​17 October 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
21 Pentecost
 
Jesus said to his disciples, “You do not know what you are asking.” (Mark 10)
 
            We are living in what some people have called the era of the Great Resignation. Having endured the effects of the pandemic as well as the bitter social divisions that have accompanied it, a lot of people are reassessing their priorities and deciding to resign from their jobs. Reports say that as many as 4.3 million people have already done so — some to seek a new career, some to find a better fit, some to stop working altogether.
            So the Great Resignation is symptomatic of what we might say is also the Great Reassessment — a life-changing re-ordering of priorities with the intention of living out more fully what one truly values.
            Jesus, I think, would encourage us in this undertaking, at least based on today’s gospel. There he challenges his disciples to reassess their own priorities, and to find a wider sense of purpose than what they have been operating with. The motivation for this encouragement, as you heard a moment ago, is that James and John come to him, wanting to be assured that they will sit at his right and left hand in the end times. They are thinking only in terms of prestige, importance, approval, approbation.
            But Jesus tells them they need to turn their sense of priority on its head: it’s not prestige that counts, but self-sacrifice; not importance, but service; not approval, but compassion; not approbation, but faithfulness.
            And I think most of us could agree with those points, at least to some degree.
            But the thing is, when we look back at the pandemic and try to put our finger on exactly what has changed in our own sense of priority, it’s rather hard to do — at least it is for me. How have we changed? Thinking of the Emmaus Gathering conversations we’ve been having here at church, I myself have been trying to put into words exactly how the pandemic has affected me, and all I come up with is a kind of mental numbness.
            Last night I had a dream that I was in a town where I had to get to the train station, but when I finally got there, I didn’t know where I was trying to go. That’s the way life feels right now. Maybe you have those kind of dreams too.
            But then it occurs to me, that maybe the numbness is exactly the point. The pandemic has put a kind of damper on so much: social interaction, the exchange of ideas, enlivening experiences of art, and music, and good food. Maybe the resulting numbness is precisely what we do need to look at.
            I realize that it makes me eager to go deeper. To get beneath the surface anxieties of these tedious days and to get more closely in touch with whatever it is in life that is longer lasting and more profoundly true.
            In the Sunday morning forum I’ve been leading on “Prophets for Our Time,” we’ve been blessed to encounter some religious thinkers of the mid-twentieth century who have helped us to do exactly that.
            Today, we had a look at Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian who had a huge impact on the Civil Rights Movement by helping to provide its theological base in the principles of non-violent resistance. Now, if you’re like me, you’ve not encountered Thurman much (if at all). He was a kind of behind-the-scenes man, something of a religious mystic.
            But he was passionately devoted to the principle that the way to counter any kind of evil or hatred, is the cultivation of an interior strength through a disciplined spiritual life that is deep enough to be able to resist lapsing into anger or resentment oneself, when confronted with evil and persecution.
            After Martin Luther King Jr. was almost killed by a knife attack in 1958, Thurman went to see him in the hospital. Although no record exists of their conversation, in a subsequent letter to King, Thurman wrote to the younger man that he was glad to hear that the civil rights leader was “structuring your life in a way that will deepen its channel.” Evidently, Thurman had told King in the hospital, that if he was to overcome what lay ahead, he would have to go deep.
            And that, I realize, is what has changed for me during the pandemic. Underneath the mental and spiritual numbness brought on by its unexpected longevity and bitterness, I am increasingly eager to go more and more deeply into what is really at stake in life.
            In a brief meditation Thurman wrote on the theme of “Radical Amazement,” he observed that “What is [often] forgotten is the fact that life moves at a deeper level than the objective and the data of our senses. We are most alive when we are brought face to face with the response of the deepest thing in us to the deepest thing in life.”
            That’s what the pandemic has made me yearn for — when (as Thurman continues) “we pass through all the external aspects of our situation and need, [and] the walls of our pretensions are swept away and we are literally catapulted out of the narrow walls that shut us in.  … Spirit is met by Spirit and we are whole again!”
            There is so much in life that holds us captive to the superficial: our preoccupation with things, our attachment to predictability, our longing for security, our fondness for familiarity.
            But if anything good will come out of these on-going months of frustration and isolation, it will be a determination to rethink, to reimagine, to reconstitute our lives: to go to that place where (as Thurman envisioned), “Spirit is met by Spirit and we are whole again.” For that kind of renewal, I know that I am ready. Amen.
             

