What God Wants For Your Life

Last night’s gospel recounts the moments at the last supper and Jesus’ effort to wash the disciples’ feet. Peter is resistant. Jesus notes that if Peter is unwilling to have his feet washed, then he has no part in the ministry of Jesus. In classic overkill Peter, of course, invites Jesus to wash everything.

It occurred to me in the middle of it all that foot washing — perhaps more than any other act in the Christian year — is the practice that tests our willingness to surrender. It’s awkward. It’s embarrassing.

It takes us into that place that sociologists describe as “liminal .” A place that is unfamiliar, where we are not in control, where the social conventions that we consider familiar are nowhere to be found. Where the things that we rely upon for a sense of comfort and control are missing.

And that, it seems to me, is the spiritual issue. Peter: “No way.” Jesus: “Then I don’t know you.” Peter (still in control): “OK, then let’s do it this way.”

The thing is, it isn’t just Peter’s problem — it’s ours. I would always prefer not to go forward and a lot of others never do. But this annual practice of taking off your shoes and socks in a public place and allowing someone else to wash your feet points to the deeper spiritual issue: Are we willing to surrender control over our lives? Are we willing to trust Jesus?

Put another way: Do we really believe that he loves us better than we love ourselves and that we are meant for glory?

We can’t live into that promise if we won’t let go or take back control from time to time.

Some years ago I preached from John’s Gospel on Good Friday. The text describes death as the last enemy and that was the focus of my sermon. One man complained bitterly following the service that I spent too much time with death. “Why not preach resurrection hope?” he protested.

In response, I noted, “You can’t preach Easter without Good Friday and you can’t understand the gift of Easter, if you haven’t contemplated your own mortality or what it meant for Jesus to embrace death as a means of liberating us.”

I continue to believe that is the case. Easter is not a sequel to Good Friday. It is not the second clause in a sentence that begins, “Jesus died, but….”

It is the day that we measure that darkness that makes real the Light.

One of the trends in modern cinema has been the disaster movie and the most common genre of late has been the apocalyptic movie: Films that chronicle the end of the world.

What is interesting about movies of this kind is that, more often than not, the movies haven’t been about God bringing the world to an end, the culprit has been other forces: aliens, global warming, and terrorists have been at the heart of most of these game-ending scenarios.

What does this tell us about our spiritual needs?

One, we live in stories — narratives shape our lives. Some of those stories are private narratives, lived out on a smaller scale, but others are all-encompassing stories within which our private stories find meaning.

Two, the larger stories are indispensable. It is only in telling our stories in that larger context that we find meaning and significance.

Three, the way the story ends tells us something about the whole of the story: where we are all going, what is important to us (or should be), why we live the way we do.

Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind version of apocalypse has taken a beating from secular thinkers and from Scripture scholars who (rightly!) criticize his interpretation of the Book of Revelation. But that doesn’t get us away form wanting to know how it all ends as a key how to live in the meantime.

At its simplest, Christian theology has always held that the end is not a what, but a Who. It is that conviction that can guide us all, regardless of what happens in the meantime.

Roll the clock back to the 1960’s for a moment: The halcyon days of the Boomer rise to glory. Bike-riding through growing suburban developments, baseball and football games, the Beatles, the Stones, a burgeoning problem with drug addiction, the assassination of a President and a major civil rights leader (among others), race riots, and the Vietnam War.

Boomers absorbed it all, conforming and reacting to the politics of their parents. We were convinced that they were pivotal moments and — notwithstanding our mistrust of authority — we refocused the institutions around us, including the church, with a view to giving our pivotal convictions a lasting place in American life. One sociologist, describes us as “the pig in the demographic python.”

Of course, it is now clear in a world that is very different from the one in which we grew up that our vision of things is already losing its hold on our children — never mind the country and the world. That hasn’t discouraged us, of course. We are still tightly in control of the church and the debates still represent the old battle lines drawn in the 60’s. Go to a General Convention or channel surf from Fox to MSNBC and it all sounds the same.

But the smell of mortality is what strikes me. Like a battered old man nursing a grudge, or a dying dog gnawing at an old bone — it’s clear that the issues are the narrow preoccupation of a generation that is losing its grip. And in a decade or so, we Boomers will have largely disappeared from the stage — taking our place among long, gray crowds, complaining that what we thought should be defining isn’t getting any attention at all.

Mortality has its lessons to teach and some of them are not pleasant to contemplate. But, like mortality, they are inescapable:

One, every generation has its contribution to make, but it has its blind spots as well. Some of those surface long before a generation completes its run: The polarized and polarizing character of boomer discourse is a case in point. Lost in the debates, left and right, is the larger well-being of our society and its institutions. Our capacity for moving beyond disagreement to mutual understanding and shared spiritual pilgrimage is in evidence everywhere.

