On the Way

Propers: Reformation Sunday, AD 2021 B

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.

About 40 years back, a Methodist minister by the name of James Fowler proposed that religious faith progresses through a series of maturing stages. As we age, as we grow, he believed, our faith grows with us—or at least it ought to. It’s not that God gets bigger, of course, but that our understanding of Him can expand. And this is not a new idea. Every serious religious or spiritual tradition speaks of a journey of faith, a pilgrimage throughout our entire lives.

Only in America do we get this idea that you can sign a Chick Tract and that’s it. You’ve checked off the box marked “faith” and you can go about your life as before. The notion of spiritual progress, spiritual growth, has largely been lost to us. Here’s how Fowler put it: he said there are roughly seven stages of faith development, largely based on age, but that it isn’t simply a linear progression. Like the stages of grief, we can get stuck at one, or we can go back-and-forth between a few.

The first, Fowler proposed, was primal faith, from birth to age two. This is when we learn whether the universe, and by extension the divine, are trustworthy and nurturing. They say that “mother” is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children. That’s what primal faith is. We learn early on whether the world is kindly or cruel.

From three to seven years we enter the intuitive-projective stage. Religion here is learned mainly through experiences, stories, images, and the people we encounter. Do we take our kids to Church? Do we pray before meals? Do we celebrate Christmas?  “Give me a boy to the age of seven,” wrote Ignatius of Loyola, “and I will show you the man.” This is the age of our earliest childhood memories. What shall we recall?

Next is the mythic-literal faith, found primarily in school children. At this stage we are most concerned with justice, with fairness. God is often highly anthropomorphic: we start to think of the divine as a human writ large, which we didn’t before. Any metaphors or symbols found in the Scriptures are taken at face value, whether we’re talking about six days of Creation or removing the mote from your eye. It is a curiously modern phenomenon that expects adults either to remain at this level of understanding or to reject faith entirely.

From age 12 to adulthood the stage of synthetic-conventional faith is opened unto us. This one’s all about conforming to authority to develop identity. In the time that Fowler was writing, in his own context, this would be people adhering to the respectable mainline of Protestantism. But today this stage looks quite different. Conforming to authority today largely means the rejection of organized religion, instead choosing one of two polarized political identities which nonetheless both uncritically accept the worldview of consumerism. Oh, you say you’re spiritual but not religious?

Well, woop-de-doo. So’s everyone else.

Our late 20s and early 30s are typically a period of angst and struggle, Sturm und Drang. The challenges of life, along with greater maturation, allow us to take responsibility for our individual feelings and beliefs. We open ourselves to greater complexity, especially as regards religion, but we must also grapple with the conflicts and contradictions inherent in our faith. This is the individuative-reflective stage of development, according to Fowler.

From your mid-30s on up, one begins to be susceptible to the infamous midlife crisis. Behind the symbols of our faith tradition, we start to acknowledge paradox and transcendence. We find that truth is complex, multidimensional, and interdependent, so that it cannot be encapsulated in any one particular statement. All the truths we know point beyond themselves to the transcendent Truth beyond words. This Fowler called the conjunctive stage of faith. In the words of Carl Jung, “Life really does begin at 40. Up until then, you are just doing research.”

If someone has reached the conjunctive stage of faith, that’s no small thing. They can count themselves happy.

But the seventh and final of Fowler’s stages is the rarest and really the goal of us all. It is enlightenment, or what he called universalizing faith. This is the faith taught by the Buddha and the Christ, by sages and saints throughout history. At this stage one no longer worries about the ego or pride. One loses the defensiveness so endemic in our culture, and instead becomes concerned with what the Bible calls ἀγάπη, that is, spiritual love, unconditional love, shown to everyone and everything that we encounter. It is reflexive compassion, true loving-kindness.

If “wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience,” as David Bentley Hart has claimed, then this is it. This is sainthood. And it is achieved not by individual effort, not by works prescribed by the Law, but by grace through faith. Stay to the spiritual path, simply walk the Way with Jesus, through thick and thin, entrusting to Him all your works and fears and sins and hopes, and the universal love of Christ, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, will flow into you, through you, beyond you—maybe not all the time, but as a foretaste of the feast to come, as glimpses of truth caught in the shards of a shattered mirror.

I’m not talking about works-righteousness. I’m not talking about earning Heaven or assiduously avoiding hell. I’m telling you what religion is for. It is to be daily conformed to the person of Christ, ever becoming more like Him, ever becoming one in Him, so that when we all are one, we might finally be individuals at last.

This is not how you get into Heaven; this is Heaven. This is what Heaven looks like on earth, what resurrection looks like while we are yet still alive. And we are upheld in this, upheld in the Way, by this community of sainted sinners, by the Word of God proclaimed and rightly preached, by the holy Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, so that we might daily die to ourselves and daily rise forgiven with the life of Christ within us. It is death and resurrection every day. This is what Jesus means when He tells us to take up our cross and to follow Him.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord—through the prophet Jeremiah—when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they … say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Sound familiar? I hope so. Because that reading sounds to me an awful lot like the stages of faith that we’ve been discussing this morning. To walk with God throughout our life, to grow in faith and in love toward all, is to internalize the Law of God, internalize the divine. Why else do you suppose that Christians eat the Body and drink the Blood of Jesus Christ on Sundays?

And we shall all know the Lord for ourselves, not just because our pastor said so, not just because we went to Sunday School, but because we’ve walked the path of faith through life, and our understanding of Jesus has grown within us, grown with us. “Every year you grow,” said Aslan, “you will find me bigger.”

Reformation Sunday isn’t just about denominational triumphalism, let alone cultural identity: a fat German friar sticking it to wealthy Italian prelates. Reformation is about how the Church regularly returns to the treasury of Scripture and tradition and takes out from its stores treasures both old and new. It is about returning, ever returning, to the Way of Jesus Christ; about dying to ourselves and to the anti-Christ within; to rise anew as Jesus, fresh from the tomb, resurrected for a world still very much in need of Him.

Things don’t look good for the Christian West. We put a heck of a lot more faith in the Holy River Amazon than we do into love of God and neighbor. But the truth is that things have never looked good for the Church. Every age becomes a crisis. “Christianity has died many times and risen again,” wrote Chesterton, “for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.” Things can look discouraging in terms of numbers, in terms of cash. But the Bible makes it clear that God has never cared about such things. He does His best work with the few and the poor.

I can tell you that easily the best theology of my lifetime, and really for several generations, is being written right now. Seeds are being planted for a flourishing of faith that you and I will likely never see on this side of the grave. Leave the future to God, in His loving and crucified hands. He will reform His Church as He has in every generation. Focus instead on reforming your soul, in walking the Way of Jesus, in trusting His truth and His mercy all throughout your life.

Be faithful in a faithless time—and He shall make you His saints.

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