The Spiritual Gift of Simplicity

Matthew 19:16-22

Luke 12:13-22

                During lent this year, we will be focusing on Spiritual Disciplines. I want to start by clarifying that discipline does not mean something painful or harsh or unpleasant.  Instead they are called spiritual “disciplines” because they are ways of organizing, committing to and structuring our dedication to a behavior or way of being.  Spiritual disciplines are activities that bring us closer to God.  The purpose of the disciplines is to help us focus on our relationship with God for a specific period of time, and to invite us to ask, with our behavior, Where is God in our experience?  How do we discern God’s presence?  And what is God doing anew in our lives?  The disciplines are for the purpose of relationship with God.  Therefore it is very important that they be about relationship and not about being rigid or stuck in a behavior.  Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, who is known as an expert on spiritual disciplines put it this way, “The way to death is to turn spiritual disciplines into laws.”  They are meant for our good, and they are meant to enhance our faith and relationships with God. 

                There are 12 spiritual disciplines that Foster identifies.  Four are considered inner disciplines and those include prayer, fasting, meditation and reading or study.  Then there are four outward disciplines: simplicity, solitude, submission and service.  Finally there are four disciplines that are considered communal: confession, worship, guidance and celebration.  Some of these - prayer, reading, confession, service and worship, in particular, we practice regularly in the church.  Others you might do on your own – meditation, for example, or seeking guidance.  But others we are less familiar with. 

                Of those twelve disciplines, fasting, or the giving up of something intentionally, is the one we most often focus on during lent.  But I would invite us to try to add or to focus on any of these spiritual disciplines during lent as a way to intentionally deepen and focus our relationship with God.  There are twelve, and yet we tend to focus on the one of fasting from something in particular.  But I would like to  encourage all of us to expand our way of thinking about these disciplines, and instead of thinking of giving something up, think of adding a practice into your faith commitments.

                Each week I will focus on one of the spiritual disciplines in particular as well, and today I would like to start our Lenten focus by talking about simplicity.  The idea behind simplicity is that we become enslaved to the complicated things in our life, in particular the “things”, the possessions that clutter our lives.  Most of our fear in this world seems to be directly tied to anxiety about losing our stuff, our possessions and therefore the things that we think make us secure.  And as a people, we are controlled by that fear.  It enslaves us.  Therefore, the spiritual discipline of simplicity calls us to let go of the fear, that bondage and enslavement to our stuff.  To trust instead that we can survive, truly, with nothing but God.  Our fear, and our desire to protect ourselves with possessions, separates us from God.  Our desire to hold on to our things separates us from truly relying on and trusting God.  The spiritual discipline of simplicity calls us to be intentional about letting go of those things that build a wall between ourselves and God, that separate us from God.

I have mentioned before that there have been a number of studies that show that the richest people in the United States give a shockingly small percentage of their incomes to charities, while the poorest people in our nations give a huge percentage.  An article came out in a few years ago in Forbes Magazine that looked at giving and indicated that this trend is on the increase: the poor are giving more and more of their resources and the rich are giving less and less. I’ve shared with you before the joke about the poor man who begged God for money with the promise that he would give 10% of everything he earned.  After finding 10$, he faithfully gave one back.  Then he found $100 and faithfully gave back $10.  He soon found a job and was making $10,000, and faithfully returning $1000 of it.  But when he got to the place where he was making $100,000 and had to give $10K of that back, or later when he made $1,000,000 and had to give back $100,000 to keep his promise, he began to feel very uneasy.  He went to the local priest to ask how he could get out of his deal with God.  The priest responded, “Well, I don’t think you can get out of the deal.  But I’m sure God would be happy to return you to making only $100 or so, if you’d be more comfortable only giving $10.

It is clear that it should not be the case that the poor give so much more than the rich. And the reality is that we could go a long way towards ending suffering if the rich were to give even a small percentage more than they currently give.  We could easily end world hunger.  We could fix the water problems around the world.  But the reality is that the more we have, the more fearful we seem to become about losing what we have.  So fearful, as I said, that we hold on tighter and tighter to what we believe is “ours” forgetting completely that nothing we have is ours – all of it belongs to God.  We are stewards of God’s resources, and as such, are called to use the resources entrusted to us for the good of all people, not the good of ourselves alone. I am reminded of the parable Jesus told of the servants who were given the talents of differing amounts.  Do we bury the resources we are given?  Do we SPEND the resources we are given on ourselves?  Or do we share them, grow them, use them for God’s good which is the good of God’s creation? 

