Spiritual But Not Religious

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"Spiritual But Not Religious"

Romans 13:8-14
September 4, 2011

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves
another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit
adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”;
and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your
neighbor as yourself.”Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is
the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to
wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became
believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the
works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in
the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and
licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

I wanted to begin today’s sermon with an interesting, provocative devotional
I received in my email inbox this week, from the Rev. Lillian Daniels, who
pastors a church in the Chicago Suburbs. If you don’t receive the UCC’s Still
Speaking Devotionals, you are missing out on a good thing. Nonetheless,
this devotional caught my eye, and raised an eyebrow—and not only my
eyebrow but a few others as well. Here it goes:

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a
minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is
"spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is
some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the
religious status quo.

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These
people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach.
Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains,
what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and
. . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these
monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we
are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t
hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep
tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is
nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is
interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call
you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets
rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not
invent all for yourself.

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now
comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in
the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find
themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to
someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can
I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a
real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that's who I
want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up
with me, just like we try to do in church.

Now, maybe you can see why it raised a few eyebrows, though, from what I
hear, Pastor Daniels is not much a rabble rouser, a muckrackers, sort of
person.   What has surprised some folks, I think, is that she honestly shares
her actual, real feelings about what that she feels is only half the story, that
all one needs in the spiritual journey is a deep personal spirituality, and you’ll
be fine, just fine. And I think what her annoys her is the back-handed insult
that some, but not all, some of the people “spiritual but not religious” crowd,
seem to make about those who do actually live out their faith in a church
community. The implication by some of this crowd is that they have grown
beyond the church, as if it was simply a stage in their spiritual growth that
they’ve gotten beyond. We the churchgoers are the infants, and they the
adults—they no longer need organized religion to find God, but hey, if you’re
dependent on that sort of thing, go for it, they seem to imply of us.

And, you know, I get it, because there aren’t a million times a year that I don’
t think: you know, I could do something else, I think. Sell insurance, maybe.
Maybe work in some non-profit, doing some development work, etc, etc, etc.
We Christians have got a bad name nowadays—the young think we are
narrow minded, hypocritical, homophobic, institutional, useless, really, for the
spiritual journey. And those young people…well, their parents are starting to
think the same thing. You can only have so many Christians on Fox News,
CNN, etc, telling you that “the Christian” position is anti-intellectual, anti-
science, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-birth control, anti-abortion, anti-woman’s
rights, anti-this or anti-that—for people to say that they just don’t want to
be categorized with those type of people. I get it. Perhaps ONLY looking for
God in the sunsets is a better option, if the other option is to be lumped in
with what passes for the Christian mainstream nowadays…

But Pastor Daniels is also right, you know, about the larger picture, about
what is missing on all these personal, singular, spiritual quests, and what is
missing is you and me, and us, and a community of people with which to be
challenged by, to be pushed by, to be loved by, to be the people who hold
our hands when all seems lost. As I’ve said before a million times, the church
is one the place where we are asked explicitly to learn the hard and good
lessons that only love can teach us within intentional community, community
composed of mostly good people, but all containing a few people we could do
without, if we were honest with each other. The spiritual journey is not just
about me, and not just about you, but really is about us, us—this place, this
laboratory full of imperfect people trying to live out the very thing we hear
Paul write in our text today—to learn how to love God and love our
neighbors. And, as I’ve said before here as well—we may choose the
neighborhood, the church, the community of faith, but not always each and
every neighbor that comes with the neighborhood. And that is why we need
church, community, fellow travelers to hold our hands, or slap our hands,
because the people we struggle to love in this place are as much an
important part of our spiritual journey as the people we find easy to love in
this place.

And I think that is what Paul is trying to get at here in our text, these parting
words after a long and wordy exposition about what he thinks the Christian
faith really means. For twelve chapters Paul goes on and on, teasing out the
meaning of his adopted faith, of how it is integrated into his life as a Jew who
has become a follower of this Jesus, and some of it, frankly, is numbing for
modern hearers, because Paul is answering questions in the first century that
no one in the 21st is asking—about the relationship between his Judaism,
and what he believes to be the Jewish Messiah, about what God is and is not
going to be doing with God’s people, the Jews. That doesn’t it mean its not
important to sit with it, and learn from, but it just isn’t all that relevant to
most of us, in terms of what it actually means to be a follower of this Jesus,
this One from Nazareth. From chapter 12 onwards, he gives his early Roman
listeners his thoughts about how what he just wrote might have something
to do with the actual lived world that they and he live in. In chapter 12 he
tells his listeners to offer their bodies, their lives as a sacrifice, to be humble,
and to love, love and love, and at the beginning of chapter 13, he shares his
thoughts about the relationship they should have with government.

