Tag: St. Paul

Transfagarasan-north

“Less certain, more convinced”: A sermon on the end of Romans 8

Kyle

Proper 12, Year A

(1 Kings 3:5–12; Romans 8:26–39; Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52)

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Do you ever get jealous of the disciples? Not for the mighty deeds or the heroic deaths, necessarily, but for the simple fact that they met and knew the Lord as none of us can?

I’m quick to assume that faith came easy for the women and men who knew Jesus of Nazareth during his incarnate lifetime. And yet we have good reason to believe that wasn’t true.

Others saw his signs, his teachings, his authority, and yet they did not believe. The apostles had it straight from his mouth that he would die and rise again, and yet by all accounts they gave in to fear and hopelessness, before even his crucifixion in most cases.

There are a lot of truisms to extrapolate from scripture, and one of them is surely this: If it’s proof or certainty we’re after in matters of faith, we’re barking up the wrong tree. But I wonder if we can’t do better than proof.

* * *

An elderly monk of a friend of mine’s acquaintance was once asked how his faith had changed over the course of his lifetime. I’ll never forget his answer: “I’m less certain. But I’m more convinced.”

That’s the answer of a man who’s seen some things, endured some things, who’s lost love ones, celebrated unexpected blessings, let go of earthly treasure and the illusion of control.

“I’m less certain. But I’m more convinced.”

That answer taught me that to be convinced, to be persuaded, is a dynamic process. It’s a lifelong experience, a full-body knowing, a deep but simple trust in a relationship that has passed the test of time.

The Apostle Paul is a man convinced. And I think it’s important that we understand why.

Don’t put too much stock in his dramatic conversion story. I don’t dispute the claim that he was struck blind on the road to Damascus by an encounter with the Risen Lord. I just think, on it’s own, the experience wasn’t what made the difference for Paul, not in the long run.

Sure, it was a touchstone, a turning point, a close encounter with a grace as raw and powerful and true as any we can imagine. But it couldn’t be enough. It couldn’t be enough to form a faith the likes of which is on display in today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35, 37–39)

Stunning, isn’t it? Gorgeous. Transcendent even. But the prose itself, even the idea itself, can’t be the point for us. Verbal pyrotechnics can impress and even move us, like Jesus’s fantastic signs and wonders. Stirring testimony can set us on a new path, not unlike the one Paul started walking in temporary blindness, while he was still known by a different name.

But I think the experience that really has the power to convince, to get in deep in our bones and our spiritual muscle memory, is captured in the space between this passage and one I like to think of as its first draft.

There’s a stretch in the Second Letter to the Corinthians where Paul “boasts in the Lord,” testifying to the experiences that he’s been through for the sake of the gospel. The really dramatic part recounts his sufferings:

Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. (2 Cor 11:24–27)

Now that is a list of dangers, toils, and snares if ever I’ve heard one.

I like this passage because it’s so real and concrete: “Look at what I’ve been through for God!” he shouts to his detractors. Paul remembers these experiences all too well, and he’s not afraid to get specific.

Our passage from Romans comes in a quieter, reflective moment. Notice that he tells us not what he’s done, but what he’s learned, which is that God was with him through all of it, that hardship, distress, etc., never had a chance against the power of the love of God, that the past, the future, the powers of earth and heaven and death itself are as nothing compared to Christ’s abiding presence.

From one text to the other, “I’m still here with God” turns to “God will always be here with me, with us.” We can almost hear Paul borrowing the words of our latter-day hymn to finish it all off: “’Tis grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.”

* * *

The point is this: to be convinced in our faith is to take stock of our life with God and our neighbor, in all its ups and downs. It’s to be slowly persuaded that all the high drama and all the numbing tedium and the joys big and small were indeed working together for the good by God’s power to transform and redeem.

To be convinced is to let it all wash over us and sink in, to move beyond “When will you show me a sign?” to “How can I keep from singing?” Of course we can’t do this in our own time or on our own power.

It’s a lifelong process, a tiny seed of faith becoming a tree wide and strong. It’s a costly process, the faithful pursuit of a pearl of great price. It’s the transmutation of the core of our being, hearts of stone giving way to pure, persistent love.

How could we hope to effect this change without the grace of God? It’s foolish to try to earn this reward, but that doesn’t stop us most of the time. The trick is to learn to shape our efforts as faithful responses to God’s gifts and deliverances. And in that department we have lots of ways to practice.

An idea of such a discipline for today is to pilfer from our patron: why not make your own list of the dangers and the delights of your life, of the arc of your transforming encounters with the mystery of love and hope and peace. It doesn’t have to be all Damascus, shipwrecks, and swords.

