The Path of Discipleship - Self-Control and Grace

The apostle Paul lists self-control as one of the fruits of Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).  As we deepen our lives in faith, self-control can be one of the byproducts.  Those who participate in efforts such as the “Get Rid of It” challenge are practicing a discipline of disconnecting from “things.”  As we learn to let go of the “things” of life, they cease to have control over us, our thoughts, our attention and our time.  We learn to say, “No” or “Not now” or at least “Not yet,” and in doing so we gain self-control.

                The process seems great in theory and yet many people have trouble with self-control.  As Paul wrote to the Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)  How many times have you tried to start a new habit or avoid an old one?  How many times have you said, “This is the last time…”?  And yet there you are with another donut or another cigarette or streaming another episode.  There you are letting life slip by or doing the very things that are supposed to make life shorter.  There you are pretending (as we all often pretend) that God is not there, or if God is there, God doesn’t really matter.

                Yet often it is not a conscious choice, choosing things over God.  Things just seem to have a way of crowding the divine out of our minds.  There is some pretty strong biology that goes into this as well.  Most of the things we get obsessed about stimulate or over-stimulate the pleasure centers of our brains.  Part of the reason that people are drawn to fast food is that there is still a primitive part of us that sees the advantage of a meal with high levels of sugar and fat (cheap calories) with high levels of salt (easy electrolytes).  We are only about 10000 years from life on the savannah, where such a meal would be a prize. 

                And then there are the whole slew of things that are simple distractions from unpleasant tasks.  Why do your taxes when “Game of Thrones” is about to start?  I’ll do this after one more video, one more dog-shaming meme.  It’s not that any of these are necessarily bad in and of themselves.  I like a good dog-shaming picture as much as the next guy:  

He knew not what he did.

It is when we cannot stop, when time slips away as we sit there in a pixelated daze, when we cede control to the device in front us, that distraction becomes more problematic. 

                There are all sorts of strategies for developing good habits and controlling bad ones.  Sites like Habitica and SuperBetter try to gamify the work.  There are also plenty of tracking apps to help the process.  Recently, I have found it helpful to keep a journal tracking the time between lapses and simply trying to add an hour the next time.  I have always had a weakness for sweets.  So if I eat a cookie and then eat another 12 hours later, the next time I will try to wait 13 hours.  It’s not perfect, but I find once the gap is large enough, the thoughts are less obsessive and the time added gets longer.

                The process is not perfect because I am perfectly human and I live in a world with easy access to sweet treats.  For all the effort and for all the good intentions, sometimes I stumble.  Sometimes I want to scrap the whole process.  Sometimes I just need to start over.

                And the good news is that this whole process is undergirded by the grace of God.  It turns out that God doesn’t love me less because I eat a cookie.  It turns out that God doesn’t love me less because I make a mistake.  It turns out that God will continue to love me as I stumble over the path of discipleship, that God has made space for me even as I struggle to make space for God; that God remains with me as I struggle, as I give up, as I start over.  Remember that the path of discipleship itself is a gift, even the struggles on that path.  We walk together following Jesus, the one who loves us when we stand still and loves us as we stumble and loves us as we walk.

The Path of Discipleship - Organization as a Spiritual Discipline

I have always struggled with organization.  No matter how hard I try, my workspace eventually falls victim to entropy, devolving into a number of piles of papers and books.  The piles are not random but fall in categories.  This one is full of administrative documents.  That one is a stack for sermon preparation.  I currently work in a congregation that has minimal administrative support, so I am the one who sorts the mail each day, routing bills to the bookkeeper, checks to the counters and the huge monthly catalog of cleaning supplies to the property group mail slot.  But then a day comes when there is no time for sorting; another stack forms, papers waiting to disperse.

                I will be careful in talking about organization not only because I struggle with it but also because effective organization is subjective.  One mind looks at a busy table and sees clutter.  Another mind looks at the same table and sees connections.  One person can find nothing without a careful filing system.  Another can pull a necessary paper directly from the stacks without pause.

                This will not be an article about a particular system of organization, instead it will focus on organization as a form of spiritual discipline.  The idea is that as our lives and spaces become more organized we are able to open up more room to pay attention to God.  Think about a schedule, how you spend your time.   A common reason that people will cite for staying away from worship or other forms of spiritual practice is a lack of time.  There are so many things that have to be done, so many tasks and projects.  Yet if you were to break down the time available in sixteen waking hours, how much time could be recovered if we could just remove some unintentional clutter? 

