Sermon for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost

St. Aidan's, September 30, 2018

Mark 9:38-50

Religion Can be Scary

Many years ago, in the process leading up to seminary, I was required by my bishop to spend a few days in a tiny hermitage at the diocesan retreat center.  The hermitage was near a little house cared for by Father Stevens, an Episcopal monk who, after decades of ministry in Liberia, had returned to the states to live a quiet life as a spiritual advisor and host to those who came looking for a little quiet in their lives.  Signs around the property encouraging silence, and sightings of Father Stevens’ with his long white hair, beard, and robes set the place apart as being a little off the beaten track.  The house had a chapel and meditation rooms open to anyone who needed them.  For those of us who were interested in that sort of thing the place stood out as a little spiritual island in the middle of a demanding world.  Not a bad place to visit.  It never occurred to me to wonder what those unfamiliar with the concept of contemplation and silence might think of that set away place with its story-book looking monk.  I got a glimpse of another take on religious life one afternoon while sitting outside my little hermitage.  

The diocese had built two nice little cabins that sat on a ridge overlooking a meadow with wild flowers and a little path worn down the middle.  The retreat center included 200 acres of property, fenced, but easily visited by kids from the local neighborhood.  I was sitting on a log, looking at that meadow, just watching the clouds and feeling the breeze, very happy to be alive when I heard them coming through the woods.  I heard them before I saw them.  Four boys, 9 or 10, talking, enjoying the adventure of having come in under the fence to what must have been a magical kind of place.  Of course adventures need to include a little danger, and I was soon surprised to learn that I had a role in their outing.  I was sitting rock still on my log and they were a good ways off when I heard one of them shout in a frightened voice, “hey look.  There’s one now.  Run!”  It took me a minute to realize they were talking about me. I found it very entertaining to be so frightening simply by sitting on a log. I began to imagine the stories they must have heard and told and amplified about the old guy in the white robe with the long beard and what kinds of things must go on in such a place. Very scary stuff.  Religion can be like that. 

I was told many years ago by the rector of the first parish I served that I would never get many people interested in “that contemplative stuff.”  I wondered if he was right.  I had always been leery of people who took their religion too seriously. I still am sometimes. Truth is, I had not been happy when my bishop made me take that time at the hermitage.  I didn’t want to go hang out with that old monk. I didn’t want him messing around in the fragile beginnings of my spiritual wonderings.  But by the time I was taken by those kids for a frightening “religious” guy, I had come to appreciate the quiet, the birds, the simplicity of just rocking and watching the woods and fields, even my simple meals and the lack of a phone and screens and news.  

I probably would have told you before that weekend that religious life was about having to follow Jesus in ways that meant giving up all kinds of things and becoming some sort of a zealot.  But by the time the kids ran away that afternoon I had figured out that my weekend was about simply being, being present to myself and with myself in a restorative way.  I wasn’t thinking about religion or monks, I was listening to my own breathing, to the wind, to the grass being blown around, to the birds.  When the kids shouted “run” I was enjoying being fully present in that fine moment, as I’m sure they were too. Go figure. So much we had in common that we would never share.

I have been reminded this week of all the people who approach the church, who approach and live at the edges of the faith community.  I have long been interested in those folks who I imagine must need something they hope the church can supply, but are put off by some of our ways, our talk, our strangeness. 

I hear Jesus saying this morning that if they aren’t against us they’re with us.  

That is a hard enough message to convey to the insiders, Jesus’ followers, who must have thought they should be suspicious of others who hadn’t had their particular set of experiences.  

I wonder if those others who were healing and doing good things outside Jesus group, the ones his disciples pointed out, I wonder if they ever heard that they were already included among Jesus’ friends.  I hope so.

Many in the faith community, and here I’m speaking not only of Christians, but Jews, Muslims, Hindu, people of all kinds of faith….are looking at our era, our place in history and seeing a new movement in the direction and nature of faith.  Christians have been talking for some time about a new reformation, that after five hundred years another major shift is coming in how we understand what we are about as Christians.  One writer, known for his work in interfaith dialogue says we are at the beginning of a new axial age in our understanding of faith, one marked by the possibility of a deeper encounter between world religions, one where we begin to discover the creative core at the center of others whose lives and ways we have not known.  One writer sees a move from the age of belief to the age of the spirit, a move from defining ourselves by doctrine to coming to see ourselves as participating in the “something more” that all religions try to approach.  Another writer searching for common ground among religions and found that the concept of the trinity runs deep, not only in Christianity but in any faith where God, Creation and Humanity are the field of discussion.  

I welcome this new axial age or this new reformation.  I hope we are moving to a time when we in religion focus not on our differences, but on what we hold in common.  That is where the real work is and has always been……hard truths, risky sharing, tentative approaches to sacred halls where the promise of living from our “soul depths” is held out.  I hope we are moving to a time when we can learn from the depths of those strange others whose faith we may encounter for the first time.  I hope we are moving to a time when we can truly say that those who aren’t against us are with us.  I hope we are moving to a time when we can be a little less proud of our own way and discover surprising gifts discovered in some new-to-us expression of what it means to live in the presence of “the great other.”  All that sounds good to me.  But I want more.  

I hope too that we can find a way to tell those who do not believe themselves to belong in the world of faith and religious longing that they too are needed, wanted….that they not only have a place among us but that they bring gifts that we, from our limited perspective might not recognize.  Only when we begin to risk sharing our humanity, something of what is at our own core can we begin to trust ourselves to the care and friendship of those strange others.   Religion can be scary yes, but maybe the best kept secret, the one that if we can expose it might help us welcome those who hang around the edges of the tradition, is that religion is scary for all of us, even those of us who consider ourselves insiders.  Religion is always about taking in the unfamiliar, about moving beyond our comfort zone, and maybe that’s what those “other people over there” have to teach us.  If they can risk coming among us to share and seek nourishment for their “souls,” then maybe we can too.  Maybe we can all learn that those strangers over there are not only not against us, but are indeed for us.  I hope that is where we are headed.  Amen