John 14:15-21
So a few months ago I was at Brixx to get a gluten-free pizza for my
daughter Emma. I ordered the pizza, and since it was the end of a long day, I
ordered something to drink while I waited for it. I believe it was a Manhattan,
and it was pretty good. I sat down to drink it, not really thinking about the
fact that I was wearing my collar. I mean, that’s just what I do: maybe I
should think about it more. At any rate, the moment I sat down, this guy at the
other end of the bar made a beeline for me and started talking. He was drinking
a club soda because he’s a recovering alcoholic. Not just that, but a
recovering heroin addict as well. He’s been clean and sober for a while and
owns a local business, but spends several months a year doing mission work in
Haiti. He wanted to tell me about all this, and he showed me some photos. Then
he told me that a friend of his was trying to get him to come to church, and he
was seriously thinking about it and wanted to know my opinion. I didn’t get far
into my answer before another guy came up to us. Big guy with a beard and huge
grin on his face. It didn’t seem to faze him that he was interrupting our
conversation. He just jumped right in, and his first words were: “Are you a
priest?” Then he pointed at my drink and started laughing: “Can you DO that?”
He wanted to know what kind of church I was at, and clearly felt like it must
be a crazy one (little did he know!) — and then Emma’s pizza arrived, I gulped
down the rest of my Manhattan, and bid them both a good evening.
While it was just a funny and quirky encounter, it touched on
something quite profound. Can you be a recovering addict with a rough history
and belong to a church? Can you be a father and haul person and enjoy a drink
at a bar? Is it possible to be both fully human and fully connected to God? The
answer may seem obvious — of course it’s possible — but we don’t always live
that way. Our cultural stereotype of a churchgoer as a priggish, self-righteous
do-gooder who never has any fun is a caricature, but it has some basis in
reality. It’s tempting for us to come to church or to approach God in general
with only our Sunday best on, all bright and shiny, focusing on our good deeds
and our pious thoughts, our worthiness, while trying to bury the rest of us,
the darker, broken, less-pretty parts of ourselves. We can be quite fragmented
that way, and it can be hard to connect with our whole selves and to connect
our whole selves to God.
This is exactly what Jesus does: he helps people to connect. He
accepts and loves prostitutes, tax collectors, all sorts of supposedly sinful
people for who they are. He gets that you can sell your body for money and
still yearn to be close to God. He understands that even corrupt people working
for the Roman occupiers had the potential for faith and goodness within them.
So he hangs out with them. He eats with them. He helps them connect all the
broken pieces of their lives. He loves them for who they are and his love makes
them whole. And in doing so, he enables them to connect with God. Because only
insofar as we are connected with our whole selves can we bring our whole selves
to God and allow God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness to flow through us.
His disciples, a motley bunch of very fallible human beings,
experienced this very thing. In Jesus, they found acceptance and wholeness.
Through Jesus, they were connected to their full selves and to God. So imagine
how they must have felt at the prospect of losing all of that. Today’s Gospel
is set on the night before Jesus dies. He has told his friends that he will be
crucified, and he clearly sees their fear and responds to their panic. He
promises them that the Father will send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who will
be with them forever, And then he says, I
will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you . . . On that day, you will
know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you. In other words,
he assures them, “You will still be connected: connected to yourselves,
connected to me, connected to the Father. Always.”
I think one of the reasons that people struggle with faith is that
they are not fully connected. Many people only bring parts of themselves to
God, and invite Christ only into the “good” or “acceptable” parts of
themselves, while ignoring the rest. And it doesn’t work. Our entire bring
needs to be connected. So, for example, I’m a priest who tries to love and do
good ministry. But I am also a human being with all sorts of desires, and a
very imperfect person who makes all sorts of mistakes, who needs forgiveness
and acceptance. It’s not just the priestly side that matters; it’s not just the
“good” side that God cares about. And that kind of thing is true for all of us.
So here’s my sermon: Connect. Allow God into your whole being. Really. Share
everything with God, not just the “acceptable” stuff. Let the Spirit into every
corner of your life and let Christ love you for who you really are. This
involves far more than mere lip service: it demands daily, even hourly, acts of
probing honesty and raw self-acceptance: “Yes, God, I’m afraid.” “You see, God,
that I am angry or hurting or needy.” That is what ultimately leads to our
transformation and growth. Thomas Keating once said: “The basic disposition in
the spiritual journey is the capacity to accept all reality; God, ourselves,
other people, and all creation as they are.” To experience that deep acceptance
of ourselves is be connected and to know the love of Jesus Christ. And it is
only by experiencing that love ourselves that we can ever hope to connect with
others as they really are and, as Christ calls us to do, share that same love
with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment