Spiritual

Midweek Vespers
The Twenty-Fourth Week After Pentecost

A Reading from Luke’s Gospel:

While he was speaking, a Pharisee invited him to dine with him; so he went in and took his place at the table. The Pharisee was amazed to see that he did not first wash before dinner. Then the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? So give for alms those things that are within; and see, everything will be clean for you.

“But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others. Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces. Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.”

One of the lawyers answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too.” And he said, “Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them. Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. So you are witnesses and approve of the deeds of your ancestors; for they killed them, and you build their tombs.

“Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation. Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

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.

A few years ago it was very popular for people to profess that “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” And this is very American, very individualistic. A cynic might be tempted to translate such sentiment as, “I don’t want to commit to anything, but I don’t want you to think that I’m shallow either.”

Cynicism aside, however, the distinction between religion and spirituality can be a useful one, if properly parsed. Religion, in our context, tends to imply community, whereas spirituality has more to do with individual, personal practice. And I think that for the most part we would all prefer the latter, for indeed it is easier: to approach spiritual matters on our own terms, in our own time, not having to put up with the messy foibles of community and restrictions of religious structure.

But religion and spirituality shouldn’t be an either/or question. It ought to be, indeed must be, an affirmation of both. Religion and spirituality are intertwined in much the same way as the body and the soul. Religion alone is a corpse; spirituality alone is a ghost. Only together do they make up a living, breathing soul, capable of anything significant or worthwhile.

Religion provides the framework, the structure, upon which we may thrive, the way that a trellis allows vines to climb, grow, and flourish. But without individual time taken to nourish the questions of our soul, that framework is largely useless. Religion thus is like a gym providing us with the equipment that we need, but we still have to put in the effort. We still need to cultivate our relationship to God.

Of course, as a friend of mine recently pointed out, most gyms operate upon the assumption that people will pay for membership and then never show up. Their business model is predicated, in fact, on the majority of folks being rather lazy. Sadly, churches can be a lot like that too. People give a little money, show up once in a while for an hour on a Sunday maybe twice a month, and figure that’s that. They don’t have to be religious; that’s what they’re paying the pastor for.

But pastors are like teachers. We can only explain it to you; we can’t understand it for you. Our religious life together is meant to foster a healthy spiritual life at home, in the office, every day of the week. We, your clergy, want you to pray together, to read the Bible together, to question your understandings of who you think God is, question what the Church teaches and why. And then bring those questions to the community, to discuss them together. Pastors love to tackle faithful questions. It’s pretty much what we do.

Without your spirituality, the church is just an empty building, and religious ritual nothing but a procession of meaningless motions. But when we know that Christ is God for you—when we see clearly how He comes to meet us in Word and in water, in bread and in wine—then it is revealed to us how this space is filled to bursting with the hosts of Heaven, the choirs of angels, the everlasting fire of the Holy Spirit’s flame.

Religion and spirituality, the communal and the individual, the universal and the personal, God and Man: all are one in Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. When He is our focus—not our institutions, not our individual experiences, but Jesus Himself—then it all comes together. The center holds in Him.

Indeed, when people sneer at religion, at Christianity, at the Church, they’re reacting to our hypocrisy, our legalism, our rigidness, and our sin. But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who rejects Jesus Christ.

The central message of the Church, the Good News of Jesus—that God so loved the world that He became one of us, the Word made flesh, to forgive us our sins, heal our wounds, raise our dead and save our world—that we reacted to such unmerited, superabundant mercy with violence and murder—yet He forgave us from the Cross, as we murdered Him, and used the very death we poured out upon Him as the instrument of our salvation—nobody rejects that.

We may think it too good to be true (which I think is a misunderstanding of how truth and goodness work) but nobody denies that the Gospel is Good News.

In our reading this evening, Jesus rightly condemns the hypocritical and hidebound sins of religious people like me: our self-righteousness, our ineffectiveness, our tendency to live in our own heads, to the neglect and judgment of our neighbors. Yet He Himself was perfectly religious. He observed all the requirements of the Covenant and the Law. He celebrated every holiday, from Passover to Hanukkah. But of course He infused His religion with His own Holy Spirit.

We can never separate the truth of God from the needs of our neighbor. As Richard Rohr pointed out, philosophers tend toward the universal and poets to the particular, but it’s the mystics who show us how we in our lives can encompass them both. And the mystics always speak of love.

Bottom line: you don’t have to choose between religion and spirituality. They only really work together. And the reason they are worth our time—the reason we should bother with them at all—isn’t about earning Heaven or avoiding hell. Rather, it’s about becoming aware of the gifts, the mercies, the love of God lavished upon us here and now, and the freedom we are given to share these gifts with everyone in need, regardless of merit or belief. Jesus is alive in the Body of the Church.

Now go and be that Body for your neighbor in his need.

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