Two, there is a place in generational pilgrimages to build and imagine a new way of doing things, but the enduring mark of a generation lies in its ability to listen. Like individuals, we collectively move through life as well – whether we acknowledge it or not; and like individuals generations pass through stages. The earliest stages are marked by growth, acquisition, and achievement. But the “arc of ambition” as one writer calls it, needs to give way to listening, if the lessons learned are likely to find application and relevance late in life. Across the church I have met younger adults who have underlined our inability as boomers to listen. Some of them are militant. Some of them are already discouraged. Both groups are barometers of our capacity for wisdom.

Three, there is a time and a place to let go. Here, perhaps, we deserve a bit of sympathy. Generational changes have accelerated and the march of generational change is different. Thanks to life in a world where entrepreneurial and broad-based change can be launched by ever-smaller numbers of people, we do not have the same leisure to prepare for changes; and thanks to longer life expectancies, dealing with our mortality is something we can defer. But none of this absolves us of the responsibility to grapple with our mortality — and that grappling with that transition requires more than imagining the world we think that the next generation should want.

Does this mean that I think we should quit trying to be creative, thoughtful, or engaged? No. But if that desire to be engaged is something that is welcome and life-giving, it will be marked by a capacity for self-transcendence, the ability to listen and learn, and the ability to hold life lightly — which is all that we can finally do.

My students are really struggling with what many theologians refer to as God’s “preference for the poor.” I think, in part, the struggle that they experience arises out of the way that they have heard Scripture’s language about the poor used in the theology that they read. And, whether they are hearing it accurately or not, what they gather from their reading is that God loves the poor and that the wealthy are — at best — the stepchildren of God’s love.

A long list of questions follows, of course: Does God love them at all (granted that they are, if not wealthy, solidly middle class)? If God prefers the poor, should they embrace poverty? What would that mean for their families? Wouldn’t they simply add to the numbers of poor that must be cared for by someone?

What about the economic realities? Wealth generates jobs and reduces poverty. Poverty does not. Governments can address poverty, but not everyone can be a ward of the state; and, in the final analysis, the government has no resources of its own. Those resources come from taxing people who have jobs and bank accounts. (And, given modern political realities as opposed to those that held true in ancient Israel, nothing done by the government is done in the name of God.)

The most perceptive of my students have other questions as well: Poverty does not make people intrinsically loveable or righteous. Poverty can be simply grinding and ugly. So, why does God “prefer” the poor? And, when their guard is really down, they point out that the theologians who insist on God’s preference for the poor are themselves fabulously wealthy by the world’s standards. They hold Ph.D.s from some of the world’s most expensive graduate programs. They own homes and cars. They have children that they feed, clothe, and educate and — ironically — they hold endowed chairs at a well-heeled university that were paid for by (that’s right) wealthy people.

The problem here, I think, is the way in which the language of the Bible is construed. Scripture does not say that God prefers the poor over the rich. Scripture says that God cares about the poor, loves them, and thinks that we all should attend to their needs in a world that might otherwise neglect them. Scripture can also be very hard on the rich when they care for their own salvation and live in denial about the needs of the poor. But none of this is a simple, categorical message that amounts to what they hear from some interpreters: God loves the poor and hates the rich.

The reason that Scripture is so emphatic about the love that God has for the poor is that in both the world of the Old and New Testaments, poverty was often considered a sign of God’s judgment and condemnation, while wealth was considered a sign of God’s blessing and salvation. What made the message of the prophets and Jesus radical was its insistence on the notion that one’s economic standing did not exclude you from the love of God, nor did your standing imply that God loved you.

So, when Jesus insisted that the wealthy would find it difficult to enter heaven, he was contradicting what the disciples and others took for granted: if you were wealthy, you were blessed. The radical message of the prophets and Jesus was that God’s love and salvation could not be tied in any way to one’s economic status.

This is not to minimize the notion that those who have resources should care for those who do not. What God wants from us, regardless of our social and economic standing, is to live in ways that are attentive to the needs of those whose needs make no demand upon us other than the one that God calls to our attention.

I just finished watching Milla Jovovich’s “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.” Not surprisingly, reviewers criticize the movie for is its lack of fidelity to history and the generic appeal that Joan makes to God.

Missing are references to her specific visions of saints and — apart from the necessity of placing her from time to time in a medieval church — there is no particular reference to the Christian dimensions of her faith. These criticisms are not from Christians (or people who appeal to their faith at any rate), let alone fundamentalists, but from people like filmmaker Ronald Maxwell. The motive, of course, is marketing. In a world where spirituality is a commodity for sale, maximizing the number of interested customers lies in sublimating the particularity of any spirituality and in maximizing its broader appeal. Fine for movies I suppose, but not so good for the spiritual life.

Some years ago I had a conversation with a young guy who was in AA. The program had saved his life and he was beginning to put the various pieces of it all back together. His capacity for relationships and good work were closer to what one would expect from someone with his gifts.

But something was nagging him. He had maxed out the spiritual value of living his life in response to “a higher power.” With no name for God, he also had no idea how to respond to God. He needed more.

