Sermon for August 4, 2019 - Proper 13C - The Rev'd Michael Anderson Bullock

Spirituality and the Ligaments

Before I begin, I want to thank the clergy of St. Paul’s, especially the Reverend Elise Feyerherm, for the generous invitation to be a part of the baptism of my grandson, Birch, and moreover to have the honor of preaching before you, at this important occasion. Again, thank you for including me so graciously and – more importantly --thank you for welcoming Dan, Lucy, and Birch into this community’s care, life, and ministry.

In addition to being grateful for this opportunity, I need to follow this up with a confession. I’ve been a priest for over 40 years, and I have prepared people for baptism. Baptism – in its rightful expression as the Sacrament of Life -- binds us consciously to God-in-Christ like the very air we breathe. In terms of baptism, I know what to say. I know what to do. And yet, I have been tied up inside over this baptism to the point of tossing and turning at night. I am still not sure what all this has been about, except I know that it is about God and the God-life and (truth to tell) how embarrassingly wobbly my own faith can be.

That’s my confession, and in this I think about what is the most autobiographical scripture I know: the one from the Gospel of Mark,[1] where the desperate father (whose son is tormented by some kind of epilepsy) asks Jesus for his curing intercession: “… if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” To the father’s pitiful begging, Jesus (with what I imagine is raised eyebrows) quips: “If you can! All things are possible to [the one] who believes.” Without missing a beat, the father confesses, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

I know that guy. I know that father. I even know the grandfather. “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Belief. All of us can spell the word, but I find that we are not as clear about what “belief” means. We have gathered to baptize Birch Raymond Sieger, one of the youngest and newest members of St. Paul’s, Brookline. Birch, being my grandson, takes my breath away. So do his two cousins, my granddaughters; and this is where any theoretical abstraction about the Sacrament of Baptism ends for me. I say this because you and I will baptize Birch into the Body of Christ, the church; and we will make promises to God and to Birch and to each other that have to do with “belief.” And since “belief” means, “I give my heart to …”, is there any one here that has not learned with great and painful expense how risky it is to give our hearts away?

So, what are we doing in this baptism? To what extent are our hearts in it?

To move toward an honest answer to these questions, we need to assess where we are in our lives, what the state of our hearts is. How can we get a reliable measurement?

Beyond what is manifest in our checkbooks and calendars, the real and honest way we can discern the state of our hearts and our lives is to look at the promises we have made. How are we doing with them? What do they say about us and what matters most to us? Another way of expressing the same thing is to ask: To whom or to what have we given our hearts? Where is our “belief” located?

Baptism, in its simplest form, is a matter of the heart and a process of investing our hearts to God, who from the beginning has said “Yes” to us and asks us to R.S.V.P. in kind. God has given us his heart and asks that we learn how to return the favor. Our relationship with God is a covenanted relationship, a matter of promises given and the struggle to fulfill those promises in turn.

God has fulfilled the divine end of the bargain. We see this in Jesus, who as one contemporary theologian waggishly has said: “When you look at Jesus, you see God in sandals.”[2] Moreover, when we see Jesus on the cross, we see the extent to which God has given the divine heart to us.

And so, baptism formally establishes and acknowledges this holy, life-giving relationship. It is our “yes” to God’s “Yes” to us, acknowledging on the one hand that we are not self-made men and women, that we are not on our own; and on the other hand that we have God’s heart, all ways and every where.

There is a lot of attention nowadays given to the statement that more and more of us confess: namely, that we are “spiritual but not religious”. The sentiments of this increasingly common declaration can be heard to echo in Mark’s gospel’s father: “I believe; help my unbelief!”

So it is that I have compassion for this halting, provisional identification. For many of us (including me, a priest of the church) have been hurt and even betrayed by the church. It is not surprising that we are reticent to give our hearts away, when our hearts have been broken along with so many of the promises that have been made – made at occasions like this baptism. But as with so many slogans that express our hurt and our protest – righteous or otherwise, being “spiritual but not religious” is not a binary choice. To make it an “either/or” situation becomes disingenuous, an avoidance of the real issue.

To be “spiritual” is to be aware of God and the life that is on God’s terms. To be “spiritual” is to be engaged with that life, a life that is beyond our expectations, our agendas. The spiritual life, the God-life cannot be boxed up or controlled by any one. Yet, to be spiritual also means that we increasingly note what St. Augustine prayed centuries ago: that we are restless with a restlessness we cannot assuage because we are restless for God and the promise of life as Communion – Holy Communion.

