Anglican Essentials 3 (Mother Beth)

“Not only with our lips, but in our lives.”
Today is the third in our series of sermons on Anglican essentials. You'll remember that we began by talking about being a Christian, then about choosing the Episcopal community as the one which will support you in your commitment to follow Christ. This sermon will talk about putting those choices into practice.
 
The poet and essayist Kathleen Norris has written, "I firmly believe that the way we bathe a child or discuss family matters at the dinner table reveals who our God is." Not only does that reveal who someone’s God is, it reveals it more honestly than what we might say when asked to name our religious affiliation. In fact, in 2018 the pollsters over at the Pew Research Center created a whole new typology for classifying Americans spiritually, because the name of the religion we verbally claim to belong to is now almost worthless as an indication of what we actually believe and do.
 
“The way we bathe a child or discuss family matters at the dinner table reveals who our God is." Those are the kind of things that show and shape where our pragmatic daily worship is directed. The word worship means ascribing ultimate worth to – prioritizing above everything else. So the easiest way to figure out who or what you have actually been worshiping, actually treating as most important, is to look at your schedule, your habits, your spending, and your preoccupations, day by day. There’s no shame in realizing that what you verbally claim as your religious faith hasn’t been coming first in your habits and behavior – this is exactly why we pray in the BCP that we “show forth God’s praise not only with our lips, but in our lives.” To be able to put God first, we need to ask help from God.

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So we’re talking today about the practices, the habits, that over centuries Christians have discovered open us up to God giving us that help. We’re talking about what actions God uses to apprentice us – back to sermon one -- as people who can put him first “not only with our lips but in our lives.” How does he move us from being infants, spiritually, needing someone else to care for us and feed us and keep us from hurting ourselves, to being competent and mature followers of Jesus Christ in the Episcopal Church?  Well, he does it through our practices. He does it through using specific actions we take over and over, habits we build, things in our ordinary routine that are different because we are Christians. I hope every one of you has at least a few things you do every day that you would not be doing if you were not a follower of Jesus. Of course anyone can decide they prefer to keep God somewhere further down the list. You can make any choice you want to about who you worship. But in a society where coming to church is a seriously odd decision, and one that can cost you personally and professionally, I’d expect many of us who are here want to learn how to choose Jesus.
 
Of course God is seeking to lead all followers of Jesus into maturity, and the entrees in our lives that he uses to do it aren’t that different for Episcopalians than they are for anybody else. But in talking through things that we can count on God using to help us mature as Christians because he has been using them for countless people over many centuries, I’m going to draw on an Episcopal source just because that’s who and where we are. There’s a group of parishes and laity and clergy called the Restoration Project who have put together simple guidelines for Episcopal discipleship groups that are being used all over the country, and they give people a way to check how they are doing on six simple behaviors that are at the heart of actually growing as an apprentice of Jesus.  Here are the six --
 
Daily prayer, working towards 20 minutes every day
Weekly worship with a church community, working towards 52 weeks a year
Outreach to the poor, working towards averaging an hour a week
Intentional generosity, working towards giving away 10% of your income
Reading the Bible regularly, working towards a knowledge of the whole book
Listening for God to call you to serve, working towards recognizing and using your own spiritual gifts
 
Simple, right? This is not fancy, optional-enhancement stuff. These are the baby steps that are accessible to anybody and have been in use among active Christians for centuries. A 21st century Korean Methodist car manufacturer, an ancient hermit in Cappadocia, a Reformation-era Lutheran farmer or a 19th century laborer attending one of the East London Anglo-Catholic slum parishes, would all be involved in these practices. Prayer every day, Sunday worship every week, giving intentionally, serving the poor, Bible reading, and doing things for God – this is not rocket science. It’s part of the structure of abiding in Christ, “not only with our lips but in our lives.”  If you came to Annual Meeting, you saw printed on the agenda the Episcopal church canon that says parishioners can only vote if you have been doing three of those six faithfully for the past year (working, praying and giving.)  If you heard my sermon that day, I suggested that if Emmanuel’s members even focused steadily on two of the six, getting to know the Bible and engaging in outreach, it could transform our parish. And I believe that. But the ideal, of course, is the sort of balanced diet implied by the whole list. This is like the Christian food pyramid; if you want to be healthy spiritually, over time you need some of all of these. But you can start anywhere, and you can start very small.

