Stones

Propers: The Fifth Sunday of Easter, AD 2023 A

Homily:

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

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

Whenever I feel exhausted, whenever I feel as though I’m at my wits’ end, I hitch up my dogs, put an audiobook on my headphones, and take a long and meandering walk through town and country. This calms and replenishes me. It reconnects me to nature, to community, to other species, and to other eras, other minds, as I’m usually listening to something about history.

In other words, walking grants to me a moment of transcendence, when the stresses and vicissitudes of life pass away, and I am connected to a greater and truer reality. Long walks and good books are an integral part of my spiritual practice. They grant the rejuvenation I need to be a better, healthier pastor, father, husband, and neighbor. For indeed, the transcendence which each of us seeks is really God seeking us.

In our epistle this morning, St Peter writes: “Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” He’s talking about a temple. That’s what a house of God is: a temple. But this house of which he speaks is not to be as the Temple in Jerusalem, limestone and dolomite. That Temple was held as corrupted, and soon thereafter destroyed.

Ours is to be a spiritual temple, and “spirit” here has a rather specific meaning. Spirit is eternal life, the life of God, beyond the ravages of time and decay. This is in direct contrast to psyche, the mind or soul that breaks down with the body. If you want to build a temple that cannot be destroyed, it has to be made up of stones that cannot be broken down: eternal stones, living stones, spiritual stones. When the pieces are invincible the edifice will stand.

So—how do we build ourselves up into a spiritual house?

As with so many things regarding the Big Questions of life, we must here define our terms. How is spirituality different from religion? Some will say that religion is confining while spirituality is liberating. To such folk religion stands for whatever they don’t like, and spirituality for whatever they do. Others then will counter that spirituality is just religion that’s been mugged by capitalism; it’s just targeted marketing. I’m not sure that such dichotomies are helpful.

A better definition for our purposes, methinks, is that religion is communal and spirituality individual. Religion is faith within family; spirituality is faith within you. And I think it clear then why each needs the other. A body can only be healthy if all of its members are healthy. And members can only be healthy if the body as a whole is hale. So it is with stones and temples.

Organized religion in the West is on the wane, while alternate spiritualties are on the rise. This should come as no surprise, given the overall cultural and economic trends in our society. We live in an overly individualistic age. It’s not that people are rejecting organized religion specifically; it’s that we’re rejecting all organizations, all of civil society, anything that requires an in-person voluntary commitment: book groups, bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, what have you.

We’re as supernatural as ever. We still believe in God and ghosts and horoscopes and sasquatch. What we don’t believe in is each other. We stopped building porches out front, in favor of patios behind.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Back during the American Revolution, Colonials felt alienation and exasperation with the centralized British state. Conspiracy theories ran rampant. People didn’t trust the courts, the legislature, the king, their fellow citizens, or the mainline establishment church. Sound familiar? So people left the Church of England for alternate expressions of a more personal spirituality, which back then meant the Baptist and Methodist movements.

The same is true today. Mainline Protestant denominations, which, for better or worse, set themselves up as the bulwark of postwar American identity, are now cratering, while nondenominational churches have shot up 73% in a decade. Much of that is a result of alienation, of socioeconomic forces beyond our control. People don’t have a tradition; people don’t have a people. And this is not necessarily a failure on our part. That a tradition is not popular does not take away its worth.

Lutherans worked hard to enter into the mainline, and it seems that we did so just in time for that mainline to fall. If people don’t like the establishment, and you are part of that establishment, then people don’t like you. What we probably should have done is just to keep Church weird, to offer something beyond the banalities of contemporary culture, something transcendent and true. Jesus, in other words: we should have clung to the wild and untamed Christ.

You see, there are two great methods, tried and true, to grow an American church. The first is to double down on the American side of things. Get rid of Jesus, or at least defang Him. Pull that Cross down from the wall, move the Baptismal Font out of the way, and remake your sanctuary into a stage. Find yourself a preacher who sounds more like a salesmen, and gin him up to serve you up the Big Mac of religions: cheap, predictable, comforting, and empty.

Sign on the dotted line, accept Jesus as your personal savior, show a little enthusiasm, and heaven everlasting’s your reward. Now you’re free to go and buy stuff! Of course, you have to give generously in order for God to be then generous with you; one must spend money to make money, right? Prosperity Gospel 101. Church is a business, after all, and you’ve got to sell the product. Faith then becomes all about the numbers, people and profit, tabulated, quantified, and monetized. Yet what shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

The other method to grow a church is also quite simple, keeping in mind that simple ain’t the same thing as easy. Come to worship every Sunday, unless you’re sick. Pray every day. Read your Bible regularly. And get active in some small group. You do that, and I guarantee that your congregation will grow. Maybe not in metrics, maybe not at first, though I suspect those will get thrown in eventually, but in depth and strength and meaning and joy. The size of His Church is not Jesus’ true concern. What He asks of His followers is that we give a damn.

The secret to growing a church, in other words, is to actually be the Church. Go figure.

Christian spirituality is all about rhythm, repetition, and the eternal return. That doesn’t sound too sexy in a culture that’s all about the next and novel thing. In a world of constant change, we mistake eternity for boredom. But the Spirit is a kind of life beyond the shifts of time, the fulness of pleroma. And the path of true religion winds not in a line but a spiral, ever returning to things we thought we knew, and seeing them afresh, as though for the first time.

The Church can only be made up of Christians, and Christians can only be formed by the Church. Beware of any preacher who tells you not to change. Not because you have to earn salvation; you don’t. Not because you’re unworthy of love; you are most worthy in Jesus’ eyes. But simply because salvation ought to be our liberation—that’s what salvation means—and what sort of liberation is it, if we simply go back to living as slaves?

I cannot be a pastor without a church. And the Church cannot be herself without each and every one of you. You are the stones who build up the Temple. You are the members of the Body of Jesus Christ. If we would seek religion together, to be a priestly people for a world in need, then we must each attend to the Spirit within us, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

We are journeying together, in a tradition of limitless treasures. In Jesus, you have everything you need, and we all have each other, that God at the last may be all in all. For now, we each must grow as Christians, for the world which Jesus loves.

I do not tell you this to lay more burdens on your backs. Lord knows, we have burdens enough and to spare. Rather, I tell you this for your liberation. I preach the Good News, that Jesus sets us free.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

 

 

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