Coming As We Are
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 17th Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
The human being, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is a “certain capacity for God.” We discover who we are, who we are called to be, in the movement toward ever “deeper” union and communion with God. True happiness, the peace that passes understanding, the ability to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of this fragile, precious, unpredictable thing we call human life, is ultimately found in God, as God is, and in God alone. Everything else that we place our trust in ultimately disappoints and leaves us as Robert Burns writes in “To a Mouse” with, “but grief and pain for promised joy.” Seeking security in things that are passing away breeds only anxiety—any attempt to find what is lasting and enduring elsewhere than in God, but a search for pigeon's milk.
Surrender to God, complete receptivity to the free gift of God’s unconditional love, is what we are created for, what our hearts yearn for, and what flourishes in a beautiful life well-lived. All prophetic action, acts of mercy, all witnessing to peace, and justice, and working for transformational change that this world might come to resemble more closely God’s dream for it, “comes down from above” as James says. When we consent to being little, poor, meek, powerless—willing clay for the potter’s hands—God shapes us gently into an unrepeatably beautiful expression here and now of the divine life, light, and love poured out for others.
None of this should sound too earth-shattering. I suspect we all know the basic outline of the path of Christian discipleship: the transmission from generation to generation, from disciple to disciple of Jesus’ Abba experience (his intimacy with the Father, that is, not when he heard “Super Trooper” for the first time). Everything we do—in our daily prayer, in our dwelling upon the true and lively word of scripture, in participating in the sacraments in weekly communal worship, in giving ourselves in self-forgetful love to our neighbor—are the means by which the divine light, life, and love breaks—as our hands and feet—into a broken and hurting world.
Beloved Community arises, is manifest and enacted, when each of its members turns towards the Risen Christ, recognizes his life living itself always already in them, and lets that life flow through them for others. Without anxiety about results we simply give ourselves wholeheartedly, unreservedly to the next thing—changing a light bulb, visiting a friend in the ICU, writing a letter to our congressperson, weeding the garden, or fixing a meal for a family suffering a loss. God doing God’s work in and through this funny little person here with all its quirks and foibles. A new heaven and new earth, one forgiven enemy at a time. One breath, one step, one plucked weed at a time.
That’s a little thumbnail of the grand, rather breath-taking and audacious vision of what we are doing here at the deepest level—being loved into loving and being that love in whatever way we are called to respond. Each act, done in love, with presence, has the potential to contribute to the eventual coming of the Kingdom. Nothing is too small in the eyes of God, nothing insignificant in God’s economy of love. Like the widow who gave her tarnished mite, we give whatever we have to God as our offering—even if all we have to give is our broken-heartedness, our grief, our dryness, our loneliness and desolation, our illness and pain: “To you, O Lord, my God.”
The trouble with all this, however, is that it doesn’t accord with how we’ve been enculturated to think of where happiness is to be found. In our self-reliant, hyper-individualist, consumer-oriented society we are conditioned to look outside ourselves for happiness: in relationships, substances, experiences, possessions. We seek lasting peace in what is going away and we suffer for it. As the theologian James Alison has remarked, the biggest problem with seeking final and lasting security in gaining the approval of others (as just one example), is that it might just work. Work, that is, until it doesn’t and it all comes crashing down like a cheap house of cards—or a house built on sand if you prefer Jesus’ similes to mine.
That’s what James is getting at in our epistle today. Trying to find happiness in outward circumstances is never going to work. Unexamined, unacknowledged, unconscious “cravings,” desires, demands, and requirements for how things should be set us against ourselves, one another, and against life as it is. We want what we don’t have. We try to get what we want and don’t succeed. “So you engage in disputes and conflict,” James writes, an unmistakable, mildly exasperated world-weariness in his tone. We ask wrongly—for what we think will make it all better (a new job, a new relationship, a better place to live)—when really what we need to do, James tells us, is simply to draw near to God, to “submit to God.” Yield, in other words, to an authority, a reality, greater than the fickle fluctuation of our whims and desires, and there (here) find peace.
