true religion

Proper 17 C 2010
Sirach 10: 12-18; Ps 112
; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16;

Luke 14:1, 7-14

“…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”

I remembered this quote from Rilke this week. Today we prayed my favorite Collect, one that is filled with questions. “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name”—how does God do that and what does it mean? “Increase in us true religion”—in an age full of voices claiming to know what “true religion” is, how can we ourselves know? After “nourish us with all goodness”, the prayer ends almost strangely with “bring forth in us the fruit of good works.”

We Episcopalians are more comfortable with questions than some other folks, and we take Rilke’s advice to “love the questions” more easily than some. We come each Sunday with our questions, questions about God, questions about meaning and sanity in an often-crazy world, and questions about ourselves—how am I to live? How do I deal with the changes in my life? What does this talk about God mean for me really?

“Loving the questions” can be an honest stance, but it can also be cheap grace. We can say “I love the questions”, and simply walk home unchanged and unchallenged, secure in not allowing a single question to move us. I fear that at this juncture of my own life. I want those questions—Who is God? Who am I? How am I to live?—to burn in me and take me somewhere new, where I can see God and the world and others and myself with fresh eyes.

The readings present us with this burning need.

Sirach says, “The beginning of pride is sin; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” I don’t think that Sirach is saying that those who do not cling to approved-of ideas about God will be punished. I think that Sirach urges us to look beyond our own assumptions and know, once again, that we are all beginners in the way of the Spirit. We are created, made in wisdom, but we need the Creator’s ongoing presence and dynamic re-creation in order to fulfill our deepest nature. Daily we are tempted to feel and think and act as if we define ourselves, are self-sufficient. Sirach urges us to a larger life, a more creative imagination of who we are and who God is, and how we are to be.

The writer of Hebrews speaks of how we are to live if our hearts are rooted in our Maker. God the creator and re-creator is the fountain of life and all goodness, each moment overflowing with generosity and abundance. There are moments when our lives seem far from this divine generosity, but the wise heart returns to the deep wellspring of God’s own goodness. And when we do, we shall be changed, we shall live out this abundance in the way that Hebrews counsels us. Hospitality to the stranger, mutual love, honoring our partners, freedom from the love of money—all this flows from walking a dynamic path rooted in the divine wisdom, drinking from the cup of divine abundance.

And that path we walk is the path of freedom.

Once again Jesus finds himself a guest of the Pharisees. Jesus was sharp-eyed to see that the gathering was shaped by privilege and status. What Jesus proposes might seem like doormat spirituality—take the lowest seat. But Jesus’ advice is the path of wisdom. Be free of scrabbling for puny scraps of self-assurance and importance. Be free of that smallness of soul, do not play that game. God’s abundance will lift you if you trust and let your life be shaped by that trust, that overflowing goodness. If you play that fighting-for-status game, eventually the music will stop and someone will push you off the chair.

Welcome each day as the amazing gift of an abundant God. Express that abundance with open hands and hearts and minds. Choose freedom from the status-standards of the world.

That sounds like at least one of those questions. That sounds like “true religion” to me.