As many members of my congregation know, I am fascinated
by silence and encountering God in silence.
I am by nature an introvert, finding rest and recharge in solitude. The hardest part of any Sunday morning is not
the worship or the preaching, but the fellowship time that follows. In many ways, this move toward silent
practice has been a natural progression, my own response to leading small
congregations in a time of decline. As
congregations see more and more open space among the pews and as the occupants
of those pews become greyer, anxiety grows.
A pastor who was trained primarily to teach and preach and lead worship is asked to deal with financial shortfalls,
tasked with growing attractive youth programs as well as occasionally trimming
church hedges due to a lack of able volunteers.
It
was sitting in silent prayer that taught me not to take on the anxiety of others. It was what the mystics called mental prayer
that reestablished my connection with the solidity of God’s grace. I rediscovered that God loved me and I could
love God simply by doing nothing but being.
My identity was not found in establishing a mega-church or pretending to
be Pastor Happy McSmiley, who loves everybody and whom everybody loves. My identity is grounded on the platform of
God’s grace and the greatest gift I can give to any congregation, in growth or
decline, is to show others that they are already standing on the solidity of
that grace. This also means that the
greatest gift that congregations can give is to introduce people to Jesus, the
one who walks on water and invites everybody to step out of the boat and join
him. People can find yard sales and
spaghetti suppers anywhere, but the church is the place where we can encounter
Jesus in Word, in sacrament and in community.
And
this is why discipleship matters, not because it makes God happy (remember, God
is already infinitely happy with you), but because it reminds us of where we
are and who we are in God; because it helps us share God’s love, hope and joy
with the world around us.
Another
influence in my understanding of discipleship in the past few years has been
sitting in meditation with a local, Zen Buddhist sangha. I know that in sharing this, some purists
will bristle, wondering about my loyalty to the Christian faith. What would Herr Luther say? I don’t agree with everything that Buddhism
proclaims, but the understanding of the relationship to faith and life is
helpful. In the Buddhist tradition as I
have experienced it, life itself is practice.
We are always growing. We grow as
we practice and we practice to grow.
There is no goal to attain. There
are no boxes to check off. The purpose
of life is to practice and it is when we practice that we are truly alive.
As I
have come to understand it, the life that Jesus lived, the span between the
birth and the death that the Apostles’ Creed glosses over, is also a gift of God’s
grace. His life, walking with his
students, sharing bread, healing the sick, loving the rejected, is a model for
what it means to be truly alive. When
Jesus, in the gospel of John says, “I came that they may have life and have it
abundantly, “ (John 10:10) he was not talking about some future heaven. He was talking about our lives here and now
as a reflection of that heaven. When we
are walking the path of Christ, when we are practicing our faith, both in
private acts of devotion and public acts of mercy and love, eternal life begins
now.
As
the church redefines itself in new era, our viability will not be found in
getting our worship just so. It will be
found in walking the path of Christ together, practicing together, and living now
in eternal life together.
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