Beware of God
September 30, 2007
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

One of the livelier conversations in and around and about Judson is about spirituality. What is it anyway? How much of whatever it is can we say is enough? How much of whatever it is do we say is too much? And do we have the best kind of spirituality? There is more than a little pride, from time to time, in our conversations. Why don't we say the Lord's Prayer in service or have Christmas Eve services? Are we a church or a club? A community or a part of the body of Christ? Today I am going to answer that we are all these things and more - a church and a club, a community and a part of the body of Christ. I want to get this conversation on the table and off the front stoop, which, by the way, remains a great place to have a conversation. There is no place around here that is not a good place to have a conversation! But the more transparent the conversation, the more interesting it is, and the more people can get in on it. I am going to argue that, as with much of what is said in the name of religion, the dichotomies are false; the conversation is off-key, not on-point.

Spirituality itself is not a false dichotomy, like secular/spiritual (even when well defined), but instead the practice of the presence of God, which is the old-fashioned definition of piety. Spirituality is just a new dress on the old body of piety. Piety is what we practice and do, what we do and where we are going. Like the poet asks of New York: Who are you and where are you going? Those are the core questions: spirituality asks them. Your checkbook and your calendar are as important as your Bible. Piety has devolved into its adjective, pious - and spirituality is trying to evolve into its adjective, spiritual. Let me insert the word practice. Spirituality is the practice of the presence of God. Spirituality is the practice of enchantment and reverence in God's world. Spirituality is the re-sacralization of a de-sacralized world. When we practice spiritual living, all we are doing is practicing. Most of us sound spiritually like I would if I were to play that piano, not having practiced for years. You don't want to hear it. Spirituality practices the presence of God. That's all, I mean that's ALL, it does.

In this context, please review the off-key conversations and the false dichotomies. The real issues in spiritual life are not church or club, nor are they belief or unbelief. Nor are the issues heaven or earth, afterlife and now-life. The issues are also not about being a good boy or bad boy, good girl or bad girl.

I use the infantile expression on purpose. So much of what is going on with God is like what is going on with our mother and father. At the Guggenheim, I'm told, there is a collage of words. In this collage, a psychiatrist takes his mother to lunch. Instead of saying, "Pass the butter," he blurts out, "Mom, why are you ruining my lunch?" Much of spirituality is just this way. We are in Father-Son and Mother-Daughter messes: we are bound and want simultaneously to get away and to draw authentically closer. We want to replace the real with the phoney, the close to replace the distant.

Add to this psychiatric situation another, larger issue: how seriously religion has defamed itself and caught Gods in butterfly nets and pinned them in a scrapbook. We need Gods who cannot be caged. God is not caged, neither by our belief nor by our unbelief. God doesn't give a darn about belief, having more important itches to scratch.

I am so tired of good/bad, heathen/believer, heaven/earth dichotomies. No wonder people want nothing to do with religion. If these are the interests of religion, why bother? If religion has an underground life, one ever so slightly visible from the altar cloths of religious institutions, a place that sniffs of the holy, then the conversation changes. We practice the presence of the Holy. That's all. I mean, that's ALL. We just practice: we don't have the best practice. Our religion is not better than their religion. We don't win the contest. We just practice.

We are proud to be a congregation, which was one of the first (1958, I'm told) to admit atheists, agnostics, miracle-phobes, and the great army of the Poped out. We welcome people who are allergic to the religion of their youth. We will always do that because often the people who are most outside of religious institutions are most inside of the holy. They have a strong b.s. meter. They have taken the hypocrisy vaccine and love the authentic too much to go to church. They hate it when Spirit is made to look ridiculous.

We are proud to be a congregation where many people openly confess - in the literary, not the religious, sense of that term - that they are here for the community, not the cross. Mazel Tov. Hallelujah. Terrific. Why should anyone even act like there is another kind of congregation? Of course, people are here for the community. That's what we have here. That's about all we have here. I mean, rephrased, Oh, my goose-bumping God, ALL we have is community here. Is there anything more holy than that? Confession in the literary sense - I'm going to risk telling you something about me - trumps confession in the religious sense. Religious Confession: Me bad, God good, take my badness, God, and remove it from me and put it somewhere. Literary Confession: Community is a place where it is safe enough to be who you are and for someone else to know it. We proudly confess that we are community here. But sometimes we also get caught by the ancient fears - and are embarrassed that we are just community here. Implication: we should be something else which we are not, so bad again. The number of ways to be bad or wrong when dead religion is in the works is amazing. The bad and the wrong ways are countless. You can even be wrong for being right when the old Gods are around. Self-righteous is the term that turns goodness into badness.

But let's get back to who we are and where we are going. We are simultaneously a congregation where disbelief, pre-belief, "I dunno," and faith are present. Faith? What's that? Faith is more often the Pascal wager that no one knows if there is a God or isn't a God, so why not bet that there is and leave it there. For others, faith is also the primal experience of the presence of God, which is what it is for me. My faith has very little to do with my brain or my wager. It has a lot to do with community and what the body of Christ, as one version of community, was able to do for me as a child. The powerful presence of a protecting spirit has never left me. I've told the story before, so I'll be quick. My father was beating my mother up. I called the pastor. He came. He stopped the fighting. Because of that Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor ushering in a state of safety into my soul that night, I have always trusted the presence of God. A substitute father arrived. The presence doesn't go away but instead ebbs and flows. I don't know that this presence is Jesus. Or that there is anything triune about it. I was pretty sure it wouldn't pass muster in front of my ordination committee so I dressed it up in theological vestments. I passed. I probably passed like most people pass their ordination exams, in an exquisite form of lying, which we say is our gift to the community. Ah, community. So holy . So unholy. What is the difference between a peer group pressuring you, an Ordination Committee, and a glorious community like ours? The measure is the number of lies you have to tell. I say that to assure you that we have a fine ordination process here at Judson and that it will keep the lies to a minimum and your integrity to a maximum. Some of you will even get ordained. Baptist principles and soul integrity notwithstanding, it is hard to be in a community and to go along with everything the community says or thinks. Church bends us to each other and to God, and sometimes swears it bends us to our deeper selves - but I always wonder about that. My practice of the presence of God has given me a grace, rather than a cynicism, about matters like this.