Here I am making an important distinction between the intentional and the unintentional.  For instance, social media can be a great way to connect with friends and family.  I know of clergy who build Facebook time into their schedule as a way to connect with members of their congregation.  Yet social media can also be a deep rabbit hole of lost time, a trance of clicking and liking, only to wake realizing that after two hours you don’t really care about the fish tacos Larry in accounting had last night.  With intention, it is a helpful tool.  With a lack of intention, it becomes a waste of time.

The call to worship at the beginning of Zen meditation is, “Great is the meaning of birth and death.  Awake, awake each one.  Do not waste this life.”  Jesus is remembered several times saying simply, “Keep awake!”  The first step in seeing organization as a spiritual discipline is realizing that organization is about paying attention to the moment, treating it as holy, being stewards of the time and space we have been given by God.  It turns out that there is an hour or two a week for worship if we choose it.  It turns out that there is ample time sit with God, ample time to admire God’s good creation, ample time to show kindness, if we choose to have it which means intentionally choosing not to lose it.

The same can be said for the assorted stuff that piles up on desks and coffee tables, in basements and storage units.  Many of us have more space than we expect when we choose to remove things we don’t need, when we  stop treating “things” like treasure and start treating “things” like the stewards we are supposed to be: to be used, to be shared, to be disposed of or passed on when appropriate.

A discipline develops when we create a regular time to organize and sort.  It doesn’t have to be long, maybe 10 minutes at the beginning of the day and 10 minutes at the end, time to plan and time to evaluate.  Time to do the cleanup that Mrs. Brenner told me to do in first grade, “Putting things away is part of the play.”  Yet again, this is not just cleaning up, but rather it is creating time and space for the holy in our lives, and as such it becomes holy work.

I should add a final disclaimer, a reminder of the nature of grace, that the love of God is not dependent on a clean house, an organized desk or a well-executed action plan.  You will make plans, and life will happen in spite of them.  You will make space and the law of entropy will fill it.  The goal is not perfection, but intention.  As with all spiritual practices, we seek time and space to be turned toward God, remembering that God is already turned toward us in love.  I invite you try a discipline of organization, intentionally creating space and time to dwell in the love of God.

The Path of Discipleship - Why Less Is More

This week I wanted to reflect a little on ideas that have come out of the “Get Rid of It” challenge.  I have led this project in two congregations and heard similar themes as the process goes on.  One theme is the simple power of making a decision.  Often we hold onto things because we cannot decide what to do with them.  Looking through closets and bookshelves is a bit like a geologist looking at layers of sediment.  We can see the authors that have fascinated and entertained us at one time or another.  I have a collection of Hemingway novels and E.B. White essays all stemming from an 8^th grade English teacher who thought early exposure to what he considered good writing would refine my style. 

We can see the classes we took and the hobbies we tried over the years.  Letting go of such things can represent a failure of will and follow-through.  I was going to be a great artist until I ran out of time but I promised myself I would get back to it.  I once knew calculus and Latin and still have the textbooks to prove it.  Letting go of them means admitting that the knowledge was transitory.   My personal translation of Virgil remains unfinished and physics much past F=m*a remains beyond my grasp.

The process of letting go is a process of admitting that who you were is no longer who you are.  When I was a child I dreamed of great things and great achievements.  I could be an astronaut.  I could be famous, maybe the president.  I could be an Olympic champion.  As I grew older, the dreams changed and the goals changed.  I could be a musician.  I could be a scientist.  I could be an author.  None of these were bad dreams.  Perhaps some were deluded by a lack of knowledge, but none were inappropriate for that moment in my life.  Yet I look at the presidency today and wonder, “Who in their right mind would want that?”  I have met former athletes, now senior citizens, who in old age deal with the damage to their bodies from the youthful pursuit of excellence.  I am content now to try to keep myself in decent shape, but no longer hold Olympic dreams.  The person I was may shape the present, but I am not longer the person I was.

By removing some things, we give ourselves permission to move forward to the next dream and next passion.  We can acknowledge that most dreams and most passions are transitory.  It is all right to enjoy a hobby for a little while and it is all right to move on to something else.  It is all right to change, to explore, to backtrack.  Change is the nature of life.

In many versions of contemplative prayer and meditation, one of the goals is to acknowledge that thoughts are not permanent.  They are an ethereal sparking of connected neurons flickering in the background of consciousness until that moment we pay attention to them.  Then somehow they gain solidity and move into the foreground.  Contemplative prayer challenges us allow them to flow in the background, to bubble up and fade away.  One thought rises as another subsides.

