You Cannot Earn What You Already Have

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. 

The Church of the Future

IT’S SUMMERTIME!!! Okay, so summer technically is not here until June 21st, it already feels in full swing with camp sessions, beach trips, and warmer temperatures. In the life of our church, this season always deceives me. I continue to think that as the rhythm of the school year slows down, I can take a deep breath and float through the summer months. Surprisingly though, the life of St. John’s Church does not go into hibernation during these hot months, but instead not only do we continue our normal pattern of worship, we also catch a glimpse of the Church of the future at work.

Have you ever noticed that people in the Church love to worry about the future of the Church? I have yet to go to a clergy gathering without someone mentioning how to get younger people in the pews. When I scour trendy priest-blogs—yes, these exist—so many of them point to dire Pew Research Center results about how many members the Church has lost recently, and then mention how we might avoid our doomed fate to disintegrate into nonexistence. Even in our own parish hall, sacristy, and library we worry over what will become of the Church of the future. And yet, if we only focus upon the future, attracting a certain subset of people, and keeping our numbers up, we are being the Church (the Living Body of Christ) all wrong.

During my first clergy conference—when the clergy people of the Diocese of Alabama gather for renewal, fun, and a little bit of worrying—I was participating in some serious fellowship exercises playing poker with Bishop Kee and some wise clergy. In the midst of this light-hearted moment, Kee subtly used this opportunity to teach those gathered a lesson, and not just one about playing cards. He asked me how I was enjoying being a young priest. I gave him a polished response fit for a seminary textbook. Instead of telling me that I did not need to put on airs for him, the Bishop while dealing out the cards told me a story.

When Kee was a young priest in the Diocese of Mississippi he loved and revered his bishop, and the more-experienced clergy of that era. The Episcopal Church in Mississippi and its diocesan camp had been the place where Kee was loved into that person who was called to serve as a priest in the Church. And while he respected the stalwarts of the Faith that had guided him, he also knew that they were human beings. They made mistakes, just like the generation before them. They struggled with change, just like the generations before them. They had great triumphs, just like the generation before them.

At the end of saying all this Kee leaned over to me and said, “I am getting to a time when I am part of that older generation, and when I was your age, I always wished that my elders had invited me into building the Church that was to come. This is your invitation to keep building the Church. And, if I ever get in the way of God’s work being done just pull on my arm and tell me to get out of the way.” I was speechless. I don’t remember saying anything else the rest of the night, even when I was the big winner taking $12 off the old priests and the bishop—a considerable amount of money given the buy-in. What I learned in that moment is that if the bishop is willing to be told to get out of the way, I must be willing to do that too.

Last week, I spent time with our youth on the EYC Work Week. Next week, St. John’s will be transformed into the land of Egypt as we put on our Vacation Bible School. In addition to these local moments of the Church of the future already being here, young people from all over our diocese will be a part of Camp McDowell, Foothills Day Camp, Sawyerville Day Camp, Special Session, Young People Paint Birmingham, and so much more this summer. I do not anticipate a time when I will need to pull the Bishop aside to tell him that he is in the way of God’s work being done; however, I do think we would all be wise to see that the Church of the future is actually the Church of right now!

Our other bishop, Bishop Santosh, when he visited with us on Sunday morning, described the beauty of the Church in how we take care of one another. We constantly reach across generations in this Church. Each cohort has something to contribute, but to be the fullest, richest, and healthiest Body we can be we must make room for all generations right now, not just down the line when they have proven themselves. There is no Church of the future, it will always be the Church right now, so how will we right now welcome all generations to God’s Table in God’s Church?