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For the last several weeks, my wife and I have been talking to our parish about the journey into spiritual maturity and the essential elements of that journey, including:<\/p>\n
Confessing our need for God<\/p>\n
A willingness to surrender to God<\/p>\n
Taking a fearless moral inventory<\/p>\n
The willingness to be a meek horse<\/p>\n
And an openness to the reconciling work of God[1]<\/a><\/p>\n But where does that journey lead?<\/p>\n Historically, for some Christians, that journey is a good way to pass your time.\u00a0 It might even be your obligation. \u00a0But for any substantive changes to take hold in your life, some Christians argue that you need to wait for heaven.\u00a0 \u201cGetting saved\u201d is the watershed moment in the Christian life and holding onto that experience is the single most important event the Christian\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Our friends who think this way about the Christian journey are serious about their faith.\u00a0 But this hardly sounds like Jesus, who said that his yoke was easy, and his burden was light \u2014 or who told parables like the story of the prodigal son.\u00a0 Nor does it sound like Paul, who told the Galatians that they had been set free by Christ.<\/p>\n But when one begins to comb through the people and the arguments that support this view, you learn that many of them are afraid that people will take credit for any improvement that they experience in this life, and they often struggled so deeply with sin in their own life, that they found it hard to believe that God could take them to new depths without taking them out of this life.<\/p>\n Luther, for example, certainly felt that way.\u00a0 As a young man he went to confession so often that his confessor told him to go away and come back when he really sinned!<\/p>\n Others focus entirely on performance.\u00a0 They would argue that the value of the spiritual journey that we have been describing lies in its ability to perfect our lives and in particular in its ability to perfect our performance.<\/p>\n I spent a good deal of time around this kind of Christian in my late adolescence, and the conversations they had about the journey to spiritual maturity revolved around rules.\u00a0 Particularly rules about dancing, drinking, and smoking.<\/p>\n Having grown up in a family of beer drinking, cigar smoking Germans and whiskey drinking Scots, that all struck me as just strange.\u00a0 But as my understanding of the Gospel deepened, it also struck me as amazingly superficial.\u00a0 To be sure, I had family members who needed to quit drinking, because they simply couldn\u2019t drink without damaging their lives and those of the people that they loved.\u00a0 And I had a grandfather who died, thanks to chain-smoking cigarettes all his life.<\/p>\n Buy the real problem with this version of the Christian journey was that it seemed to completely miss the point.\u00a0 These prohibitions had grown up in connection with prohibition and speak-easies, not out of a deep reading of Scripture.\u00a0 And one could observe all of the rules and still completely miss the point of the Christian life.<\/p>\n The third, progressive Christian picture doesn\u2019t register the importance of the journey at all.\u00a0 The Christian\u2019s life is all about politics and the Christian\u2019s duty is to realize a this-worldly reality.\u00a0 Oh, to be sure, you can have a spiritual life as an accompaniment to that task but it is an accompaniment to the Christian\u2019s calling.\u00a0 This view, too, is strangely at odds with Jesus, who cautioned his disciples, \u201cGive to Caesar that which is Caesar\u2019s and to God that which is God\u2019s\u201d.\u00a0 And, more fundamentally, it misses the fact that Jesus was crucified, in part because he failed to fulfill political expectations.\u00a0 (This is not to suggest that the Christian life does not transform the way that Christians think or act politically.\u00a0 But it is to say that it is not the priority of Christian life.)<\/p>\n Alongside these three descriptions of the Christian journey is a fourth view.\u00a0 One that acknowledges that our journey has a starting point, in admitting that we need God.\u00a0 One that admits that we need to seek forgiveness, open ourselves to God\u2019s direction and reconciling love.\u00a0 But it is also a vision of the Christian life which teaches that we do all that as ground-clearing so that we can begin a journey into God in Christ that transforms us in this life and goes on transforming in the next.\u00a0 It is what the Orthodox tradition describes as\u00a0theosis\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 the process of living ever more deeply into the life of God in Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n This view of the Christian life is one of adventure, not entrapment.\u00a0 A view of growing love and deepening joy.\u00a0 A vision marked by healing and growth.\u00a0 A view that holds that life is the good gift of God.<\/p>\n It also argues that the minds, imagination, and relationships we build with God and with one another are all a part of that gift.\u00a0 And that whatever the life to come will hold, it will be more like that and better.<\/p>\n No one can completely capture that reality, but Psalm 84 puts it this way:<\/p>\n 4 Happy are the people whose strength is in you! * 5 Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, * 6 They will climb from height to height, * Now, I learned a long time ago that it is dangerous to comment on poetry.\u00a0 Nothing you say will be more powerful than the poetry itself, and people who don\u2019t like poetry cannot be convinced there is anything to like about it.\u00a0 But, that said, allow me to make some observations:<\/p>\n One, this is obviously not to be taken literally.\u00a0 It was written by a family of priests that maintained the worship of Israel both during and after the Exile.\u00a0 And the poem describes the assent to the Temple during two of the major Jewish festivals held each year.<\/p>\n It implies that the Temple is higher than everything around it.\u00a0 And it was higher than much of the surrounding area.\u00a0 When you land in Tel Aviv today, people talk about going \u201cup\u201d to Jerusalem, not because it is north of Tel Aviv \u2013 it\u2019s south \u2013 but because it is over 2400 feet above sea level.\u00a0 But Jerusalem is not the highest point in Israel (Mount Horeb is) and the Temple is not even the highest point in Jerusalem (Mount Scopos is).<\/p>\n But whenever Scripture talks about the Temple, it is talking about a journey into the presence of God and the whole universe is a hierarchy.\u00a0 There is God, and everything else is pretty much downhill from there.<\/p>\n For that reason, the Psalm wasn\u2019t written just to capture the geography of the festival, it was written as a description of the spiritual journey.