Similar images can be used for the things in our lives, the physical possessions, the scheduled priorities.  What if we learn to loosen our grip on them, to give them less attention?  What if we learn that things are just things?  Could we live with less?  Could we share more?  Could we open more physical space around us?  Could we open more time in our lives?  Could we better handle the changes that are a natural part of life?

Like it or not, we change.  The world changes.  The things we own also change.  Cars dent and paints fade.  The new shirt becomes the stained shirt.  The enthralling mystery book loses its appeal when you find out whodunit. 

The good news is that God’s love is constant when the world is not.  God’s love surrounded the person you were.  It surrounds the person you are.  God’s love will surround and sustain the person you will be.  The path of discipleship is that path that reminds us of this truth, a path explained well by those words of Meister Eckhart that are shaping this Lenten season.  “To be full of things is to be empty of God.  To be empty of things is to be full of God.”

The Path of Discipleship - Contentment and Peace

Shalom is a Hebrew word that is commonly translated as “peace.”  This is not a bad translation but it is not entirely adequate.  Shalom can also be translated as perfection, wholeness and completeness.  Often when we think of peace, we think of an absence of conflict.  Yet one can walk into a room without conflict and feel a palpable tension that is the absence of peace.   There may not be no guns firing, but being on the edge of violence is hardly peace.

                When I think of shalom I go back to a time when I was a camp counselor in northern Michigan.  Our days were very active and so right after lunch we had cabin time, also known some summers as “lie low” time.  It was an hour after lunch to relax at the cabins, play card games, read a book, take a nap (though everyone was too old to call it “nap time”).  I remember afternoons lying by the screened cabin window, belly full of good camp food, a slight breeze coming in, reading a book and feeling sort of dozy.  In that moment there was literally nothing else I needed, no place I would rather be and nothing I would rather do.  Sure, after a time it would get boring, but for that hour it was an experience of shalom.

                Contentment is how shalom feels.  It is the deep sigh of satisfaction.  It is the unforced hint of a smile.  It is knowing when enough is enough. 

                Much of our culture is grounded in creating discontent.  Marketing strategies seek to create a sense of dissatisfaction: that my cereal isn’t good enough, that my car is too slow or too weak, that my clothes are too old or too plain, that my teeth are not white enough, that my body is not thin enough.  If we can just improve and upgrade our things, then our lives will also improve and upgrade.  If we live with a sense of contentment; if we embody shalom, such appeals come as a foreign language.  My body is a gift as it is.  My little car gets me to where I need to go.  The things I have are enough to be happy and truly my happiness ceases to be dependent on things.

                Contemplative Christians talk about being grounded in the presence of God as the source of contentment/shalom.   When I spend time aware of the constant love of God that undergirds my every moment and every breath, contentment is never far away.  When the love of God is the source of shalom, I am constantly in shalom, only needing to be reminded when I forget or become distracted.

                There is, however, a danger to contentment in that it can easily turn to apathy or complacency.  The prophetic voices of the faith challenge this impulse.  I may be content with the food I have; the things I have, but I cannot ignore my neighbor who does not have enough.  The prophets invite us to be grounded in the love of God so that we can advocate for those for whom shalom is absent.

                I write this in the wake of another school shooting in America, this time in Parkland, Florida, where a young man killed 14 students and 3 faculty members with an assault rifle.  Such an event should move Christians from complacency, to advocate for and support students who now are beginning to demand shalom, safety, freedom from fear in places of learning.  We should step forward with them, asking our leaders to allow the scientific study of gun violence (The CDC has not been allowed funding to do this work since the Dickey amendment in 1996) and advocating for policies that will keep children safe. 

                In fact, I believe this is a fundamental calling of the church, to witness and advocate for shalom in the world; to live the meaning of contentment; to share so that others can have enough.  Contentment does not mean that we spend our lives in experiences akin to my camp experience, a constant retreat.  These moments are meant to ground us in contentment so that we can live content lives in a discontent world.  In Christ, we see shalom; in God, we find shalom; together, we live shalom.

The Path of Discipleship - The "Get Rid of It" Challenge

During the season of Lent, I am going to be writing about the virtue of discipleship that is a confluence of ideas around contentment, peace, self-control and humility.  I am aware that this is a broad list and yet these ideas seem to build on one another.  Self-control and a sense of humility lead one towards contentment and peace. 

                In practical terms, our community will be experimenting with one of the greatest sources of discontent in our current age, the quest for stuff.  We surround ourselves with things, sometimes purchased by impulse, sometimes for practical use, sometimes to make us feel a little bit better.  We are surrounded by messages that tell us to be discontent with what we have and always seek a little more, the next thing, the better thing.  And if we are like most Americans, we live in houses surrounded by thousands of things, most of which we do not need and many of which we will rarely if ever use.  The growing exception to this rule is the folks who rent storage spaces so the things that they do not need are out of sight and out of mind.