If your sounds more like the 2 Corinthians passage than the Romans, then there’s no doubt you’re in touch with the rich contours of your own personal walk with God. If it sounds more like the Romans, then perhaps you’re starting to see how your experience fits into the even bigger story about the people of the way and the God who is with us on the way.

The process will be tender and difficult. Some of you have engaged it in Pilgrims, drawing the ups and down in your life and your experience of the closeness, or the distance, of God in the midst of them.

Yes, the process will be hard. But for most of us, by the end of it, we become a bit more persuaded of Paul’s deep conviction, that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Not layoffs or transfers, not abortions or miscarriages, not defeats in the right battles or victories in the wrong ones, not failed finals or terrifying diagnoses, not panics in the night or failures of nerve, not divorces or bad credit or terrible decisions or disasters beyond our control, not even the suffering or death of a person most dear to us can separate us from the love of God.

We may not know that love, we may doubt it, we may even reject it, but Christ is still there in our hearts, the Spirit is still moving all around us. Sighs too deep for words aren’t the half of what God is praying and doing in us, in our finest hours and in our darkest ones.

I can’t prove it to you. Neither can Paul, for that matter. But the grace of God in Christ, and the experience of a lifetime of love, can convince us. It might be the only thing that can.

Image credit: Transfagarasan-north by Michał Sałaban via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hope photo

Suffering, endurance, character, hope

Kyle

Third Sunday in Lent, Year A

(Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42)

Image source: “Hope” by Renato Giordanelli via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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I’m breathing slightly easier this weekend than I have for the last few months. We have reached the end, at least as far as the calendar is concerned, of a marathon faith experience even longer than today’s gospel passage. I call it the Third Quarter Blues.

When I arrived back on campus after Christmas break during my first year of seminary, a particularly blunt senior told me how things were about to go: “Third quarter is a straight-up miserable experience,” he said. “It’s cold, it’s gray, it’s long, it’s Lent. Everybody just goes crazy.” It turns out that seminary staff members are not immune to this malady, and I hope in the days ahead that some of my own crazy will dissipate.

I suspect all of us here are feeling the effects of something like the Third Quarter Blues—in our homes, schools, workplaces, and here at St. Paul’s. The time has changed but not the weather, at least not reliably. Perhaps we’re missing that object of our Lenten fast. We long for summer time off but can’t yet see that light at the end of the tunnel. And of course, the long and exhausting work of a parish transition continues.

Call it March Malaise. Call it the Lenten Lull. Call it early “spring” in the mid-Atlantic, with spring firmly fixed, for now, in impatient quotation marks.

Maybe that’s why today’s epistle reading caught my eye despite the sheer volume of the gospel lesson. When it comes to endurance of any sort of affliction, our patron saint is quite the optimistic observer of human experience. Listen again to this progression he proposes: “[W]e also boast in our sufferings,” he says, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us” (Romans 5:3b-5a).

Let’s be clear that Paul is writing about sufferings that go well beyond the doldrums I’ve been describing. The word he uses (θλῖψις) has at its root a sort of claustrophobia; it’s the pressing in of forces upon us, maybe even the cliffs rising up to surround our dire straits. I don’t have to tell most of you how difficult life can be.

Still, big or small, Paul says suffering is a valuable and even indispensable part of the Christian life. How can that be? Well, notice the way he frames his little formula for our spiritual formation. Here’s the passage one more time, but with the introductory and concluding verses restored to it:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5)

We stand on God’s grace. We share in God’s glory. Our hearts are filled with God’s love.

In this light, in the light of Christ and the power of the Spirit, suffering is redeemed by God’s presence with us in the midst of it. If we boast in our sufferings, it should be because they are God’s special time for being particularly present with us. Conversely, they are our special time to grow in trust, because we know we can’t persevere on our own.

The verses that follow emphasize the lengths our God is willing to go for our redemption: “while we were still weak,” Paul writes, “while we still were sinners,” “while we were enemies,” we were reconciled to God through Jesus’s death and life.

Death and life, held together in the heart of God’s Son amid the darkness of our tribulations. Let’s call that redemptive suffering and not confuse it with its hopeless counterpart. Unredeemed suffering is suffering with blinders on. It’s like reading those middle verses about suffering and character without their wider framing in God’s bountiful grace.

In our reading from Exodus, the people of Israel are suffering with no eye on redemption: we read, “[they] thirsted there for water and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” (17:3).