Religion may seem restrictive and it is certainly true that when we begin to think about our spiritual life in conversation with a single spiritual tradition the particularity of a tradition demands certain things from us. But it is also true that without a religious tradition, we drift spiritually, without a clear idea of what our spiritual pilgrimage is all about — the central challenges, our essential spiritual needs, the point of it all. It is also more likely that we confuse our own preferences and prejudices for the voice of God. It is no guarantee, of course, but the conversation with a tradition at least opens the door, drawing us into a conversation about the will of God that is bigger than our own experience.

Houston Smith once observed, “religion gives spirituality traction in history.” It is also true that religion gives spirituality traction in our personal lives. We need more than a god who is no god in particular.

Our spiritualities are carved out in a world dominated by big M materialism. At heart, we are taught that what is real is what we can see, feel, smell, hear, and touch. Ask us what we know about the world and we give you facts, figures, and measurements.

For atheists, that means that life’s only mysteries are what we have yet to learn. For some believers it means that God lies just beyond what we don’t know or just beyond what is yet to be known. The debate over creationism illustrates how much atheists and some believers have in common: They may come to different conclusions, but they can’t believe that God is somehow present in and through the world in which we live.

The result is a God of the gaps or none at all.

There are a lot of problems with big M materialism. Some of them are these:

One, not all truths — not even the most important truths — are material. We are moved by far more than what we can see, feel, smell, hear, and touch — by love and conviction, for example.

Two, the scientific method — the road to mastering our knowledge of big M materialism is a great, but limited tool. It can describe what happens in the world around us, it can’t explain why it exists at all. Thanks to science I know that mass and gravity are related. Science can’t tell me why the relationship does or should exist.

Three, for people of faith, a devotion to big “M” materialism, a devotion to it drives God to the boundaries of our existence. The best of the Christian tradition has always held that God is both beyond our existence (transcendent) and active in our world (immanent).

Four, for the atheist a devotion to big M materialism never quite eliminates the need to have faith. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens — all of the “new atheists” I can think of still want to talk about meaning, beauty, morality, and significance. Why? For what reason? If we are here as the product of an accident — then why care, even if we are here for a long time?

Don’t be bullied by big M materialism. The Greek Orthodox tradition has always held that the world around us exists and holds together thanks to the creative and animating work of the Trinity. Science isn’t a window into the absence of God, it is a small window into the grandeur of God.

Ancient Hebrew tradition is filled with stories of God crafting covenants and of familial relationships which (often imperfectly) reflect the relationships that God seeks with human kind. At their best, those relationships are the bearers of two gifts:

Love and blessing…the security of knowing that we are loved and the promise of a future all our own. Growth is not possible without both gifts.

They are the gifts that God gives to us and they are the gifts we give to others in life’s more intimate and enduring relationships. The engine of all spiritual and emotional growth and health lies in receiving and giving both.

One of my favorite treatments of Ignatian spirituality tracks the growth of the great saint. In each step along the way, the writer observes that what Ignatius could imagine depended upon the spiritual horizons within which he worked.

As a prince, the world he knew was shaped by the horizons of a soldier prince.

As a new Christian he thought of Jesus as a model to be imitated.

As his horizons grew he thought of Jesus as a Lord to be served.

And, at the its most expansive, he thought of his life as an invitation to be Jesus’ companion.

It was this last horizon that defined the order that Ignatius founded. To the world that order is known as The Society of Jesus or the Jesuits. But even today it is the title, “companion,” that the Jesuits themselves prefer.

What we think of our relationship with God and what we expect from God will shape our horizons. Often, the growth we experience has less to do with what God is willing to give us and more to do with what we expect.

What are your spiritual horizons?

I have discovered that as director of spiritual formation, you are often asked questions that no one dares ask anyone else. Some of those questions are more appropriate than others. I have been asked about columbaria, Christmas decorations, apocalyptic television series, the Episcopal Church, and Tim LaHaye. There may be a common denominator there. I can’t be sure — and I’m not sure I want to know.

Others questions I’ve been asked are topically relevant, but sweeping in character, like the question, “What is Celtic spirituality all about?” My answer has been, “Christian, only dark and broody, with a dash of animism.” But in the spirit of Lenten discipline, I suppose that I should confess that answer was calculated to bedevil an old Irish colleague and friend.

Truth be told, Saint Patrick actually represents a far more robust view of Christian spirituality than my playful definition suggests. Though we don’t know a great deal about the bishop, what we do know is that he was captured as a child by Irish marauders who sold him into slavery and for six years he managed the flocks of a cruel master. When he finally escaped to Britain, he placed himself under the tutelage of St. Germain. He was eventually ordained to the priesthood and — at his own urging — was sent back to Ireland.

Tradition has it that his first act was to pay his own ransom to his former master and give him God’s blessing. One of the few surviving texts attributed to Patrick is a prayer that today is called St. Patrick’s Breastplate. A portion of that much lengthier prayer reads:

I bind to myself today

God’s Power to guide me,

God’s Might to uphold me,

God’s Wisdom to teach me,

God’s Eye to watch over me,

God’s Ear to hear me,

God’s Word to give me speech,

God’s Hand to guide me,

God’s Way to lie before me,
God’s Shield to shelter me,
God’s Host to secure me,


Happy St. Patrick’s day…