                Simplicity, learning to live with less stuff, learning to depend less on our things and more on God teaches us that God really is all we need and that forming idols from our things does not make us happy, healthy or whole.

                If we decide to take this on, then, as a spiritual discipline, where do we start?

There are specific things we can do towards the goal of simplicity:

a.        Buy things for their usefulness rather than simply because they are pretty or because we like them.

b.       Reject addictive things

c.       Get used to giving things away

d.       Refuse to be propagandized

e.       Enjoy things without owning them (library books, videos, skates, etc.)

f.        Appreciate creation

g.       Pay for things now, not later – incurring debt is not conducive to simplicity

h.       Use simple speech: in other words, don’t use big words when simple ones will do.  Don’t feel the need to say in a paragraph what can be said in a single sentence.  Don’t repeat yourself.

i.         Reject things that oppress others – this includes ideas as well as things that put some people in an oppressive position: women, people of color, hierarchies of relationships.  This includes being aware of the chain of events that leads to each product that you buy, and make care to buy from places and from people and specific objects that do not hurt people in order for you to obtain them: don’t buy things made with child labor or slave labor.  Buy things that are purchased fairly and that pay the actual workers fairly.  Don’t buy products that harm the environment or that are made by harming the environment.  Be aware of where you buy things and how things come to be on your shopping list.

j.         Shun things that distract you from God: social media, TV, or anything that takes you away from God.

                None of these things are easy.  But as a Lenten discipline, I think the intentional choosing of simplicity is an act that can have a radical effect on how a person relates to God. 

                Rev. Mark Scandrette said this in the study, "Animate", “Shortly after I began working as a pastor, I had a moment of crisis. One Sunday morning I was standing in the pulpit preaching and as I looked out on the congregation, I saw people falling asleep and fidgeting in their seats anxious to get home to watch the game or to get to the restaurant before the noonday rush. I knew that no matter what I said people would come through the line after the service, dutifully shake my hand and say, “good message pastor” or maybe make a comment about a funny story I’d told.  The possibility that I might spend a life time of Sundays reenacting this script made me want to scream, “Is anybody listening?!  This should really make a difference in how we live our lives!”  And then I thought about myself that I could preach a sermon about love and then go home and be crabby with my family.  Or talk about God’s heart for justice knowing that I wasn’t in relationship with anybody in poverty or struggle myself.  This was all going through my mind while I was speaking and I wondered, is anyone actually listening to what I’m saying? Is what we are doing here making a difference for any of us?  Do I really know what I’m speaking about from lived experience with God?  Or am I just regurgitating what I’ve read?  Maybe we’ve forgotten that Christianity isn’t just something to believe, but it’s a way of life that we are being invited to practice.  It seemed to me that we were being invited not just to (rehash) the Christian story but to become part of it, joining what our maker is doing to bring healing, restoration and hope to our world.  It’s what Jesus described as the kingdom of God or what I call Jesus’ revolution of love. I realize that many of the ways I’ve learned to be religious didn’t naturally move me towards transformation for the good of the world.  It was easy to get stuck in my head. There was a huge gap between how I wanted to live and how I actually lived.  My practices tended to be individualistic, information driven and disconnected from the gritty details of life.  Slowly I began to realize that if I was going to be part of the revolution of love that  Jesus embodied and promised, that I would need to be more honest, more active and more connected with other people. …  We won’t learn how to practice the way of Jesus without taking tangible steps to walk in his way.  The promise of the gospel is that we can learn a whole new way to be human, to live without worry, fear, greed, lust or anger.  To live a life animated and empowered by love.  This is the kind of life Jesus lived and invites us to experience. ….” 

                Mark Scandrette talked about a number of things his congregation did and does as a way of following Jesus.  One of them had to do with the Lenten discipline of simplicity and that was the “have two, give one away”, which simply means if you have two of something, give the second one away.  The congregants met weekly for two months, talking through the stuff that they had, what they really needed, and what could be given away or sold to help those who have less.  In the process of selling and slimming down and giving away, they raised thousands of dollars to help overcome poverty.  But as Mark realized, the practice probably did not make a big dent in the world’s poverty.  Instead, it changed those who engaged this practice of simplifying.  They came to really look at their stuff in a different way: as resources, lent to them by God for the use of all of God’s people, as objects that could be used for God’s glory, or could be simply selfishly held on to for one’s own pleasure. 