​3 October 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
St. Francis
 
“May I never boast of anything except the cross of Jesus Christ.” (Gal. 6)
 
            If you ask me, St. Francis gets sold short. The ubiquitous statues of him in gardens, for instance, imply that he is little more than a lover of nature. He was that, but he was also more.
            Or, the blessing of the animals that has become so popular this time of year hints that he is best remembered as a lover of animals. He was that, but he was also more.
            He was, for instance, someone who conscientiously shed any encumbrance that stood between him and following Jesus—whether the obstacle was wealth, or status, or security.
            Yet he was no hermit. He was also someone who devoted himself to the project of rebuilding the church, at a time when it was morally lax and spiritually vacuous.
            And so he was someone who unashamedly challenged the powers that be, preaching a gospel of renewal even to the pope himself. In fact, it was when no one at the papal court would listen to him, that he went into the fields to give his famous sermon to the birds, as a rhetorical sign that if no one else would listen to him, perhaps at least they would.
            Francis was also the founder of a monastic tradition that carries on to this day, some 800 years later, built on the foundation of worldly poverty and spiritual humility.  We here in the Southwest are especially aware of this tradition, as it was Franciscan friars who first brought Christianity to this part of the world.
            Yet in his own lifetime, and in the years shortly thereafter, Francis was best known for his intense personal identification with Jesus—an identification so intense and profound, that it is said that he came to bear the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, in his own flesh. And so today’s New Testament reading has an especially powerful resonance with this dimension of Francis’ life: he boasted of nothing, save the cross of Christ, and “carried the marks of Jesus branded on his own body,” as the reading says.
            All this adds up to the fact that Francis embodied a great paradox: his whole life was a drive toward complete simplicity, yet the commitment and insight that drove him toward that simplicity were themselves multilayered and highly complex.
            And I suspect that it is this paradox that is the real reason for Francis’ enduring popularity as a saint. We are instinctively drawn both to the focus and intensity of his life, yet also identify with the struggles he had in achieving it.
            If you go to the webpage of the Secular Franciscans (that is, people who live a Franciscan way of life but are not part of a monastic community), you’ll notice that simplicity of life is at the heart of their rule. “Remove the meaningless,” the website banner reads, “to return to the meaningful.”
            What strikes me on this particular Feast of St. Francis, is that in these pandemic times, one of the gifts that has been given to us is an opportunity and the encouragement to do exactly that: “Remove the meaningless, to return to the meaningful.” As you know, on Friday the United States passed 700,000 recorded deaths from Covid-19 on Friday; the world has now lost 4.8 million. Confronted with so much death and surrounded by so much tension and animosity, we are being driven back to reclaim what matters most to us, both individually and as a community.
            Some people for instnace are changing, or leaving careers. Some people are reconnecting with family and friends. Some people are reordering their use of time. It’s as if the spirit of Francis is blowing through our lives, encouraging us to declutter, to change, to simplify.
            In a little book called The Post-Quarantine Church, church consultant Thom Rainer writes that of nine key changes facing the church in these times, the most important is simplicity and clarity of purpose. If busyness characterized the pre-pandemic church, focus will characterize successful churches now. “There will be the temptation,” Rainer writes, “to return to the complex church of the past. … Just say no. … Healthy churches in this new era will be focused churches, congregations that do a few things well.”
How appropriate, therefore, that the first of our “Emmaus Gatherings” during this stewardship season is happening today, on the Feast of St. Francis. Designed as a time to take stock of what has happened, and to imagine the future, these conversations give us opportunity to do exactly what Rainer suggests: to become more focused and deliberate about what we do as a church.
The story surrounding today’s gospel texts is a good example of such deeply-grounded simplicity. Soon after his conversion to a life of poverty, Francis took two of his new companions with him into the Church of St. Nicholas in Assisi, seeking to know God’s will for them. First they prayed, and then three times they opened the gospel book at random to read whatever turned up, and the three verses that jumped out at them were these: Give to the poor; Take nothing for yourself; and Take up your cross.
What could be simpler than these three imperatives, and yet what could be more complex and difficult to follow? But that’s the beauty of the Christian life: it is grounded in the simplicity of faith in Jesus, yet amplified by all the deep resonance and fullness of life that each of us brings to it. Following Jesus is no one thing, it is many things—and yet, it is a focused and intentional thing. That’s why it’s best to describe it as a way of life that touches everything we say and do, rather than something we just believe. And that, it seems to me, is what we can most profitably take from Francis’ own example—faith as a way of life, centered in Christ.
The French poet Paul Valéry once asked, “What is there more mysterious than clarity?” In the spirit of Francis, we might today paraphrase that question as, “What is there more complex than simplicity?” Amen.