Scripture: Luke 4:16-21
A couple of weeks ago in the sermon I was speaking about “spirituality”, taking as my starting point a discussion in the worship committee about ways in which spirituality is, should be, or could be present in our worship service, that then turned into a discussion of what we mean by spirituality anyway. I’m returning to that subject this morning not because there are any issues particularly that need to be settled or because I have some idea that I can finish up on the topic, but just because, as I acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, there’s a lot to be said and many ways to approach the subject of spirituality, and it seems like a subject worth pursuing.
Also I confess this has been bugging me for awhile…for a long time before it came up in worship committee. Spirituality is a popular word these days. It seems, for a lot of people, not to carry so much of the negative baggage of a word like religion. Also, maybe it’s a useful word because it seems you can be a spiritual person without having any settled beliefs about God and without buying in to any particular system of beliefs. Maybe some people think of spirituality as religion without the rigidity. And I suppose that’s a good thing, except that it has come to be used in such an un-rigid way that sometimes it’s hard to tell what it does refer to. So I’ve actually been thinking for some time about what spirituality might mean to others and what it does mean to me. I don’t have any definitive answer to that question, even the question of what it means to me, just some more thoughts.
I also want to acknowledge that this sermon is importantly the result of conversation with Ellen Ryan, who is the person working with me on worship today and again two weeks from today. That, of course, does not imply that Ellen will want to associate herself with what I have to say, just that the direction of what I have to say owes enough to Ellen’s thoughts and our conversation that I wouldn’t feel right not saying that.
One of the things I’m indebted to Ellen for is the suggestion for the scripture reading for this morning, and I am going to do something this morning that I admit I don’t do very often. I’m going to begin with scripture. Just as an aside, what I often do, I realize as I sort of analyze my own sermonizing, is talk about something that is suggested by or related to scripture in some way but without dwelling on the connection very much and then sort of circle around and maybe at some point make the connection back to the Bible reading for the morning. As I say, this morning I want to start by talking about the scripture directly.
The passage describes an event right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. It follows directly upon the story of Christ being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. “Then,” scripture says, “Jesus, filled with the power of the spirit, returned to Galilee…and he went to Nazareth, his home town, and he went to the synagogue that was his home synagogue, on the Sabbath day as he was in the habit of doing, and he took up a scroll and read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…recovery of sight to the blind…to let the oppressed go free…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll (closed the Bible) and sat down. Silence. Everyone looking at him. Pregnant pause. Then, “Today this scripture is being fulfilled in your hearing.”
In my hearing what that means is Jesus saying something like: “What you taught me in Sunday school, in that little corner room back there, and what I somehow learned by growing up in this community is coming to life in me. What Isaiah wrote is who I am. Those words on the page there are becoming my life.” This is Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, before he has done anything publicly, choosing his hometown and the church he grew up in to announce what he intends to be about, to sound the keynote for what is to come, and it’s instructive. I refer to this passage a lot because of the important, defining place it has in the story. For today, let me point out just a few things, or maybe really just one thing.
The importance of Spirit in what is described and what Jesus says. Returning to Galilee after his little encounter with Satan, Jesus is described as being filled with the Spirit. Then he describes himself, using Isaiah’s words, as having been called by the spirit of the Lord, anointed to, “bring good news to the poor…release to the captives… recovery of sight to the blind…to let the oppressed go free.” The spirit called him, anointed him, to those tasks. That was his spirituality.
For Jesus, and I’m suggesting this morning for us too, spirituality is not something we engage in some of the time, and it is not a quality some people have and not others or some people have a lot more of than others. It is the way we live our lives, the path we follow, who we are, our way of being in the world. Jesus was not spiritual because he made sure to spend some time with God. Indications are, from what we can read in the gospels, that that was true. He didn’t just go on a forty day retreat in the wilderness. He regularly withdrew from his active life, as the scripture says, to go off by himself to pray. He was constantly engaging and disengaging, often feeling the need apparently to just get away from people, to be by himself, to pray, to think, to be quiet in body, mind, and spirit, all things we may naturally associate with the “spiritual” life. But Jesus wasn’t spiritual just because he was well-rounded in this way, making sure to set aside some time for God or for contemplation or reflection. He wasn’t spiritual because he was wise and knew that he needed to do some self-care so that other people with all their demands on him didn’t drain him of all his resources. All of that was part of his spirituality, but so too was proclaiming release to the captives and setting free those who are oppressed. The Spirit—he was quite clear about this—did not call him away from the life of action and engagement; it called him to those things. And his spirituality consisted of the whole thing, the way he was with people and apart from people, the way he had, as I said before, of being in the world, the way he went about his living, not just the reflective, quiet, prayerful side of things.