                In the 13^th century, the German priest and theologian Meister Eckhart declared, “To be full of things is to be empty of God.  To be empty of things is to be full of God.”  This is going to be a basic theme during the season, that the more we focus on acquisition and measure ourselves by possessions, the further we are from God’s vision for us.  Although proponents of the prosperity gospel will disagree, there is a long tradition within Christianity that believes that the things we own always seem to end up owning us.

                Although some figures in Christian history have chosen voluntary poverty as a discipline (like Saint Francis of Assisi), my hope for this series is to help people loosen the grip that our possessions have over us.  One tool that I have used in the past is the “Get Rid of It Challenge.”  During the season of Lent, those who participate are challenged to remove one thing from their lives for each day in the 40-day season.  While the stated goal is to be 40 things lighter, the true goal is to develop a discipline of removal, which can blossom into a discipline a sharing and an attitude of contentment.

                Here is an outline of the challenge.  Try it out for Lent or adopt it any season:

The Get Rid of it Challenge

Goal:  Remove 40 things from your life during the season of Lent

You can:

                Gift your thing to someone

                Sell/Donate your thing

                Last Resort – Responsibly throw it away or recycle it

What constitutes a thing:

                For this challenge, a thing is any object that you think you own: the knickknack shoved to the back of the closet, the unused wedding gift on the basement shelf, the vinyl record you no longer listen to.  As you develop this discipline, you may begin to think collectively about things (a record collection, the books on a shelf may become one thing.)

Rules and guidelines:

1.        Only one object per day counts toward the goal.  You may start sorting the papers on your desk and find forty scraps to throw away, but only one counts each day.  The point is to develop a habit/discipline, not just clean house.

2.        If someone gives you a nonperishable gift, you have to remove an extra thing for the day (apologies to everyone who has a birthday in Lent)

3.       For every nonperishable item you purchase, you need to remove an extra thing for the day.

The Path of Discipleship - Love and Worship

This post marks the end of the discussion of love as a virtue of discipleship.  Clearly, there is much more that could be written.  Love is an essential topic in scripture as well as theology in general.  We are all responding to the love that God showed us from the very beginning, from creation, from the first breath, from the cross.

                One of the traditional ways that Christians have responded to this love is through communal worship.  As we gather together, we turn toward God as a community with thanks and praise, grateful for what God has done and continues to do and promises to do.  In our congregation, we worship facing the cross, constantly reminded that the love that we celebrate is both grounded in and tempered by the suffering and death of Jesus.

                We also worship facing the communion table, invited every week to come forward and take part in the community meal where Jesus greets us as host and feeds us with his own self, sustaining us once again to go out into the world with love.  Some traditions have an altar call where the hope is that people will experience that one-time conversion, able to answer with a date to the question, “When were you saved?”  My Lutheran tradition invites the community forward every week to the table of grace, recognizing that our lives need conversion again and again.  We come forward to discover that Jesus has chosen us in spite of who we are and what we may have done.

                Worship has a three-fold purpose when it comes to love.  First, we encounter God’s love in word and sacrament.  I put this first because such is the nature of grace; God always acts first.  We may think that we are the primary actors on Sunday morning, with our standing and sitting and singing, but before we can crack open a hymnal, the Holy Spirit has already been singing to us, a song of creation and a song of love.  On Sunday morning (and any other time we worship together) we intentionally wade into the stream of God’s love, not realizing that it is not a stream we choose to enter, but an ocean that surrounds us like the oxygen and nitrogen in the air we breathe.  When we take the time to pay attention, to glimpse that love, we are called to respond.

                For this reason I put our response as the second purpose of worship.  When we have encountered the love of God it is fitting to take time to admire and celebrate that love, like a beautiful work of art the draws our attention, or (as with the discussion of awe and wonder) a dramatic sunset that stops us in our tracks.  We respond with prayer, praise, song and speech.  We respond with words of thanks and words of peace and words of good news.

                Unfortunately, the valid criticism of much of Christianity is that this is where it seems that the purpose of worship ends.  We come in the building.  We praise an hour.  We go out until next week.  With that attitude, it is no wonder that churches get bogged down in the minutia of worship and liturgy, worried about the style, worried about the proper form, worried about getting it just right.  Should it be entertaining?  Should it be traditional?  After all we only have this hour to convince people to come back for another hour next week.  And isn’t it the purpose of the church to get people in the doors for that precious hour?  We miss the point of worship when we forget a fundamental purpose of worship.

