Hearing the Call to Stewardship

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 23rd Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this nagging feeling that contemporary Christianity is long on explanation and short on practicality. I remember hearing today’s passage from Mark as a young teen and being gripped by a simple question--“But how? How do I ‘love the Lord [my] God with all [my] heart, and with all [my] soul, and with all [my] mind, and with all [my] strength.’ ? What does that actually look like in my daily life?” The priest, not surprisingly, wasn't much help. “Come to church on Sundays,” seemed to be about all he had up his sleeve. The other 166 hours of the week were left unaccounted for. Not exactly Moses’ “keep them in your heart… recite them to your children and talk about them… at home or away… when you lie down and you rise.. Bind them on your hand, fix them on your forehead, write them on the doorpost and your gates.” Strange as it was, I intuited that what Moses and Jesus are calling us to is lifelong and life-wide practice of the presence of God. It seemed a bold and exhilarating prospect--to live my life in God like a fish swimming in the water. Total immersion in the presence 24/7. I thought the church would show me how to do it. Sadly, no. 

Loving God is not something that Moses and Jesus command “just cuz” as my children would say. It’s not something done out of grinding duty and obligation--that whole world of withered fig trees, tumbled temples, burnt offerings, and sacrifices that Jesus critiques. Loving God and our neighbor as ourself--embodying the commandments--is an expression of a full, flourishing, and, yes, happy life. The Shema is not pronounced so that we might grovel in servility at the feet of some despotic tyrant God. No, the summation of the law is a distillation of what it means to be a happy, joyful, compassionate person in a community of happy, joyful and compassionate persons: “that it may go well for you” as Moses says, that we might flourish (multiply) in the  land of milk and honey--aka any place and any moment where and when we are open and receptive to God’s presence and action in our lives and the lives of those stranger Christs we chance to encounter.

Loving God is always a response to God’s love that comes before anything else. The egghead theologians call it “prevenient grace”: “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn 4: 19). As a kid, much of what I experienced in church had the order precisely backwards. If I loved God enough, then God would love me back. Conditional love meted out according to my efforts. A terrifying, insatiable vending machine God I had to keep feeding with quarters. The life of following Jesus down the way of love that I might come to resemble him in some small, pointy-nosed, grumpy Canadian way reduced to making sure I had enough change in the ashtray for an ominously endless stretch of toll-booths.

If the life of discipleship is not about making sure I have an extra roll of quarters always on hand to feed the meter of grudging grace, then what is it? If God’s love comes always first, if it is truly Christ through whom all things were made, and in whom I live and move and have my being, then what does it mean, in concrete terms, to love God? It would have to mean a capacity to be open to what already is, an openness, willingness, receptivity, and attention to the love that is already on offer. And what prevents us from making contact with the presence of God’s love? What prevents us little fishes from noticing the sustaining water in which we swim?

Simone Weil (1909-1943), whom Albert Camus called, “the only great spirit of our times,” writes in her book Gravity and Grace: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” I often grumble about the “mindfulness industrial complex,” but my quibble is mostly about how consumer capitalism has co-opted and commodified mindfulness and divorced it from its roots as a universal spiritual discipline. Jesus is mindful. Jesus pays attention. He sees Bartimaeus at the side of the road. He feels someone reach out and touch him in the crowd, he tells us to keep awake, to watch, and that scene in Gethsemane (repeated three, three!, times) tells us all we need to know--Could you not keep awake for one hour?

So often, we are hijacked by our ruminative thinking. Our planning, our worries, our regrets, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others: these are actually what we bind on our hands and heads, what we paste over the door and the gates. And it makes us miserable. We get what we think is a funny look and off we go spinning a spooky tale of woe worthy of Edgar Allen Poe. Only later do we realize that the person had a toothache--it wasn’t about us at all! Loving God then is partially about noticing when we’re caught up, identified with our thoughts about people, things, God, and to gently release them. It’s not that we chase our thoughts away with a broom. That’s just more violence directed towards ourselves in the name of loving God. No, we simply smile at our thoughts as thoughts and learn to see that we are much more than our thoughts. There is a world of difference between noticing “I am having judgmental thoughts,” and just having judgmental thoughts.

