A Deeper Reality

Propers: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 20), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is a tension in religion between the ecstatic and the dogmatic; that is, between the personal encounter and experience of God on the one hand, and the communal institutions built upon that strong foundation on the other. Ideally these two complement each other as two halves of the same whole. We gather in community, as the Body of Christ, in order to strengthen and support the life of faith we share as individuals and as families both in the world and in our homes.

Faith without community withers. There is no individualistic Christianity. But community without the life of faith—as in, say, Sunday worship without the daily reality of Christian prayer and practice—well, that collapses just as quickly. The base gets pulled out from underneath it, and so the entire edifice topples in upon itself. If what we’re doing here on Sunday makes no difference in our homes and our communities every other day of the week, then we’re already done here and we might as well close up shop. Go see what’s on TV.

Religion begins with a personal, ecstatic encounter with God, the sudden exposure to a higher power, a deeper reality. Think of Abraham’s dark night, or Moses and the burning bush. Think of Israel’s Exodus out from slavery or the astonishing conviction of the early Church that in Christ we meet God in the flesh. And institutions spring up to bring the goodness and beauty and truth of these revelations, these real encounters, to the entirety of the world. We write Bibles and Creeds. We enter into timeless, transcultural liturgies. We pass on the mysteries of the Sacraments as they were first passed on to us: the promises of God we can grasp.

And the purpose of all of this, mind you, is to bring us to encounter God for ourselves. That’s what all of this is for: the liturgy, the prayers, the Sacraments, the teachings, the holidays, everything. It’s all to take the encounter that the world has had with God in Christ Jesus and present it in its entirety to you. This is what Paul means when he writes about “so great a cloud of witnesses … looking to Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”

Imagine a bunch of people having real, personal encounters with God and then getting together to make sense of what they’ve experienced. It would not be unlike explorers in a new land gathering to draw up a map. The map is not the same as the personal experiences. It isn’t as real. But the map will be a great deal more helpful if we wish to go anywhere. The teachings and the rituals of the Church are the map. But the Christ we receive in the Sacraments and encounter out there in the world—He’s the reality. He is our experience of God.

And we haven’t done a good job expressing that. In fact, Western Christians have made a mess of the whole thing. The Church in the West falters because we’ve turned a transformative religion of living encounter into a mechanism for the status quo: a place where if you just say the right things, check the right boxes, put in the minimal effort, then you can continue your secular life unmolested and unchallenged by spiritual concerns, focusing instead on the stuff we all like to buy.

People leave the Church when it makes no difference in their lives, when they see it as a pointless distraction rather than as our gateway to the Source of reality. I sometimes read neopagan books—because they tend to be far more Christian than they would ever admit—and what I find there is this deep and indeed Christian thirst to see the world as sacred, to saturate our everyday lives of hearth and home with an authentic spirituality. Postmodern people are desperate for meaning. They are desperate for truth in a world where all seems relative. And that’s what we used to do best. That’s what the Church has lost in our pursuit of inoffensive banality.

The upshot is that the history of religion, and especially of Christianity, is littered with renewal movements and reformations. People rejuvenate dying doctrines and overthrow ossifying organizations. They leave the Church in order to find God. It is a process of death and resurrection. Indeed, every 500 years or so Christianity cleans house, pulling things old and new out from her treasury, rising from the grave just as her obituary is being read out to the world. We are in such a period now.

In the words of Fr Addison Hodges Hart:

Unless the churches [of the West] recover and promote their original tradition of contemplation, silence, and inner transfiguration, intended for every individual member … a reading of their sacred texts with the emphasis placed more on the spiritual senses … and reconcile themselves to being smaller and more discipleship-centered, then they will inevitably hemorrhage those who are earnestly seeking a real encounter with God.

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” Jesus proclaims in our Gospel reading this morning, “and how I wish it were already kindled. I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is complete.” He is speaking of the fire of the Holy Spirit, the very life and breath of God, who is breathed into us in our Baptism, so that He is a God nearby and not a God far off, a God who dwells within our very souls, making of our bodies His Temple.

The fire Christ yearns to kindle is the fire of union between God and Man, so that each one of us is so filled with the blazes of God’s own love that we are reforged and reborn, made into Temples of the Holy Spirit, members of the Body of Christ, sent out to bring new and eternal life to every corner of this fallen world! And the baptism with which He is to be baptized is none other than His Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven, with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train—the very same Baptism into which we are baptized: that is Christ’s own death, already died for us, and Christ’s own eternal life, already begun!

Christ is alive and real and still at work in our world, in our Church, in our very souls. Seek Him out in silence, in prayer, in humble supplication. Seek Him out in the leaves of the trees and the needs of the neighbor and the sacred hospitality of our humble, messy homes. Do not be afraid to question and to wonder and to reason. Wrestle Him in the Scriptures. Grasp Him in the Sacraments. Love Him by loving this world for which He died. He is nearer to you than your own jugular.

And when we quiet our minds, and calm our hearts, and trust His promise, we will find that the whole time we have been seeking Him, He has been with us all along. Then will we hear the still, small voice, whispering in the silence: “Be still and know that I am God.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.