Spirituality, as I’m thinking about it today, is not something we can choose to have or not have. We all have a spirituality of some kind. The question is not whether we embrace spirituality but what our particular spirituality will be. Another specific debt I owe to Ellen this morning is a reference to something written by a theologian Ellen knew about but I only vaguely knew of: a man named Hans Urs von Balthazar. He said that spirituality is “the way a person understands his or her own ethically and religiously committed existence, and the way he or she acts and reacts habitually to this understanding.” I may not be doing justice to what he said, but my interpretation of that is that spirituality is what a person thinks she’s doing. What am I doing? What am I up to? In a large sense. What am I about? Where do my commitments lie? That sort of thing. That’s my spirituality.
That reminded me of another quote: “We may not be able to make up our minds, but we cannot fail to make up our lives.” Which is to say that we do not escape spirituality because it is the way we make up our lives. Again it is the way we understand from the inside what we are doing here, and since we are doing something, we do not choose whether to be spiritual or not. We do choose what specifically our spiritual life will consist of. And finally I came across by chance still another definition of spirituality this week from another Catholic theologian who died just a month or two ago, a man named Luigi Giussani, who said “the spiritual life is the development of a gaze”. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, but I liked the phrase. The development of a gaze. A way of seeing things. A point of view. But more than those things too.
What all those quotes say to me is that spirituality is a basic quality of our existence, and that’s so for everyone. Our spirituality is what we think about when we have stopped thinking about all those things on our to-do list at work or at home. Our spirituality is what we think about when we don’t have to think about anything at all. Our spirituality is what we think about when we don’t quite realize we are thinking about anything at all. Our spirituality is what we pray for when we don’t have time to measure our words or make sure we are praying for what we ought to pray for. Our spirituality is what we set our hearts on. Our spirituality is what we need to do for reasons too deep to explain. It is the way we go about making up our lives, the way we understand our commitments, the development of a gaze.
I don’t mean to turn this in to a matter of definitions or semantics—this is what spirituality means, this is what religion means, this is what faith means, and so forth. It’s not a matter of arriving at the “correct” definition of spirituality. But there are different things we may be talking about when we use a word like spirituality, and it’s good to be aware of them, and it may make a difference in how we think about what we’re doing here together as a church, as Sojourners.
It is not that we believe in seeking justice but that since we are a church we know we must also pay attention to spiritual growth and nourishment. It is not that we need to find some healthy balance between spiritual concerns and social action. It is that we are involved in trying to build up a way of life in this community, and helping one another to build up a way of life as individuals that is characterized by prayer and the doing of justice and contemplation and peace-making and soulful quietness and courageous speaking and it is all woven together into a whole cloth that is our spirituality. It is misleading to separate out some parts that have to do with reflection or contemplation or prayer and call that spiritual. It is also misleading to think that a Christian spirituality is defined by certain beliefs about Jesus, that being a Christian is centered on what we think about Jesus. If we take our cue from Jesus, it is about being led by the spirit to proclaim release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, setting free those who are oppressed. And what we are to be about as a church is not the promotion of a set of beliefs but the nurturing and nourishment of a spirituality such as that Jesus described for himself. Because we are all different, we will each have a different spirituality. There is not just one Christian spirituality. But it is a task we share in together, and it is the spirit in which we observe communion, not as a people united by common beliefs but as a people engaged in developing our spirituality, always developing, never finished, and who come together to support one another, nurture one another, join hands as we try to blend our own unique spiritualities into a beautiful whole, shaping out of our separate spiritual quests a Christian community, living out a Christian spirituality. It is, I believe, a joyful task. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 5, 2005