Scripture: Romans 8:1-6, 14-16, 22-27
The title of sermon this morning is misleading. I thought I might do the list thing—top ten reasons to be spiritual—and maybe a few reasons not to be. Instead what this turned out to be is more like “preliminary, very preliminary, thoughts on spirituality. In any case, I probably ought to say just a few things about where this is coming from to give you some context.
There was a discussion in the worship committee a couple of months ago. It wasn’t a real long discussion and I’m frankly not sure I remember it very well any more, but it had to do with spirituality and its relation to our worship here at Sojourners. Is the spiritual dimension of our lives an important enough part of our worship? Do we foster spirituality in our worship? Allow enough room for its expression? Is it a topic, an area of concern, that we ought to focus on explicitly, maybe as the subject of a sermon? Those are the kinds of questions I remember and they raised other questions, like: what do we mean by spirituality anyway? What is this thing we’re talking about that we think we need or want more of?
I don’t recall that we came to any conclusions, but I do recall saying that I would preach on this at some point, just as a way to point us in a certain direction and suggest some things to think about. So I’m keeping that promise this morning, and it happens to come on the Sunday after Pentecost, which, as I mentioned last week, has to do with the gift of the spirit, so it’s a time of year that might point us in this direction as well. And there are several sscriptures, one of which I chose for this morning, that urge spirituality on us, as Paul, telling us that a life of the spirit is much to be preferred to a life of the flesh, and trying to hear Paul I feel the urge to reflect on what he might mean by that, or what we might mean when we use that kind of language.
These are things that do concern me, both as a pastor and a person. Leaving room in our lives for the spirit, the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God. It’s an issue in our worship. Always has been as far as I can tell. Perhaps more of an issue than for some other congregations, or at least it affects us in a different way maybe than many other congregations. Let me begin there, with the church side of this, because I think it will lead us in a bunch of directions.
On a typical Sunday at Sojourners there will be a gaggle of announcements. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve noticed that. Even people who have only been here once or twice have probably noticed that. There are announcements about things going on in the church, committee meetings, events coming up, sometimes things going on in the wider church, other parts of the U.C.C., things going on in the community, a forum, a candidates’ meeting, a musical event, a run or a walk for a good cause, all sorts of things. This has been a topic of discussion off and on during the time I have been at Sojourners and I suspect was before that too. In the discussions I have been a part of few people want to do away with announcements. Taken together they represent the work of our community, what we are involved in individually and together, concerns we share, causes we support, work that needs to be done. When we come together as a community, it’s appropriate to bring all those concerns to our time together, so they are appropriate to our worship. Some people do wish they were shorter; few people want to dispense with them altogether.
At the same time most people don’t find them very worshipful. So we have developed the usual practice of putting the announcements on the front end of the service and then making a break between that and our worship time, providing a time of silence so that we all have a chance to sort of shift gears, move ourselves somehow from an announcement mentality (which is more like a business mentality) to a worship mentality, from a frame of mind we assume to be non-spiritual to a more spiritual frame of mind, however we manage to do that. That’s the theory.
But I’ve been thinking some about this mundane issue in our worship life, actually not the issue itself of how you handle announcements but some of our ways of thinking about that and the assumptions that are connected with it. For instance, the assumption that announcements are unspiritual. I have been in churches where there were no announcements to speak of, and no spirit to speak of. A lack of vitality in the total life of a congregation that generates few announcements gets reflected in a worship service that lacks vitality. From this perspective, announcements don’t detract from but add to the total spiritual quality of a worship service. It is partly a mistake to think of spirituality as something deep and profound and mysterious and filled with thoughts of God, and therefore announcements as getting in the way of spirituality because they are not usually deep or profound or mysterious or filled with thoughts of God and get in the way of our desire to be deep…and so forth. They are, or can be, or should be, a sign of life and thus a sign of the spirit, even if they do not by themselves warm the heart or tingle the spine.
On the other hand, there is some reason to think of announcements the way we often do. Especially when there are a lot of them they come at us one after another, in pretty rapid succession, reminding us not too subtly of all the things there are to do, places to go, opportunities that sound suspiciously like obligations, and so forth. The direct message of the announcements is all the things that are going on, how the spirit is moving among us, if you will. The indirect, and as I say, not too subtle message is how filled up our lives are, where we are constantly engaged in moving from one thing to the next, getting from one place to another. But this can carry over into the rest of worship as well…if we take a break to be quiet for a moment and then resume the steady march through the service, moving from one thing to another, completing each task and moving on to the next, just like we do in life. Worship itself can become a reflection of our daily, crowded, encumbered lives. Even prayer time, presumably the most “spiritual” part of the time of worship, can fill up with legitimate, heart-felt, real concerns but where we are nevertheless reminded, again in a sort of indirect way, that there is too much to remember, too many things that claim our attention, and we can’t remember them all, can’t get them all in in the time allotted, even if the silent prayer is uncomfortably long.
We come to church, many of us do I think, precisely to set aside a time apart from the stress and press of schedules and the mentality of moving from here to there. We come, many of us do I think, to heed the advice that was quoted to us back on Ash Wednesday that turns a common phrase upside down and says, “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” We come, many of us do I think, because we hope to find a place where the order of the day is not to solve problems but to stand in wonder, and because our insides need space for wonder as well as worry.