\u00a0 And the journey is one in which people fix their hearts on God, draw strength from God\u2019s presence, and are carried through desolate places along the way.\u00a0 Hinting, as it does, to struggle and sorrow \u2013 it also teaches that no matter what happens, the journey is one that moves from strength to strength \u2013 not because the pilgrim relies on his own strength but because the pilgrim draws strength from God.<\/p>\n But, for all of us, including less poetic souls, what does that journey look like in \u201creal life\u201d?\u00a0 Allow me to tell one story:<\/p>\n I first met my friend, Doug, almost thirty years ago.\u00a0 He lived just a block or two north of Washington National Cathedral.\u00a0 He frequently attended the Eucharist on weekdays, which is where we met for the first time, and we became close friends.<\/p>\n He was a freelance photographer and took photos of political leaders, prominent figures, and events held by non-profit organizations.\u00a0 My personal favorites were two photos that he gave to me \u2013 one of me praying with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Cathedral and another of Mother Theresa\u2019s hands, which he took when she was visiting the United States.<\/p>\n Doug had a great eye.\u00a0 He looked at the world through a passion for the beauty of the world around him.\u00a0 He was larger than life in social settings.\u00a0 He made friends instantly.\u00a0 He put people at ease \u2013 even when they hated having their picture taken!\u00a0 And he loved a celebration.<\/p>\n But life was not always kind to Doug.\u00a0 He battled bipolar disease for most of his life, and the medication that he took destroyed his kidney function.\u00a0 As a result, he was on dialysis for decades.<\/p>\n Technological changes and economic pressures destroyed his business.\u00a0 He succeeded in making the change from film to digital cameras but the IPhone and the financial collapse in 2008 posed insurmountable challenges.\u00a0 The circle of clients he served simply stopped spending money.<\/p>\n Doug never found his footing, work-wise, after that.\u00a0 On one occasion he was homeless, and in recent years he lived in shared housing provided by social services.<\/p>\n To make matters worse, in recent years his health deteriorated.\u00a0 He had four heart attacks, and he needed dialysis with increasing frequency.<\/p>\n But the \u201cthe desolate valley\u201d never robbed him of inner strength.\u00a0 In fact, his love, his character, and his generosity of spirit shone all the more brightly.\u00a0 The friend I knew in Washington never changed in essential ways, and those were characteristics about him that transcended those struggles.<\/p>\n Above all, he had a big heart, a deep love of both God and everyone he met.<\/p>\n He loved to worship.\u00a0 He attended our church online and then attended his own Lutheran Church \u2013 every Sunday.\u00a0 (He may be the only layperson I know who went to church that often.)<\/p>\n And throughout his life, he was attentive to the needs of those around him.\u00a0 There was an abandoned \u201cFive and Dime\u201d between the Cathedral and a Starbucks where we would occasionally meet for coffee.\u00a0 A man named George lived in the entrance of the Five and Dime, and Doug would always buy him coffee and a pastry, call him by name, and crouch down to talk to him for a while.<\/p>\n On another occasion, he witnessed an argument between a man and his wife and doubled back to comfort and encourage the agitated stranger, reassuring him that he was just having a bad day and that God loved him.<\/p>\n More recently, in the home provided by social services where he lived with five other men, he shared coffee, food, and his phone with them, even though he had lost everything he owned, including his cameras.\u00a0 And on Sundays when he tuned into follow our Sunday service, he invited his housemates to join him.<\/p>\n Those are just a few examples, and they hardly scratch the surface.\u00a0 For all that he went through, Doug was never angry or bitter.\u00a0 He was deeply devoted to God\u2019s work in his life.\u00a0 And he was tirelessly devoted to the needs of others.\u00a0 I guess you could say that for all the disappointments that he experienced, Doug was always on a journey turned toward God that was shaped by love and wonder.<\/p>\n A month ago, as he waited outside for his ride to dialysis, he suddenly collapsed and died.\u00a0 At first, I was sad to think that he was alone that morning and that there were no opportunities for a final conversation.\u00a0 But it has occurred to me since he died, that his death, like so many of the other obstacles that he encountered, could never divert him from that journey.<\/p>\n Now why am I sharing his story with you?\u00a0 I suppose the reason is this: I could share a story of a great saint who made his mark on the church and history.\u00a0 And those stories have their value.\u00a0 But I also know that when I tell a story like that, there are inevitably those who think, \u201cOh, I see, he thinks I need to become a nun or a monk, a missionary or a penniless saint, or \u2013 God forbid \u2013 a priest or a deacon.<\/p>\n But, in truth, the invitation to the Christian spiritual journey is not all about that kind of life at all.<\/p>\n More often than not, the Christian journey is about those who respond to God\u2019s love in the \u201ceveryday-ness\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n of their lives, giving back to God and to others, from whatever they have, wherever they are \u2014 living into Christ\u2019s desires for them and caring for those that they meet out of the abundance of God\u2019s mercy.<\/p>\n Doug was just that kind of person.\u00a0 He made that kind of journey.\u00a0 And you can make that journey, too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> There are echoes of the 12 Step program here, which Christian in its underpinnings.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Psalm 84:5-7, NRSV<\/p>\n [3<\/a> I am grateful to Eugene Peterson for this expression.<\/p>\n Photo by Jayson Boesman<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last several weeks, my wife and I have been talking to our parish about the journey into spiritual maturity and the essential elements of that journey, including: Confessing our need for God A willingness to surrender to God Taking a fearless moral inventory The willingness to be a meek horse And an openness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":240,"featured_media":7076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5063],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-spiritual-journey"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nwhose hearts are set on the pilgrims\u2019 way.<\/p>\n
\nfor the early rains have covered it with pools of water.<\/p>\n
\nand the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n