What must I believe to belong?

It is incredibly confusing to folks when what we say does not match with what we actually do.  Of course, we are all inconsistent at times. But you know what I mean! If you are a pastor and you talk about prostitution as a sin (in practically every sermon you preach) but get caught in a hotel room with a prostitute and it turns out you have spent $50,000.00 of your church’s money on prostitutes over the course of your career - that’s a problem.  

If on the other hand, you behave like a human - desiring to love Jesus and others and respect yourself and messing that up in a variety of ways on a regular basis, well, that’s human.  When you mess up, after a bit of defensiveness maybe, a time or two of blaming others, if eventually you start talking about how you messed up and what you are responsible for and how you plan on making amends - again, you are not only a human but you are practicing believing in the sacred act of humility and repentance.  Who wouldn’t want to belong to a tribe that lives like this? I think there are some hints about belief and belonging in these two illustrations.

Before we get to that, let’s take a few moments and consider when we have personally acted in ways that seem to contradict our beliefs.  What did we do? How did we feel? What were we thinking? Did we have a path forward? Was it littered with shame? Was it restorative?

If we are going to be part of a faith community, these are important questions to ask because they will define in many ways our faith experience during times of crisis.  Whether we are community members or leaders - these questions will impact our capacity to love humans and participate in their healing.

Believing and Belonging

From an early age, I have been confused about the criteria for believing in order to belong to a faith community.  My early exposure to faith was a mixed bag. My parents did not attend church or ever speak of spiritual matters. (Other than when my dad was cursing.)  My maternal grandparents were Baptist through and through so I went to church with them during my summer visits. It was in their church that I learned what white grape juice and stale crackers tasted like, Jesus was a white man with a long light brown beard, heathens were not to be trusted but if you got baptized all was forgiven and you could belong (My grandfather was deathly afraid of water so he was an outsider for 30 years before he screwed up his courage after a heart attack and took the plunge. However, he panicked and flailed around which resulted in the pastor taking a plunge and the two men splashing around in that baptismal pool for quite awhile before choir members rushed to their rescue.), all other denominations were heathens especially the Catholics, you don’t go to church unless you are dressed to kill (that was confusing), baptists drink (often excessively) but not together, and... baptist pastors have this habit of running away with either the choir director, pianist or church secretary (there was a stretch when they were three for three in that department).  I learned a lot of other lessons too, but who has the time to read all that?!? Anyway, all of this was going on with the backdrop of sermons that preached: behave. Behave. Behave. Like I said, it was confusing.

When my husband and I were newlyweds we joined a beautiful Southern Baptist church in our community and loved it.  Our Sunday School teachers became spiritual parental units for us - loving and encouraging us and seeing potential in us that we didn’t even dare to dream might be true.  They challenged us too. They taught us the scriptures and cast a vision for what it might mean to bear the image of God and take it with us in our daily lives. They sacrificed for us, serving our entire class Sunday lunches around their large farmhouse table made of pine and waxed until you could see your reflection in its surface so long as you moved aside the steaming plates of food and the baskets of Mama John’s yummy yeast rolls.  We met on Thursday nights as families for bible study (with the babies) and the women returned on Friday morning for a women’s study. These folks were NOT confusing. They were clear, consistent and oh so very kind. In their presence, everyone felt like a favorite child who belonged. If I have any instincts about what it means to love Jesus and follow him, it is because they planted them.

So what made one experience so confusing and the other so clarifying?  To be continued….

A Simpler Approach to Spirituality

I’m going to close with a simpler way to process your spirituality if looking at all the individual puzzle pieces (as we’ve done the past few days) isn’t all that interesting to you.  

What constitutes a good day?  Do you ever ask yourself that question?  What do you need to do today, that you can (in reality) do, that would contribute to experiencing a meaningful day?  

It tends to be that we’re so bogged down trying to get done the things that need to be done that we don’t think about building meaning into our day.  Or, we don’t consider what it would take in order to create space to create meaning in our day.  

Of course, building meaning into our day such that we spiritually flourish requires a little bit of planning.  But it’s not just about planning- it’s about intentionality.  Intentionality is at the heart of a flourishing spiritual life.  

Are you living as you intend to be living?  

Spend some time with that question.  It’s not an easy one to answer.  And, the answer will always be a little bit yes and a little bit no.  

Life will be more spiritually enriching if we’re living as we intend to be living.  This means we regularly evaluate how we’re living and intentionally seek to adjust the areas where things aren’t going well.  This process allows our lives to become more full, more spiritually enriching, in part because we confidently know that we're approaching our lives wholeheartedly.  That requires courage.    

If we’re living intentional lives then we will experience ourselves as being more whole, or unified, persons because there will be, over time, fewer discrepancies between our desires and our actions.  There will be less hypocrisy, less internal tension, and the joy that comes from knowing we’re doing the best we can.  

Every Moment Holy

Every moment is holy.  Or, perhaps, every moment has the capacity to be holy.  Holiness is about distinctiveness, it’s about being “set apart.”  God called Israel, in the Old Testament, to be His people, meaning, they were to live with by a unique set of values that pointed others towards God.  

We lose track of individual moments quickly.  They pass us by while we’re looking elsewhere.  But each individual moment grants us the opportunity to be kinder, gentler, more patient, more gracious, more attentive versions of ourselves.  The world is not a gentle place so even a small, seemingly insignificant display of compassion can dramatically impact another person’s day, or life.  

Perhaps we miss these small, significant opportunities to fulfill the call to be a people “set apart” while we anticipate grander opportunities to put our goodness on display.  Or perhaps we (wrongly) assume we have no goodness to display, and give up the fight.  Whatever the case may be, focus on the smallest possible way in which you can exercise your distinctiveness.  

If we can “focus small” then we will be far less likely to miss grander opportunities.

Confession

16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.  

James 5:16, NRSV

Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

Confession is a term that points us in the direction of a number of spiritual practices.  We can’t confess until we’ve done rigorously honest self-reflection, for instance.  We can’t confess without surrounding ourselves with community who are willing to hold us accountable to our certain way of seeing, who we, for our part, trust to do so.  

The 12 steps provide us the mechanics required to carry this process out (in step 5 and its surrounding steps).  We take a moral inventory, we share it with God and a trusted accountability partner.  

The Bible casts a more obviously spiritual vision for confession (though, of course, the 12 steps are profoundly spiritual), a vision which includes healing, forgiveness, acceptance, redemption, restoration, and community up-building.  That's a powerful list.  We can't over-emphasize the importance of confession.