In these verses before us today, Paul returns to love, to the command to
love, and he does something very unusual, something he rarely does, in that
he seems to directly reference an actual teaching of Jesus’, though one can
also argue that Jesus’ own teaching have very clear roots in Jesus’ own faith,
Judaism. In fact, it is a rare thing for Paul to ever actually quote or reference
Jesus’ own teachings—of course, the Gospels were not written at that time,
so all there was, was probably some oral teachings passed down within the
church. Still, this is a rare moment in his writings, one where he seems to
know of this early teaching of Jesus about love. Owe no one anything, Paul
writes, right after he tells us that we should pay our taxes, to give Caesar’s
his due, so to speak, but the one thing we should pay each other is the debt
of love—we are obligated to love the other, but he’s not talking about money
debt, of course—what he seems to mean in this context is that we ought not
owe anyone a debt of love, of mercy, of goodness, that has not been repaid
in this life, and lifetime. Of course, you know who you owe, I know who I
owe, we know who we owe, what we owe in terms of those who have
forgiven us, those who loved us despite ourselves, those been kind to us
when we were unkind to them, many of whom we have not repaid yet, either
to them personally, or simply to another, by paying it forward, in honor of
them.

And, of course, Paul reminds us that we do not have forever to repay the
debt of goodness given to us, nor to allow ourselves to be repaid by
another—of course, some of would rather keep the ledger unbalance, if only
to wallow in our self-righteousness—never me, of course, but maybe
you…The night is far gone, and the day is near, Paul writes, warning them to
repay the debt of love that we owe each other, by being good people, by not
giving into the flesh, which, as I’ve shared with is not Paul’s way of saying
sexual sin, as it is Paul warning us not to given into that shadow side of us,
that place within us that cares not for other, or the impact our actions has
on them and their lives.   We don’t have forever to get it right, Paul’s
language seems to say, though he thinks it is because the Lord is coming
soon, because of the second coming. For us, the rush has nothing to do
with the possibility of Jesus’ second coming, which may or may not come
soon. Do you remember the t-shirts and the bumper stickers that were
popular some time ago, the ones that satirically read: Jesus is coming, look
busy! Well, that is not what worries us so much nowadays, but it has more
to do with the fact that Jesus may come to get us, move us out of this
world, into that other world, our deaths. We don’t have forever to clear up
our debts, to do the work of love in this world. No one knows the day or the
hour, Jesus warns us…

What I want to do is bring us back to Pastor Daniels’ devotional here, and
connect the dots. What scholars often reminds us here in this text is that
when Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbors, Jesus really is
putting the two together, putting God and neighbor together, and saying
you can’t love one without the other. It really is not enough to love the God
we find a sunset, or on the beach, or at the Grand Canyon, though there is
no doubt that God can surely be met in those wonderful and good places.
What is required, what is demanded, of us, is to love the God we find in our
neighbor, the good one, the easy one to love, the one who keeps his lawn
up, respects your property, but also the bad one, the hard one to love, the
one who has no boundaries, the one who says cruel things, the one who
does cruel things. That is why church matters—again, what other place
offers us so many intentional opportunities to learn how to love, to love well,
to love God in each other, and to offer forgiveness over and over again to
each other. Again, I may choose the neighborhood but each and every
neighbors, well, no, I don’t…but I’ve got live somewhere, I have to live
somewhere, or otherwise, I’m homeless, I’m without a home, a place where I
am known, at my best and at my worst, and where I know others, at their
best and at their worst. It really isn’t enough to love a sunset, and the God
we meet there, both of which are so easy to love, in that moment, I mean, let’
s face it. No, we are also asked to love the neighbor, who is sometimes not
so easy to love, and not so beautiful, and in whom it is not so easy to see
the face of God. But if we don’t take up challenge to love the humans whom
God inhabits in this world, the humans that God is, in this world, then, well,
we are missing a whole lot of God, and, that, my friends, would be a crying
shame. The reality is that God has become the neighbor in that moment,
and the neighbor has become God, and—we can choose to only meet God in
sunsets, or we can choose to meet God everywhere, and everywhere means
in this imperfect place, in all the imperfect churches and communities of faith,
of whatever stripe, that think that we need each other for the journey
towards the Holy. Amen.