They’ve already forgotten that they are there for glorious purpose, [1] that God has delivered them from bondage and is leading them to a land of promise. Yes, they have trials to endure in the desert, but they seem blind to the many ways in which God is already caring for them there.

Unredeemed suffering can also come from mistaking random circumstance or cruel injustice for the will of God.

Consider the Samaritan woman Jesus speaks with at the well. I heard Bible scholars this week plead with preachers not to portray her as some serial adulterer or other notorious sinner. That conclusion simply isn’t supported by what John tells us about her or by what Jesus says. It’s more likely that she’s a serial victim: five times divorced due to infertility, perhaps, or simply the whim of husbands who held near total power over her in that society.

Whatever her history, Jesus shows her it doesn’t have to define her. Her redemption begins in the caring conversation he has with her—a woman, yes, and also a Samaritan. And it continues as he invites her to that sacred Gospel vocation: sharing with others the Good News of the Savior of the world.

Unredeemed suffering is living with no hope for better, living as if we were alone. It’s trudging to the well each day without thought for the living water that will truly sustain and satisfy us. Unredeemed suffering is never God’s will for us. And its fruit is not character but despair. Heaven make us free of it. Only heaven can.

Redemptive suffering, on the other hand, is how the Spirit works through the inevitable trials of our lives and uses them to shape us in God’s image and draw us into renewed life in Christ. That’s character.

We heard a story of redemptive suffering this week in our staff meeting. As many of you know, our parishioner Bob Cuniff is in his final days of a long and painful battle with cancer. Bob has been in the Pilgrims class this year and desired to be received into the Episcopal Church. On Tuesday, Sarah Stoycos accompanied Bishop Jim to the hospital to serve as Bob’s sponsor in a bedside liturgy of reception. It’s nice having a bishop around.

Before they began, Jim and Sarah met Bob’s sisters, both of whom are Roman Catholic and one of whom is a nun. Bishop Jim asked them if they understood why Bob wanted to become an Episcopalian. While still loving the Catholic Church, Bob believed he had found his true home here. He believed he was on a deeply meaningful journey.

They said, yes, they understood, they were supportive. And so Jim asked them if they too would like to serve as presenters. Again they said yes. What a powerful sign of their love for their brother.

The service for confirmation and reception can be quite short if you strip it to the essentials. When they were finished, Bob said a few words.

He said first that these past few weeks had been among the most difficult times in his life but that he could feel the presence of God there in the room. And he said this: that that experience had been wonderful.

Imagine that: I can feel God here with me in this hospital room, and that has been wonderful.

Hope did not disappoint our brother Bob. And Paul’s Good News for us today is that, by the grace of God, it will not disappoint us either.

**

[1] I realized somewhere along the way that this phrase is from Loki in the Avengers movie. Go figure.

Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

Activation Energy & Spiritual Gifts

Kyle

Epiphany 2, Year C (1 Corinthians 12:1-11)

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Image source: jasonwoodhead23 CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

I wonder if Epiphany is easier in the southern hemisphere. “In your light, we see light,” was the phrase from this morning’s psalm that stuck with me all week. But this matra had to be almost purely metaphorical, since, until yesterday, Metro Washington seemed to have been transported to the Scottish Highlands, or maybe San Francisco in the summer. Short days, overcast skies, and regular blankets of fog interfered with our season of light. I’m guessing my colleague who traveled to Grahamstown, South Africa, this week had no such difficulties.

The gloom is distressing because it’s hard to be what you can’t see. Epiphany is about uncovering, about revelation, about enlightenment. We asked in today’s collect that we might “shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.” It’s hard to turn our spiritual imagination to the ends of the earth when we can’t even see to the end of the block.

But all literalism aside, there are real questions for us here: Can we believe right now that each of us, personally and corporately, manifests the divine light? And in particular, is that light a light for the whole world? Have we been empowered by the love of Christ incarnate and the baptism we share with him? Have we been equipped to serve God and one another in his name?

This morning, our patron saint responds with a resounding yes. This passage from 1 Corinthians is one we study often here at St. Paul’s, but to hear it during Epiphany is to discover the full force of its proclamation: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4–7).

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit. Despite our doubts, Paul asks us to trust that we have been shown and given what we need to be a light to the world; God has put that light within us. Sometimes we hide it under a bushel basket, but that is not its purpose and not our destiny. Our vocation is to shine, to become an ever-more-transparent window around the light of Christ within us. The potential is already there inside, yearning to be made manifest.