When we start to see our thoughts as just thoughts, it makes a little space for God’s loving presence to break in. That’s why I think bird-watching is such a good metaphor for the life of discipleship. Behind a scrim of self-centered thinking the world of leaf rustle cloud tuft bird song--God’s loving presence that is always and everywhere--fades away and we’re left with a telenovela Gehenna of believed thoughts churning away. We notice that, smile at our overactive thinking, and come back to the one who’s been here, all along. We leave, in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, the world of “dead works to worship the living God.” And it is in encounter with the living God--being present to the presence--that we slowly start to recognize, become mindful of if you like, the God who is mindful of us--“What is man that you should be mindful of him? The son of man that you should seek him out?” There really is a table spread for us. The milk and honey cup is overflowing. We come back to knowing ourselves to be loved unconditionally and learn to live from that place of radical acceptance. We learn to see ourselves as God sees us—keeping the door of the heart/soul/mind/strength open consistently to receive the love constantly on offer.

Once that oil of gladness starts to penetrate the hardpan of self-hate--our constant judgment of ourselves as always falling short and never being enough--something shifts. Present, attentive, receptive to God’s presence, we wake up to the fact of our neighbor. Indeed, we might say our neighbor is never really our neighbor until we know ourselves in God. Our baptism is reaffirmed, made manifest and we find ourselves effortlessly pledged in loving, steadfast solidarity with all of creation. I am yours and you are mine--what affects you affects me and vice versa. Service to others as natural as scratching an itch.Those Bartimaeuses on the roadside whom we tried to shush and shoo away, those little ones against whom we raised the drawbridge and dug a moat, are us, members of the one body: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, is one.” Touched by love, we gradually become that very same love for others. The scales fall from our Damascus Road eyes and those to whom we were once blind swim into focus.

That’s what church is for--to gather in beloved community around the Beautiful One--Christ Jesus--and to give ourselves away to him in love that we might be touched by that love and embody that love in our God-given ministry: the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives. Dostoyevsky tells us that “only beauty will save the world.” Only the strange, rugged, touching, feeding, healing, dying and rising beauty of the Beautiful One has the power to make us beautiful. “If we turn our mind toward the good,” Weil says, “it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.” 

That grand vision of beauty saving the world from the ugliness of division, discrimination, environmental degradation, grinding poverty and endless war starts with each and every one of us hearing that call--”Hear O Israel!” Hear O Tyler! Hear O St. Marks!--and to turn and walk the way of happiness, goodness, beauty, and truth.  We’re called to be stewards of making space for God to get at us (in daily prayer, practicing Weil’s loving attention to God’s presence in daily life, worship in community, getting to know this strange Jesus person as revealed in the Gospels). All the little holy habits that are aimed at creaking the door of the heart open for love to whisper in. We’re called to be stewards of this place--that it might remain a house of God for all people to be touched, set alight, and transfigured by love. We’re called to be stewards for justice--upholding the dignity of every human being and loving our nonhuman neighbors: mountains, rivers, trees, the sustaining air and threatened species. We’re called to portion our time, our talent, and our treasure in such a way that the living God is at the center of our lives. 

There’s that old joke about Episcopalians that when they’re baptized everything goes under the water except their wallets. It’s somehow “uncouth” to talk about money in church. It’s somehow not “spiritual.” But life-long and life-wide formation--those other 166 hours of the week that so concerned me as a kid--means what we do with our  money matters to God as well. Not as membership dues. Not as a mere fee for service. Not in order to be in good standing with God, but as a holy, happy, beautiful habit--a way of ordering our lives that witnesses and testifies to the living God, the Beautiful One stopped, standing still, and calling us home to himself to make us beautiful like him: that beauty indeed might save the world.