The irony of course is that church can so easily become just one more thing to fit in to a busy schedule and, as I say, that once we are here so much of what we do can wittingly or unwittingly reinforce the patterns of harried and hurried lives and get in the way of the very wonder we know we need. Churches, I regret to say, can sometimes be quite good at sucking the wonder out of things, even out of the things of God, talking about God as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. You don’t guarantee a spiritual experience by coming to church. Being spiritual is a different thing from being religious, if by religious we mean doing churchly things and saying churchly words. That is hardly a new thought. We have all had churchly experiences that were not very spiritual, some of them here at Sojourners, and we have all had spiritual experiences that did not take place in church.
So how do we do better? How do we try to make sure that church will be a spiritual experience, not just a religious one. And the answer is…we don’t. It’s out of our control. Mostly anyway. Quakers have one approach that I know something about, having worshiped in Quaker style on a number of occasions. In the silent tradition of Quakerism the worship service consists of nothing planned except silence. The theory, I think, is that all the things we are used to doing in worship are distractions, so get rid of them. Take away the hymns and the leafing through the hymnal to find number 495, or was it 459, and forget the unison prayers and forget the choir music and the readings and the 17 minute sermon. Forget the agenda, aka order of worship, altogether. It’s all a distraction. Just create a space where people can be still, not be told to do this or say that, and try to be in touch with God in whatever way works for them.
Sometimes, I know from experience, that works pretty well, at least for some people. It can certainly result in something a person might understand to be a spiritual experience. Often it does not. What I have often realized after sitting for an hour or so in a Quaker meeting and not feeling very spiritual is that, for instance, it is hard to be spiritual when it is way too hot in the room, or when you have a splitting headache, or when there’s this itch in the exact spot in the middle of your back that you can’t reach, or when you have an important exam the next hour, or when it’s a gorgeous day outside and you’re inside wishing you were outside, counting the minutes until you can be outside. The reality is that we can’t structure spiritual experiences into our lives or into our worship, not even by trying to get rid of all the structure we think gets in the way. It’s true that we can crowd the spirit out, but we can’t structure it in. It’s beyond our control. We can’t make it happen, not in a worship service, not in our individual lives.
Another thing I think is true is that we don’t know even how to talk about it very well. I’ve referred to spirituality several times as entering into a state of wonder, which is one way of talking about it, but of course there are other positive ways to talk about spirituality, maybe some sense of being close to God, maybe some deep inner sense of peacefulness, and you may have different ways to describe what you think of as spirituality for yourself, and I’d appreciate hearing about them.
But sometimes too we talk about it in the negative. It is the something that’s missing, whether from a time we expected it like worship, or just in general a “something” that’s missing from our lives. We don’t necessarily have the right words to describe that something that’s missing but it has to do with the spirit somehow, has to do with living turning into merely existing, has to do with maybe feeling like you’re trapped in one of those wheels hamsters run around on or otherwise feeling oppressed by one’s circumstances, or what seems to be the exact opposite, maybe it has to do with having a little too much peaceableness. When we are missing something in our lives it might be something specific and describable, or it just might be the spirit of God, not very specific and not very describable, but very real.
In any case, I don’t think it serves us very well to have some fancy idea of what spirituality is all about, or what being a spiritual person is all about. It is not necessarily about having deep communion with God, though if you have deep communion with God, I am happy for you. It’s not about radiating some glow from within that shows the world you have been transported to a higher plane. It’s not about having some deep well of goodness that makes us overflowing with kindness and having no need, ever, to be anxious or angry. It’s not about all those things first of all because for most of us those things are out of reach and therefore we may well end up thinking of ourselves as hopelessly unspiritual. But also if that’s what spirituality is all about, I’m thinking it’s not even something we should want to be. Not only is that not what spirituality is about, it is not what I understand myself to be about.
What we are about, we humans, is not striving to reach some high plane of spirituality. We are about trying to do a little bit of justice in our lifetime, joining hands with fellow human beings when we can, finding some moments of enjoyment and people to share them with, attending to the various duties and responsibilities that have come our way, sometimes just making it through the day, getting rid of the headache, or finding someone to scratch the middle of your back, sometimes stopping to gaze at stars, to say a prayer, or wonder about God. It is all spiritual, not just the part about gazing at stars, saying a prayer, or wondering about God. It is all spiritual, or at least it can be, because it does depend a lot on us, on our attitude. It is all spiritual if somehow we are able to believe that God is present in all of it. And spirituality sometimes may be nothing more than paying attention to that barest whisper that says God is present in it all, in it all.
The Shakers, not the Quakers, the Shakers have a saying: “hands to work, hearts to God”. It is, for me, a pretty good way to describe what spirituality is about because it suggests that it’s a quality that can be present all the time, not a time set apart, not a separate set of things to do, not a technique. “Hands to work; hearts to God.” It doesn’t describe the whole thing, doesn’t answer all questions. But recognizing that there’s a lot more to be said, it is, for now, for me, a pretty good place to start. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 22, 2005