Adding to the beauty of Paul’s portrait is that the light shines differently in each of us, through a variety of gifts, services, and activities. Regarding that last word, in particular, our translators have been very clever. To say that there are “varieties of activities” and one God who “activates … them” signals to us that activities and activates translate words that share the same Greek root: ἐνεργέω (energeō), from which we get our word “energy.” Energeō means “to be operative, be at work, put forth power” or “to display one’s activity, show one’s self operative.”

So there’s a sense here both of work and of witness, of doing but also demonstrating. We might paraphrase that there are “varieties of works” but “the same God visibly at work in them,” or maybe “varieties of passions” but “the same passionate Spirit as their source and significance.” So to shine is to get caught up in the work of the Spirit by discovering and using the Spirit’s gifts. And because those gifts are varied, the process of their discovery and growth in us will look different for everyone. But let me take a stab at describing the process, with an analogy that I think Paul’s word choice supports.

You might remember from high school chemistry that certain kinds of reactions do not take place immediately upon mixing two ingredients. These transformations need a little kickstart, a boost of heat called activation energy. Often, it’s the flame of a bunsen burner that provides this requirement and activates the change to come. But whatever the source, some reactions simply will not take place without it. Yes there’s potential, but there’s also a barrier that must be overcome.

So I think about this concept when Paul talks about energeō, about spiritual gifts that God will activate (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:11).

Some of our gifts don’t seem to require activation energy at all; God has given us the potential for a particular kind of work, and it bubbles and spills out into our lives like baking soda and vinegar mixing in a model volcano.

You probably know a lot about the spiritual gifts God has given you in this manner. They might be useful for the work you do every day, and they’re almost certainly on display as a light to others in your ministry at St. Paul’s. For example, the members of the choir, among many others here, have been given musical gifts. Most of them probably learned this at a relatively young age and have been shining in this particular area of service for years.

Some gifts, though, are still waiting for God to give them that little boost, and in many cases we increase the energy required through the chill of our own fears. For many of us, hospitality is a challenge in this way. I myself have often used as an excuse my shyness or fear of looking stupid or desire to avoid rejection. I let myself off the hook for introducing myself to someone, or learning more about them, or extending to them an invitation to church or some event.

And yet at a few points in my life, I believe God has really needed me to welcome a particular stranger in a particular situation. And so I’ve been given in those important moments, and I bet you have too, the activation energy to overcome the barriers that are a natural part of us and the barriers we have contributed through sin. I hope in those moments that the light of Christ has indeed been made manifest to the people we have encountered.

Let me extend this analogy just a little further. I believe God has given us another, complementary path of spiritual growth: The Spirit has called us into community here and elsewhere, and in community we encounter catalysts. Catalysts, you may recall, lower and sometimes remove the activation energy required for a certain reaction. So too can our transformations be aided by the people and situations we encounter in community. They catalyze us, lowering or even breaking down the barriers to our fuller discovery and exercise of the gifts we have been given. It is not always an easy process, though.

Again, hospitality may be a telling example: the person who recognizes in us the potential for offering welcome and asks us to join in some new role can be just the catalyst we need, helping speed up a process of spiritual maturing that might have taken much longer otherwise. To be accountable to a community is to be challenged grow in the Spirit.

I spent the week before last living at Richmond Hill, a convent-turned-ecumenical-retreat-center in Virginia’s capital. Richmond Hill is run by volunteers and by ten or so house residents who make a 3–5 year commitment to the ministries of hospitality, racial reconciliation, educational reform, and thrice-daily prayer for Metropolitan Richmond. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more potent catalyst. You see it in the web of relationships among the  residents, between the residents and the wider community of volunteers, between that community and city, and between this whole matrix and the visitors who show up at their door for retreat.

In my week in Richmond, I was challenged and I hope changed by the residents in particular. Each one makes discernment of the Spirit a priority in their own lives and shares this gift with those they welcome and listen to so intently. If you visit there, and I hope you will, you’ll see the way their community shines for the city they serve, catalyzing change that manifests the reconciling love of Christ in classrooms, housing projects, council meetings, churches, coffee shops, and individual relationships. It is a sight to behold. As is any place where the Spirit is at work among the faithful—including St. Paul’s, K Street.

In this season of manifestation and light, and in the seasons to come, I hope we too can be on the lookout for signs of our individual and corporate gifts, especially the ones we have not yet discovered. I pray that God will provide the appropriate nudge in the moments when we need it. I pray that in our attentiveness to each other we can be catalysts for spiritual growth that will bear much fruit in this parish and in our communities. If we are faithful to this process, we can’t help but be a light to the world, no matter what the weather, and no matter how we are called to serve the common good.