One of the flaws of our denomination, I think, tends to be that we get distracted by boutiquey concerns. To stick with the metaphor, we can get all excited about the garnish without making sure all the food groups are on the plate first. (You know? "Carrot curls! Seaweed foam! Wow!") We can fall into acting as if knowing the ins and outs of liturgical ceremonies is more important than just opening up your Bible and reading it. As if garnishy gimmicks are going to get more done in your life than the straightforward behaviors that Christians through the ages have proved that God is going to use.  And this is even more a problem because of the way we Americans are now conditioned to treat spirituality as another disposable consumer good you can buy for a few hours of optional enhancement before going on to something else. People act all the time as if downloading a visualization app, or paying a service provider $50 for a Saturday workshop on a currently fashionable personal growth technique, were going to give them access to something better and more effective than what you can get right here at this altar free 52 weeks a year, the body and blood of the risen Lord Jesus Christ who is your God and who died for you.
 
The routineness of Christian practice, the fact that it’s designed to be boring and not always tickle our fancies and give us goosebumps, is part of why it’s a hard sell these days and why people prefer to sample spiritual garnishes occasionally instead of concentrating on regular, solid nourishment. But the harm neglecting solid food does you is incalculable. We need, desperately, to have ordinary routines that every day make us stop and remember that we belong to Jesus and he loves us and it is going to be all right. Ordinary things we do because we are Christians, things that disrupt the routines of the world and counteract its spiritual confusion. What does it look like? Many of you already know:
Lunchtime; 5 minutes of prayer first, then the office fridge.
My 7am coffee is ready; time to grab the Bible.
Putting the kids to bed; but first we recite that prayer from Compline we’ve been memorizing. (BCP page 128!)
Bank statement’s here; time to open the memorized giving report in Quicken and make sure I’m at or over 10% to charity.
Sunday morning; whether or not we feel like it, let’s go to Mass.
See, it’s the disruptive, solid, and habitual nature of things like this that makes them work. You can’t just do Christian stuff when it feels convenient. It has to penetrate to a deeper level, like droplets of water wearing a hole in a rock over decades, or you’ll never get the real benefits.
 
Whatever is dripping into your life day by day is already wearing that hole in you. Spiritual practices are not some special list of unusual things that people who are interested in religion can add on to a generally neutral life. There is no neutrality in the realm of what kind of person you are becoming day to day. You are, every person alive is, completely saturated in spiritual practices. You and I spend nearly every moment of every day engaged in practices that are shaping us spiritually. The question is, whose practices are they? Do they serve the goals of humility and servanthood, or of comfort and distraction? Do they make us love Jesus Christ, or do they make us love our preferences? Are they the routines of the apostles, or of the world the flesh and the devil? Are they gradually making us more consumeristic, narcissistic, and individualistic, or less?
 
If we just do what everyone else does, taking on the habits and routines of the world the flesh and the devil, eventually we won’t even get Christianity as a thing. We genuinely will not be able to imagine and desire it, and we see in the world around us that many people now aren’t able to. Other visions seem way more plausible. That’s why simple behaviors, like that list of six that have been the basic food groups for centuries, are so vital to even want to follow Christ “not only with our lips but in our lives.”
 
Daily prayer, working towards 20 minutes every day
Weekly worship with a church community, working towards 52 weeks a year
Outreach to the poor, working towards averaging an hour a week
Intentional generosity, working towards giving away 10% of your income
Reading the Bible regularly, working towards a knowledge of the whole book
Listening for God to call you to serve, working towards recognizing and using your own spiritual gifts
 
The research is in on these kinds of things. We know that the Spirit uses them to change lives. We know that billions of Christians from every culture in every era have benefited from them. They are practices for the long haul, baseline, simple, proactive behaviors you do over and over and whose effects spread out in your life in ways that are barely unobservable one by one, but over thirty, forty, fifty years change you completely. Of course, some days, you don't want to do them at all. But if you do them anyway, keep practicing, keep training, just like an athlete or a musician or a dancer, your practice ends up making all the difference in the world.
 
This is a deep, longstanding Episcopal conviction, and some of you here know all about it because you’ve been living that way for decades. Over the long haul, these tools will create habits that will slowly invite God to shape you into a full bodied disciple. But I can tell you, that will never, ever happen by accident. It happens by practice.