To be “spiritual” is to know the restlessness for Communion with God and with God’s people. The question then is: How do we go about this Communion? What do we do about the restlessness? The answer, I submit, has to do with “religion” and being “religious”.

My point is that the word “religion” comes from the same Latin word for “ligament”. As someone who is anticipating a knee replacement (and Birch’s other grandpa knows how this works with respect to a new hip), I do need a “bionic” knee joint in order to move smoothly, but unless my ligaments are there to hold that new, shiny joint in place, there is no cure. There is no health. There is no stability, no movement.

This is to say that everyone is religious; the problem is what we worship, what we hold at the center.

Being “spiritual” without being “religious” is about being in Communion with God without any support or guidance. Dealing with one’s spiritual life, dealing with what it takes to keep our heart’s center reserved for God and not for some more convenient facsimile is not a “do-it-yourself” project. We need help; we need ligaments to support and encourage and guide us in giving our hearts to and in living in our promises.

And so, I am looking at the local version of the ligaments on an occasion when we are promising a baby boy to trust his heart to and learn to have faith in life on God’s terms. And like that father in Mark’s gospel, you and I are hedge fund managers, when it comes to our hearts and our life with God. We believe; but oh God, help our unbelief. Heal that broken heartedness we have faced and the protective reticence its painful scarring creates. “I believe; help my unbelief.”

As a recovering spiritual hedge fund manager, I know where my reticence lies. I know I start to balk when it comes to giving all my heart to God and to the God-life; and that reticence lies at the very heart of these baptismal promises. It’s where the water of baptism comes into play.

There is a common tendency among us to view baptism’s waters as a deep cleansing affair. At this level baptism is seen to wash spiritual impurities away. In the very “religious” language, baptism washes sins away. I wish it were that easy, but it’s not. Baptism’s waters are not simply a matter of being cleansed. Baptism’s waters drown us, and encountering that reality always gives me great pause. I don’t think that I am alone in this.

The words of the Baptismal liturgy put it right in front of us. In the “Thanksgiving over the Water”, the priest says this: We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit …[3]

If these words are not dismissed as mere “church” words but represent the ligaments of life with God and with one another in faith, then what are we saying? What are we promising? In what possible way are these words of hope and transformation?

This is the “heart” of the spiritual life, the “heart” of the Christian faith: namely, that fear and death are very real, but with God they are not the last words. And this is where I get wobbly. This is where I get wobbly today, when it comes to Birch’s baptism.

We are drowning this baby boy, my grandson. And yet, we do so as an act of faith, of promise, of great and terrible love. So, here is what I know about this and what I continually strive to give my heart to.

I know that the greatest gift we can convey, the greatest expression of love we can offer entails learning how to die faithfully. If we could provide the ligaments for this Easter lesson, then we would be giving Birch (in this case) the means to die to his failures, his foibles, his fears. And then he would be truly free – free to be what God aches for him to be; free to be his deepest joy; free to be truly alive. For with God and in the God-life, we only have to die once.

I know that this is true. I know Easter’s reality. I give my heart to it, but in my unbelief I still – strangely, irrationally – choose not to die once with Christ and be free, but I hedge my bets and die from 10,000 paper cuts every day; and as a result, I tend to fret myself to death. As St. Paul says, “I do what I hate and hate what I do. There is no health in me.”[4]

No, life on God’s terms is not a “diy” project. It requires the spirit of Communion, and it requires ligaments. God help us: We and the tradition we represent are the ligaments for one another – “for better or for worse”.

There is one more thing to say about baptism and us. There is the water of baptism, in which we promise to learn how to die to our puny, fearful versions of life and to “awaken to” (that’s what “resurrection” means – “to awaken to” what life with God-in-Christ is like. And what life on God’s terms is like is symbolized by baptism’s water and the holy oil of chrismation.

You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.[5] With these words we harken back to the way biblical Israel acknowledge their kings. Oil was poured over their heads. “You anoint my head with oil,” as Psalm 23 puts it. The chrism, the holy oil we use in baptism “awakens us to” the fact that in God’s eyes of grace, mercy, and eternal love we are royalty, that dying to all other claims of this world, we are all kings and queens in God’s eyes.

And that is a promise and that is a heritage that anchors our hearts for faith. It is Good News, soothing news to our restlessness; and we share it – all of it -- with Birch and with one another today. Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Mark 9:24f

[2] John Dominic Crossan

[3] Book of Common Prayer, page 306.

[4] Romans 7:15

[5] Book of Common Prayer, page 308.