The Invitation
John 3:14-20
Good morning. Our scripture today might be the most oft quoted scripture many of us know. It is also the most popular scripture for signs seen at football games. I would venture a guess that if you memorized just one scripture in your lifetime, John 3:16 might have been the one. It’s not an easy scripture to inclusify which is why I balanced the 2000 years of God’s male image by affirming the divine female. Kinda gets our attention hearing it differently. That is actually a good set up for the different direction I’d like to take us with that scripture. It inspired me.
One of the things John’s Gospel tried to make clear was that being Christian meant not only professing a new Messiah; but also proclaiming a new spirituality. God’s action in the world by becoming flesh in Jesus created a new, a spiritual relationship with all people.
It’s this new spirituality that I’d like to explore this morning.
I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser. It’s titled “The Holy Longing.” In it he tackles the subject of spirituality in a way that’s pretty edgy and he picks up and looks under the idea of what it means to have an incarnational faith—a faith based on the idea that God incarnated in Jesus and that that same spiritual energy can incarnate (live) in our lives. You may agree or disagree with his take and my take on this. I do hope that you will want to read this book however so we’ve placed a few copies in our bookstore downstairs. Quoting Father Rolheiser:
Today there are books on spirituality everywhere. However, despite the virtual explosion of literature in the area….there are major misunderstandings…chief among these is the idea that spirituality is, somehow, exotic, esoteric and not something that issues forth from the bread and butter of ordinary life. For many people, the term spirituality conjures up images of something paranormal, mystical, churchy, holy, pious, otherworldly, New Age, something on the fringes and something optional.
I know this first hand when I invite women to our spirituality circle. Occasionally they decline saying they’re not spiritual and that they don’t “get spirituality.” I understand that response.
Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those of us with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one—either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, we wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness, writes Rollheiser. What we do with that holy longing, that fire, that madness is our spirituality.
Spirituality is not about choosing spiritual activities like going to church, praying or meditating, reading spiritual books or setting off on some explicit spiritual quest. First we have to do something about the fire that burns within us. Again, what we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality.
Spirituality is more about whether or not we sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It’s about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. The health or dis-ease of our spirituality is based on the choices we make.
Rolheiser’s offers a striking example of how spirituality is handled differently by different people. He compares Mother Theresa, Janis Joplin and Princess Diana. Beginning with Mother Theresa, he’s relatively certain most of us wouldn’t think of her as an erotic woman. Yet we think of her as a spiritual woman. The truth is she was very erotic because she was a dynamo of God’s energy. Eros, the root of the word erotic, is simply God’s energy that flows in all of us AND that connects all of us together. Mother Theresa may have looked frail and meek but she was a human bulldozer, an erotically driven woman. She was also a much disciplined woman, dedicated to God and the poor. Everyone considered her a saint. One definition of a saint is someone who can precisely, channel powerful eros in a creative, live-giving way. Soren Kierkegaard once defined a saint as someone who can will the one thing. Mother Theresa did just that, willed the one thing—God and the poor in her case. Mother Theresa could balance life and spiritual energy; that was HER spirituality.
Contrast her with Janis Joplin, the rock star who died from an overdose of life at age twenty seven. Few would consider her a very spiritual woman yet she was. People might think of her as the opposite of Mother Teresa, erotic, but not spiritual. Yet Janis Joplin was not so different. She also was an exceptional woman, a person of fiery eros, a person with rare energy. Unlike Mother Theresa, however Janice Joplin could NOT will the ONE thing. She willed many things. Her great energy went out in all directions and eventually created an excess and a fatigue that led to any early death. But those activities—a total giving over to excess, performance, booze, drugs, sex, coupled with the neglect of normal rest—were her spirituality; what she did with her longing, her restlessness. In Joplin’s case it was not a healthy integration but a dissipation of energy that led to her undoing. She had no balance, scattering her energy to the wind in dis-ease.
Admittedly Janis Joplin was an extreme example. Most of us don’t die from lack of rest at twenty-seven. You and I are more like Princess Diana, half Mother Theresa and half Janis Joplin.
Diana is worthy of reflection here because she too was something of a spiritual and erotic hybrid. She successfully balanced both making her the rare individual we considered both erotic and spiritual. Long before Diana became friends with Mother Theresa she was already helping the poor. She had the discipline to wield many things while willing the one thing. For Diana her spirituality was both the commitment to the poor and the Mediterranean vacations…and all the pain and questions in between. Diana chose things that left her more integrated in body and soul and she chose others which tore at her body and soul. Such is spirituality. It is about making choices for more integration and less dissipation whenever possible. That’s the fullness of what our scripture was eluding to, balancing dark and light, good and evil, all while consciously being centered in Christ.
And here is the big finish. Ultimately all these hungers, this holy longing, in balance and at full maturity, culminate in the one thing…making us co-responsible with God for the blessing of the world.
So how do we do that? How do we live in balance, live in the light, working against evil wherever we find it?
What are the commandments for the long haul? You may be surprised to hear that you are already doing quite well.
#1 Continue becoming a person of deep private prayer. Without prayer we risk becoming either depressed or inflated.
#2 Learn to carry the tension of life. Not everything can be resolved in this lifetime.
#3 Sin bravely! I’m not inviting you to sin. That’s NOT the invitation. I am inviting us to always be in that space where God can transform our wrongdoings.
Finally, in an age when it is so difficult to sustain faith and to sustain community, there can be no better advice to us than that of Jesus himself: #4 Gather around the Word of God and Break the Bread together. By gathering in community, we experience the love of God in relationship with God through our relationships with one another. That is the invitation, that we gather in his name. He promised to do the rest.
Amen.
(Portions of this sermon are paraphrased or directly quoted from “The Holy Longing” by Fr. Ronald Rolheiser.)