The third purpose of worship is to get us out of worship.  It is what happens when we leave the building, the hymnals, the organs and praise bands behind.  In my tradition, the formal service ends with a declaration of dismissal like, “Go in peace!  Serve the Lord!”  The idea is that the love we encounter in worship should send us out into the world to share that love, live that love and model that love.  The love we show for others is the consequence and continuation of our worship.

We can debate about the nature of the best worship in our day and age.  Worship styles have shifted and changed over the past two millennia.  Liturgy is attractive to some.  Praise music and PowerPoint slides may be attractive to others.  Another group may be more attracted to contemplation and quiet.  None of these are wrong, but all of them miss the point if they fail to send us out in love.  The measure of good worship is not found in the numbers who return, but in the Christians who are inspired to go out and share good news through acts and words of love.

The Path of Discipleship - Love and Forgiveness

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”  Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. – Matthew 18:21-22 (NRSV)

For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us. – Psalm 103:11-12 (NRSV)

Forgiveness is an essential part of love and love is an essential part of forgiveness.  It is when we start talking about forgiveness that we begin to consider the limits of our own love and wonder about the limits of God’s love.  The idea that God loves everyone (and so should we) seems good and beautiful.  I have talked before about the understanding that God’s love is a constant, the ground of being on which we find support and strength as we walk the path of discipleship faced with the natural uncertainties of life.

It is a beautiful idea until, as with most ideas, one takes it to the extremes.  If God loves everyone, then God loves Hitler and Mussolini.  If God loves everyone, then God love despots and dictators.  If God loves everyone, then God loves abusers and molesters.  Can God forgive the Holocaust?  Can God forgive someone who steals the innocence from a child?  Can God forgive the serial killer who has no ability to feel remorse?

I suspect this question is more about “should” then “can.”  Ultimately, as God is infinite, then God can forgive whatever God chooses to forgive.  It is more proper to ask, “Should God forgive radical evil?”  As we look at the span of history as well as current events, it is not hard to find actions that are reprehensible, for which forgiveness and love would be difficult if not impossible.  Should God forgive such actions even when there is repentance?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.  Attempts to answer it have led to reams of rabbinical texts, volumes of academic theology, stunned silences in the midst of adult Sunday school.  If the answer is a clear, “Yes,” then forgiveness seems somehow cheapened, an easy out of guilt for the worse humanity has to offer.  If the answer is a clear, “No,” then we are struck with the uncertainty of acknowledging a limit to forgiveness.   Somewhere between little, white lies and genocide there is a boundary which, once crossed, excludes forgiveness.  Perhaps we rarely reach that boundary; perhaps we cross it with frequency.

At the heart of a Christian discussion on forgiveness is the image of Jesus offering forgiveness to those who nailed him to the cross.  The love of God is seen most clearly in the experience of radical evil by Jesus himself.  Jesus goes to the cross as an innocent; suffers as an innocent; dies as an innocent, and still offers a word of forgiveness.  Could we do the same?  Or perhaps the image of Christ’s forgiveness from the cross points out that the love and forgiveness of God is broader than we want to admit.

And again I think that the extremes of forgiveness may distract us from the heart of the matter, our learning to be forgiving people.  If we want love to be more than a platitude, we have to learn to forgive, to restore relationships that will inevitably be strained.  But when we talk about forgiveness, we need to start with the small annoyances that are part of our daily lives rather than starting with radical evil that we cannot begin to understand.  We need to learn to forgive the ill-timed word and the impatient response.  We need to learn to forgive the petty disagreement and the unintentional slight.  Once we take a deep breath and learn to forgive smaller things, then larger offenses are no longer insurmountable.

At the same time, I don’t believe that Jesus expects us to have the level of forgiveness that he showed on the cross.  I believe he gives us an example of forgiveness to strive toward, a direction on our path.  God has offered us forgiveness so that we can become forgiving.  The ability to let go of offenses is as important on our walk as seeking to avoid causing offense in the first place.  We will have impatient days.  We will meet people with whom we simply do not click.  We will be offended and we will cause offense.  We will need to be forgiven just as we will need to be forgiving.

Anyone in a long-term relationship can tell you that forgiveness is essential to love and love is essential to forgiveness.  God has chosen to be in an eternal relationship with us, requiring an eternity of love and an eternity of forgiveness.  Thankfully in God we find an abundance of both, enough that we might also learn to grow into loving and forgiving people.