Comments for Jim Other sermons.                 

.I will shortly be turning sixty. And I find that few things seem more important these days than my discerning what God’s will is for me. I don’t mean this in a heavy or portentous way at all. It’s just that I think I have begun to taste how freeing and peaceful it can be to stop trying quite so hard to figure things out, and focus more on letting God speak to me. And being able to listen. I recently received a lovely letter from Joan Peddicord, whom, along with her partner Sharon Bottcher, many of you fondly remember. Included in what she sent was a poem by May Sarton. It is titled: Gestalt At Sixty. In part it goes like this:

How rich and long the hours become,
How brief the years
In this house of gathering,
This life about to enter its seventh          decade.

I live like a baby
Who bursts into laughter
At a sunbeam on the wall,
Or like a very old woman
Entranced by the prick of the stars
Through the leaves.

And now, as the fruit gathers
All the riches of summer
Into its compact world,
I feel richer than ever before,
And breathe a larger air.

I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweeter grace---
Learning to let go.

---
Praise God for his mercies,
For his austere demands,
For his light
And for his darkness.

This speaks to me. The task of spiritual discernment has grown in importance, because there is a peace and freedom and sense of grace that I have tasted, but can’t really say I have experienced in its fullness. So, to discern, to perhaps experience God’s darkness as well as God’s light, I’ll be spending five days this week in total silence at a Trappist monastery in Virginia.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that scripture has begun to speak to me in deeper ways. Take the passage this morning from Romans 12, one of my favorites. Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect." As I meditate on that verse, I am struck with how absolutely revolutionary and truly radical it is. Paul is describing a process – a process of spiritual discernment that turns our normal ways of decision making upside down. When most of us face decisions, we struggle to "figure out" what we will do. Right? Study it. Chew it over. Cudgel the old brains. Sweat a bit, and then hope for the right answer. But look at what Paul is saying. When you are faced with a decision, follow this process. First of all, detach from the world. At some level every Christian is, or should be, a non-conformist. Step outside the expectations of the normal world. The current set-up won’t help you. The current set-up wants only to keep you quiet and in bondage. So start by being a non-conformist. Second, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. This is really thinking outside the box. Thinking outside the world. Thinking cosmically. Let your thinking be transformed. And third, if you allow your mind to be so transformed, then you can discern the will of God. In other words, every challenge, problem or decision is about discerning the will of God. And not just the big, important, life changing questions, but it goes also for all the simple choices and challenges, great or small, we face on a daily basis. Whether you decide to pick up a book or turn on the television may not just be a matter of how to ease your boredom. It may really be a choice between God’s will for you in that moment, for that day, or for your life.

Mostly we think, do we not, that we save prayer for the big challenges, and go it alone on the little ones. But when Paul says "Pray without ceasing" I think what he is talking about is bringing a quality of awareness, a presence, an openness through each step we take during the day. This can be called mindfulness, or living in the now, or attentiveness to the presence, or simply prayer. And underlying this is the understanding that God’s will for you, that which you can discern, is, as Paul says, "Good and acceptable and perfect." Every decision we make, spiritually understood, is always a choice for or against God’s will. And God’s will can never be figured out. It can only be discerned.

It is interesting to me that, in this same passage, Paul talks about Christian community. Discernment has a solitary, deeply personal dimension to it. But discernment also takes place in community; through corporate prayer, love and support, and good advice. And Paul says that the Christian community is like the human body. Christ is the head, and we are each members of that body. I had lunch with Bob Brown last week, and we had a wonderful conversation about the life of a congregation. And what he was saying immediately made me think of Paul. Bob said, "The church isn’t a machine. It’s a living organism." The theologian Jacques Ellul wrote an influential book years ago titled: The Technological Society. His thesis was that organizations at every level of society – from the family to the state – are now viewed in the same way as we view machines. This attitude has many consequences, including the assumption that problems can be solved by the application of new and better techniques. Problems can be "figured out" and fixed. In this spirit, are technocrats really human beings at all, or are they replaceable parts? Of course many people view the human body itself as simply a machine. Which may be fine as far as the analogy goes, but it breaks down when we start reflecting on mind, and brain, and cognition, and spirit. And what of those stories about the person who receives a transplanted organ, and finds that the memories, thoughts, and feelings of the deceased donor have come along with it? Paul says the church is the body of Christ, and we are all members. But how does this happen and who are we as members? Paul says we become part of this mystical body by presenting our own bodies as living sacrifices. He says that is what spiritual worship is. He says we become members not simply as parts of the body (cogs in a machine), but that "individually we are members one of another." Members, not simply of some greater whole, but members one of another, yet distinctly individual.

Paul indeed says clearly that different members have different functions – teaching, ministering, giving, leading, generosity, and compassion. But how does that come about? Paul says, "We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us." Grace is what we experience when we have discerned God’s will for us. To experience grace is the sole purpose and end of our lives, and from that grace all gratitude and good works flow.

"When, in Matthew's Gospel this morning, Jesus tells Peter that flesh and blood have not told him that Jesus is the Christ, he is saying that Peter didn't "figure out" who Jesus was, he spiritually discerned that he was the Christ. And when Jesus admonishes the disciples to tell no one of this, he is saying, I believe, that no one can be told this or encouraged to figure it out. Each must discern who Jesus is in the same way Peter did." ^{See footnote}

Aren’t we called as a church to do all we can to help one another discern God’s will for our lives in a daily way, to experience God’s grace, and let that which is good and acceptable and perfect flow from it? I think so. That’s good news. When we worry about filling the volunteer job slots, meeting the budget, and all the institutional maintenance issues, we are tempted to see the church as machine. We see our congregational life as consisting of problems to be figured out and fixed. But Paul is saying something quite different. He is saying that the Body of Christ is a living spiritual organism and we can each become a member of one another in that organism. God has already given you gifts through grace that are waiting to be shared. Nothing is more important than the release of your gifts through the discernment of God’s grace in your life. What is God’s will for you? Can you look with wonder and appreciation at what God has already been doing through you? Can God’s grace be even more fully uncovered and set free? Then what a church we could be! AMEN.

^Footnote: Marvin Wunderlich pointed out that the Jesus Seminar scholars have a different take on the passage in John. They assert that Matthew was using the Peter character to describe the presence of the Christ in the early church (Matthew's community). It was how Matthew discerned the nature of Jesus, not necessarily Peter.       Back

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