Mystery

I'm going to take a break from writing for a bit. I'd like to say it's for some introspective reason, but it's mainly just because I found a new mystery series. And Kirt's on night shift so I can read way after midnight. I'll binge until I read through them all or they become too predictable. 

There were a couple of requests for sermons so I'm going to put them on here until I exhaust Inspector Gamache. 

I'm too lazy to edit. 

Matthew 11:16-19
[Jesus spoke to the crowd saying:] 16“To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,
 17‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
  we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; 19the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

I am not a big fan of spirituality. I actually think it’s one of the worst things to happen to Christianity next to our obsession with the idea of the angry God killing his Son instead of us. I think they are two extremes related to our shame of flesh. They go hand and hand along with rapture stuff, which we don’t buy into at all, cause all of these things try to get us out of life in the flesh. They all try to convince us that true faith is about escaping this body and this world and added bonus all the jerks around us.

Trying to escape the world and call it faith is always a heresy. Anything that takes us out of this world or seeks to distance us from the incarnation, where God chose to reveal God’s self in the flesh, is an anathema to the heart of our faith.  We’ve manipulated Jesus into a well-behaved, always wearing white, really boring and unaffected by the things around him but always ready with a great lecture on what we should be doing kind of savior. We tend towards a Jesus who is very clean and incredibly dull but loves us from a healthy distance and promises us an eternal paradise with no sagging body parts and no annoying people.

Maybe you’ve escaped that cultural image of Jesus, but at it’s core is the old Christian temptation to somehow avoid or at least correct God’s deep investment in creation. A faith that separates us from this world is not Christianity. A faith that disconnects us from our bodies, each other, or the gritty world is not a faith grounded in the crucifixion and resurrection of the flesh of God. A faith that allows us to judge those around us because we are more spiritual keeps us from loving those around us.

Jesus is scandalous. Two thousand years ago as well as today. He refuses spirituality, or at least he refuses to define God’s will as something that can be separated from creation. God’s desire is not to escape or destroy creation, but to reconcile and redeem it. 

I got thinking about all this when in our Gospel reading, Jesus acknowledges that folks are calling him a glutton and a drunkard. Don’t think that justifies eating and drinking too much in your lives, but it must have seemed appalling to the religious folks of Jesus’ time to see Jesus eating and drinking with delight as well as hanging out with unclean folks. It just didn’t seem very holy or very spiritual.

There were lots of spiritualities during Jesus’ time too. The Essenes were a religious group who isolated themselves and kept strict purity codes. They thought the end was coming and sought to have a perfect community and start a new kingdom. The Gnostics pursued a secret knowledge so their inner light could be restored to God often by forsaking their bodies. The Stoics sought to escape creation through logic and discipline. The Sadducees and Pharisees kept strict dietary and purity laws.

Religious folks have always been trying to move beyond the mess of our bodies and this world to get closer to God. 

But then Jesus, the one we say is the very enfleshment of God, shows up and makes a mess. He doesn’t give us nine steps to escape aging, death, suffering, or the jerks around us. He enters deeply into it all, he drinks and eats, he gathers and loves those who have been cast off as unwanted, he suffers and dies. 

What if God’s desire for our world and all eternity is not to escape it or for us to be calm, disembodied spirits, but for us to be present here and now looking for God’s presence? Maybe churches need to stop trying to be spiritual and start advertising our fleshiness- Holy Church of Carnality. We don’t love and forgive in a spiritual sense; that’s something that can only be done in the mess of the flesh.

The church needs some flesh. That’s why this table and meal is at the center of worship, but eating lunch with a bunch of crazy kids who are telling you stories about their families, often a mix of comedy and tragedy, is a glimpse of God deep in the flesh. All summer I get to be a guest at God's table and have my faith restored moment by moment. 

Not always in a sweet way. They make me zany sometimes. We get frustrated with each other, sometimes lies are told, excuses made, hurtful names are called. We wrestle through the ugly and stay in relationship, stay at the table. That's a God sighting. Not just the beauty of sunsets, but we see God in the work of living in truthfulness and grace.

The church should be messy and fleshy. Being in relationship with a God who insists on love and forgiveness is not an otherworldly, mystic experience. It's showing up in the flesh.

I’m not making this up either. I included a passage on the back of the bulletin from Mark Allan Powell who was here for synod assembly. He goes into greater detail about the glutton and drunkard, but I want to read the last paragraph for you.

Spirituality is not to be achieved by negating the world or by renouncing what life has to offer us; rather, true spirituality is experienced through recognizing the world as God’s world and embracing all that life has to offer us. People who love Jesus must allow no divide between “spirituality” and “worldliness.” In Jesus, all that is spiritual takes on earthly flesh and becomes worldly. For people who love Jesus, then, the quest for spirituality is also a quest for earthiness and humanity. The more we love God, the more we will love God’s world.