Church also shows up, institutionally, not personally, to protect children from violence. Once that happens to you, it is hard to forget it. And don't think for a minute that I believe church shows up for all the children. It doesn't even get close. There is a child in a closet somewhere in this village right now, praying that the pastor will come. She doesn't show. This no-show God is pretty hard to believe in. This no-show God is pretty easy to dismiss, even to hate. Personal experience of Spirit is a hard sell, given the circumstances. But once you know it, you just keep setting the bucket out for the hail.

Community is a place where we take our personal secrets and turn them into public culture. Community is a lot like God: sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesn't. When we say we don't believe in God but do believe in community, we have probably mixed our metaphors.

In community, we tell each other who we are - and when that doesn't fit with the culture and the community, we alter - or altar - ourselves. Indeed, we are transformed by the grace of God in each other into a place of common myths, one of which is that we have no common myths. Judson has a myth of being a place that is safe for people who don't like myths. Is that lying? Only in the eyes of extreme individuality. It is true in community. By the way, my own view is that a lot more people could keep a lot more to themselves. Especially on cell phones.

So if spirituality is not faith or unfaith, club or church, belief or disbelief, if all these things blend in and out of each other in a dynamism that is enough to make you put more covers over your head in the morning, what is it? If spirituality is not the false dichotomies of dead religion and caged Gods, what is it? The practice of the presence of God in our souls and in, and through, each other, that's what.

Community is just about all there is - and that ALL is more than sufficient. It is what some Christians mean by the body of Christ. You are Jesus to me. I am Jesus to you. If there is no Jesus in my life, it probably means I am not practicing your presence as holy to me. I am probably not revering you. I have probably moved into one of the back rooms of life where the false dichotomies throw me up against one wall and then another. That is their way of having a good time. They are spiritual torturers. They want to know if Jesus is Christ and I say what does it matter?

One of you told me she had given up hope. Another said he had lost interest. A third said, I am so afraid of dying before I have lived. I said something lame, in each instance, like, practice the presence of God. Go to Spirit, your spirit, our spirit, the Spirit. Develop spiritual habits. Pray. Think. Read. Sing a hymn. Write a letter to yourself. Don't do anything else. Develop a personal piety. If you must work, work, but keep praying. Practice the presence of God. Imagine God is with you in your boredom, your despair, your endgame. What difference would that make? Would you at least let a gentle God in and stop beating yourself up for suffering? We charge interest on suffering, you know. First we suffer. Then we blame ourselves for suffering. We think God blames us for suffering. Not true. Grace is an interest-free loan. Spirituality is never perfect; it is always practicing.

We have exoticized spirituality. You know the concept. Travel often takes us to exotic lands where we exoticize the people as though Tanzanians were more alive than we. We wear peasant blouses in hopes that some presumed simplicity will wear off on us. We decorate our apartments with fabrics from foreign lands and hope we can be free of our own white bread culture for just a second. We go looking for spirituality in all the wrong, exotic places, when all along, the Spirit lives on our sidewalk, in our Coffee Hour more than our church, on our subway, and in our computer. Spirit is in the stranger (or your mother) and the strange (or "normal"), close by. You don't need the frequent flyer miles. Spirit is ordinary, not exotic. Spirit is close, not far.

Darjeeling Limited is the film opening the New York Film Festival. It is a story of three brothers traveling through India searching for a spiritual experience. Guess what? They don't find it. Beware of dog, not god here. We dog God but the truth is God dogs us. We dog God in faraway places and God dogs us close up.

Consider Moses' rock. It is right there in his back yard. All he has to do is tap it. Water flows.

In our exoticized, externalized spirituality, we hold the fantasy that the perfect is the spiritual. We'll go to India, carry around our 15 bags of luggage, designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. We'll find God. We'll come home. We won't attempt suicide again. While not losing our baggage, we will also find our souls. Fat chance.

Consider Moses' rock. Is there something close by to tap? Today I am tapping the Judson conundrum. Some say we are not spiritual enough. We're not "church" in the terms of those who cage their God. We fight back with more than a little pride. There might be other ways. Spirituality is the activation of the flow of water in us by community, by faith, by miracle, by accident, by hitting the rock in us hard enough that we break it open. Spirituality takes us to another place. We no longer say, "They are bad church, we are good church." We no longer say, "They are shooting monks in Burma." We say we are shooting monks in Burma. We no longer say, "They are taking health insurance away from children." We say we are doing that. We are freed from the false dichotomies for something that approaches spiritual truth, usually known best as simultaneous compassion for self and other, rarely known as pride or "They-making."

So I'm on the train and a woman asks the conductor, "How good is the coffee in the snack bar?" He says, "It's the best coffee on the train." The spirituality I am suggesting is not the best coffee you'll ever drink nor will it perfect you as a person. ALL it is the best coffee on the train. that we happen to be riding. Amen.

· Ancient Testimony Exodus 17: 1-5