Seeing clearly our various demands that life should be a certain way, that other people should be a certain way, is the first step on the way to drawing near to God. Our eventual yes to life, to God, is the fruit of knowing in detail all the ways we habitually say no: this isn’t it. We look steadily, curiously, and with no small dose of good humor and begin to see—over many years—all the little ways we place requirements on ourselves, others, and life itself. Gradually we learn to stop bothering ourselves, stop imposing our demands on others, and learn to embrace our life with a wholehearted yes, in the trust that this—this thing I didn’t expect, and don’t much like, that I would prefer to not have to go through—this is my way to God: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Each event welcomed as a fussing child in need of soothing, welcomed as Christ himself. This is it.
Encountering the other, we actually begin to let the other be other in their otherness rather imposing our will on them—”not your will but my will done,” is often how our relationships actually run! We fix, fuss, fidget with the other and never actually encounter who they truly are beyond our idea of them and who we need them to be for us.
Seeing this tendency in ourselves—how we can’t just be-with the other in love as they are—is sometimes painful. We begin to see, too, that this is, at its heart, a form of violence. James mentions that his readers “commit murder.” Now few of us here go to those lengths of literally murdering the other, but we do it metaphorically all the time. Imposing our unconscious demands and requirements on the other, trying to make them in our own image, is a form of violence. We metaphorically kill who they truly are. Cut off all contact. Dismiss, disown, and disinherit. Just go to the Homeless Youth Shelter and see for yourself.
And, of course, we do this because we do the same thing to ourselves. We try to be perfect, good, work hard, never make a mistake and project a calm, imperturbable equanimity—and in the process we are forced to deny, repress, or split off anything in ourselves that doesn’t accord with that idealized image. Sometimes, I think, church even encourages this. We get gussied up, put on our beatific smile, and keep up the act for an hour and a half, while inside everything’s a mess. It’s exhausting. Winding oneself up to be a certain way for an allotted period of time. Who needs it? One more place where we have to pretend? No thanks.
We need to know, to remember, that worship and prayer are never about feeling a certain way, looking a certain way, acting a certain way. In worship, as in prayer, we are invited to come just as we are, exactly how we are. No particular way to be. No special attire. Just as we are. Tired, exhausted, joyful, elated, empty, or bereft—we offer that to God to hold, and heal, and make whole. We put our cards on the table and give it to God: “Here I am, Lord. Do your work in me. Your servant is listening.” When we can learn to drop our defenses, and know ourselves as already known, already loved, something is unleashed in us. Those things we thought we had to deny, hide away, or repress are touched by love, by grace, and used, strangely, as God’s very vehicles for love shed abroad in the world. We stop chopping up life in good bits and bad bits, private bits and public bits, and we start to realize that we really are accepted—that oil of gladness really has been poured over every nook and cranny of our being.
When we shift from the grinding, effortful, graceless attempt to secure our happiness and our identity in terms of what James calls the “earthly,” or “unspiritual,”—the pursuit of power, possessions, and prestige—we find ourselves already home, our life hidden in with Christ in God. We stop our war with ourselves and the changes we sought through effortful striving or dutiful performance spontaneously, by grace, occur. We find ourselves more open, accepting, and welcoming of the other as well. Welcome emerges in our lives not as something we do at the doors of the church once a week, but as a disposition that seeps into our entire life, a place we come from. We welcome because we have found ourselves welcomed from those far flung highways and byways.
Learning to let ourselves be in God, we gradually learn to let the other be, too. We stop “murdering” their difference and begin to hold them in the love with which we know ourselves, forgiven sinners that we are, to be held. Who is greatest, questions of rank and hierarchy fall away and we stop measuring ourselves against the other. We relax back, like a little child, surrendered and at peace in Jesus’ lap, our head resting on his shoulder even in the midst of activity. Leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. Melting into his warm embrace—where do we leave off and he begin? Surrendered, at rest, little, and last, we’re instruments, finally, of God’s peace—servant of all, always journeying forth and always at home.