows no partiality, why he can love even his enemies,
because he sees all are one in God. He actually can see the truth that his neighbor
is an extension of his own self.
Unlike Jesus, most people see life in dualistic terms, as us vs. them, flesh
vs. spirit, empire vs. God’s realm. Where most see a duality, the mind of Christ
sees a unity. If God is the true life of all then God is the true life of empire as well
as of God’s realm. Sure, Jesus says, give your taxes to the empire, but then give
the empire to God, because it is God’s. Give yourself to God, too, because you are
God’s. Give everything on earth to God, for everything truly is already God’s.
Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that we cannot serve both God and
mammon, both God and material things, both God and the world of flesh and
empire. We have to choose to serve one or the other. This sounds dualistic, but
only from the perspective of mammon. If we serve the flesh or empire or anything
less than God, then we remain divided by our materialistic self from God, from
our neighbor and from our true spiritual self.
But if we set our minds entirely on the Spirit and let go of all else, we
suddenly realize that instead of losing life, we gain life. Instead of living in
anxious scarcity, we live in a joyous abundance—even if we are in poverty. As
Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Strive first for the realm of God and
God’s ways, and all these material things will be given you as well.” Choose
mammon and you will lose the spiritual gifts. Choose the spirit and you gain the
abundant life Christ came to give.
This is the advice I think George was giving. The secret to flourishing in a
joyous abundance even as your world collapses in fearful scarcity is to live by the
Spirit, to live by God’s way of truth that you will find by letting go of all else and
setting you mind on the Spirit. Do this and serve God and neighbor with all the
gifts the Spirit gives you, following the Spirit’s lead one day at a time, and you
will find that you are calm mostly, and you are playing to your strengths, and that
you remain the true person you most want to be, and that you have the fruit the
world hungers for most—things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. You will find that this is
what matters more than anything else in life—more even than life itself.
There have been other terrible times in the world. Out of one of them came
the beautiful voice of one who had the mind of Christ, Julian of Norwich, who
sang out, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be
well.”
Let us do what she did. Let us let go of all else and set our mind on the
Spirit of life and peace. Let us pray in silence….
Sermon 10/19/2007