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| Why do we expect our relationship with God to grow like a retirement portfolio? |
Every Monday morning from 10 to 11 A.M. for almost three years of my life I sat in a gorgeous office. The walls were lined with bookshelves filled with volumes on Theology, Contemplative Prayer, Holy Scripture, Fishing, and Canoe Building. Gigantic peach, tan, and cream sandstone blocks lined the exterior of the office. And, several picture windows provided views of students walking to class. Additionally from where I sat I could catch a glimpse of the dogwood and Japanese maple trees that sat outside—ever changing with the seasons. Inside the office, something else was changing too.
The 10 o’clock Monday morning meetings were with my mentor—Sewanee’s University Chaplain the Rev. Tom Macfie. There we talked about our shared work, and he guided me through conversations about discernment. While God had called me in many other times and places, it was in that office that I felt God confirming my call to ordained ministry through the support of a guiding presence. Of course, this sort of careful listening can also reveal truths that require one to change one’s ways.
Many Monday mornings, Tom and I talked about our prayer practice. A trend emerged after about a year of working together. Every few weeks one of us mentioned that our daily prayer practices were going. It was not necessarily a boast, but it was not always humble either. Almost always the next week that person would have to admit that the same prayer practices had faltered. At first, neither Tom nor I thought much about it, but overtime an insight emerged.
When we discovered this theme—solid prayer time, then mentioning how well our relationship with God was going, and a resulting setback—we noticed in this theme God inviting us deeper. Jesus tells us that every branch that bears fruit the Father prunes to make it bear more fruit. Our life with God, our prayer practices, and our walk of Faith possesses both growth and pruning, so that we may bear more fruit. But what that time with Tom helped me to realize was that through ups and downs what matters most is abiding with God, being with God as God is with us.
This is hard for us. We like to think about our lives in terms of growth. Think for a moment about your work experience, your wisdom as a human being, or your ideal retirement portfolio over the course of time. What does that look like if we put it into line graph form? A line with an arrow pointing up into the future, right? Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this growth. However, we cannot apply this linear growth concept to our prayer life. It just does not compute. Why is that?
For one thing, God abides with us more intimately than we will ever perceive, feel, or know. How can one graph growing closer to the One who is closer to us than ourselves? At the same time, God exists more transcendently beyond us than we can imagine. Having a relationship with God who dwells in and beyond us will leave us baffled. This means that our relationship with the Divine does not track easily, like a linear graph. Why would we expect that relationship to grow exponentially?
Also, in times when we think we are responsible for how close we are to God we often fail. As I learned during those meetings with Tom, tracking growth in my spiritual life looks more like a sine wave or an ever-changing spiral than an upward trending line. When we come to church, take time to pray, give to God’s work in the world, and serve our neighbors, then we may think we get a gold star, like we received for attending Sunday School as a child. The temptation is to think we are the reason our spiritual life is trending upward. The Book of Proverbs reminds us that pride goes before destruction. Even here though, there is good news: not in the pride, but in the pruning.
New fruit comes from God’s pruning. In the difficult moments when we live in the love of Christ, God stimulates growth. Our spiritual lives, our life in Christ, will not emulate a line graph, but rather the messiness of garden. There will be dirt. There will be sunny days. There will be downpours. There will be heat. There will be growth. There will be shearing. And all the while we will be tempted to figure out exactly where we are, like I tried to do during those sessions with Tom, but that is not what God calls us to do.
What God calls us into is abiding. In each of the readings for today we discover this true task of our lives. It is not for us to quantify or score how well we are relating to God. Rather in each of these readings we hear the call to abide in God and God’s love, as God and God’s love abides in us.
The Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip baptized in the Acts of the Apostles did not simply read Holy Scripture. He felt the Holy Spirit drawing him to abide in God more deeply. When he saw water he yearned to be more deeply dwelling in the life of Christ, so Philip baptized him.
In this Psalm of praise, the author yearned to praise God in the great assembly. All are called to dwell in God. All are called to remember the Lord. Even those asleep in the earth shall bow down in worship. For all of our souls, like the author’s, shall live for God, as we abide in him.
The Letter from John, one which we often read at the Blessing and Celebration of a Marriage, reminds us that God is love and we are God’s beloved. Our lives are to be solely focused on living out of this beloved and loving state. However, because of the association with marriage we may only focus on the emotion of love. John though tells us this love encompasses something even more tremendous than the feeling of love. God loved us first. God loves us fully. God will love us eternally. When we abide in this love, throughout life and especially during difficult times, we will emanate this same love to others.
John’s Gospel account seals this life-long call to live in the love of Christ with an analogy. We are the branches. Christ is the vine. We bear fruit not on our own, nor by our merit, nor by working harder, but by living in Christ. While other bits of John’s Gospel account grab more attention, this challenge to abide in God resonates so powerfully to the Church of today. 63 times throughout his letters and his Gospel account this word abide appears. The Church of right now would do well to proclaim this often. Why?
We are surrounded by a world that believes what I did during those Monday morning meetings. Namely, that is up to me to have a good spiritual life. It’s up to me to earn my way into God’s grace, God’s love, and God’s heavenly kingdom. So, we hear things like you must go to church, pray every day, avoid sin, etc. Being a follower of Christ Jesus was not, is not, nor will it ever be about doing something to earn the love of God. God already loves us. God abides in us no matter what. We cannot hit a higher mark on this line graph. Instead, we are called to recognize what is already present.
God loved us first. Through the love of Christ Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection—and particularly in his sacrifice—we see the depth of God’s love. That is why we are beloved. And, as we exist as God’s beloveds we are called to share this same life-giving love with others.
Let our lives then be a reflection of God’s love for us. May we always remember that we are God’s beloveds. Then, may we live our lives not to earn more of what we already have in abundance. No, instead may we live though sacrificial love as a joyous response to God’s infinite love for us and for all.
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