My last congregation tried a similar project.  We worked together and supported one another in going through our things and collecting objects for a huge rummage sale with the idea that we would not be selling these objects to one another, but really getting rid of things that were no longer useful, had no purpose other than self-gratification, were cluttering and complicating our lives in a time when we were called to simplify and cut back. All of the money we raised then went towards hunger issues. I would encourage you all to consider doing the same.  Go through your things this winter and spring.  Really look hard at what you have that you don’t use or don’t need, see what you have two of that you only need one of.  Again, this is for OUR benefit.  We may not change the world by it, but we can start to change ourselves as we strive to be closer to God and more active in our following of Jesus.  This is just one way, but I find that the de-cluttering of our lives, the simplifying of our lives is an amazing step towards overcoming fear and greed in particular.  It is an invitation to rely more fully on God.  It is an invitation to trust.  It is a call to be more fully present with God.  And that is a gift indeed.  Amen.

Sunday's Sermon - Jesus did not come to make us comfortable

Exodus 20:1-17

1^st Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-25

I’d like you to take a moment to think about why you come to church. And what you hope to get from your time here at church. 

In part, we come to church for fellowship, comfort in hard times, strength, hope. These are all important and good things. God wants us to have that support which empower us and strengthen us to do the work of the church in the world. We support one another in our faith, we support one another in the work we do for the church and the world, we seek comfort from God and from one another, we find hope that leads us out of difficult times and out of despair, we obtain the healing power of prayer and of God’s word for us as we come together.

But there is also another side to our coming here. God calls us into relationship and that has to be dynamic. We walk a journey, and we hope to move forward in that journey, growing with God, growing in our faith, growing in our spiritual lives. We are part of a Christian community to help us to move in our spiritual development. So we come to church, also, to be challenged and to grow.

James Fowler wrote extensively about spiritual growth and development. He outlined a typical path of spiritual growth through six stages as he observed them. I’m not going to outline those here, though maybe at some point I will. But I do want to share with you what he and others have said about how that movement through the stages of spiritual development takes place. And what Fowler and many others have said is that both conversion and spiritual development tend to happen in the same way: they both tend to happen most often and most fully after some kind of crisis. People are most in a position to change their understandings, their outlooks, their behaviors and their faith through and after they have gone through something that has challenged their world view, understandings, or beliefs up to that point.

That’s not to say that crises are safe or always a good thing for our faith growth. You can probably think of situations in which faith bodies have taken advantage of the fact that people in crisis are more open to belief changes. Cults, for example, typically target vulnerable people. They find people who are hurting, who have just experienced a loss or a change of some kind, and they promise something better, something which will move them out of their pain. I have seen this happen first hand. My high school good friend’s mother died a month after we began college. He had just moved away from home, across the country, living away for the first time ever. He was stressed with the new work load of attending a school far from home, and then his mother passed away. The Moonies in his college community found him within a month after her death, offering him a new family that would hold him, would love him, would fill the emptiness he felt, would offer a sanctuary from the confusion and stress, would help him walk through his new life journey. He was very attracted to the promises they made him and he attended several of their events before those of us back home became concerned enough to step in. Fortunately, there was a Presbyterian Church in the community with a pastor who, once contacted, was able to reach out to him and show him that while their promises sounded good, the cost of giving up all his outside relationships, all his finances, and even his personal identity were too high. But we also know of many who are not so lucky and who do join cults in their times of crisis.

So, too, many of us can think of examples of people who have given up faith entirely in reaction to a serious crisis. Something bad happens and people can become angry at God. Often that bad thing is something that happens in church. For some, they choose, in their anger, to deny God altogether. I’ve always found it interesting that many of the atheists I know, while claiming that they don’t believe in God, in fact are actually just really angry at a God they continue to believe in, despite what they say. They are punishing God for their pain or loss by denying that God exists. Other atheists are in between stages of spiritual growth, unable to move from one stage to another smoothly and so they reject a previous stage of faith belief but cannot embrace the faith of a later stage. For example, a person who has been at the stage of belief in which Holy texts are literal writings may find themselves confronted by scriptures that are divergent from each other, such as Jesus blatantly contradicting the Old Testament rule of “an eye for an eye.” If that person cannot find a way to understand this discrepancy, if they cannot find a community that can support them in a new understanding of those texts, if they cannot find a model for a faith that does not require a literal approach to scripture, all too often they end up leaving their faith journey all together.

So we know that crisis can be hurtful to one’s faith journey as well. But it is also, as I said at first, the fertile ground that can help us move in our faith journeys into a deeper, more genuine and more honest relationship with God. Crisis doesn’t have to be big in order to do this.  It can be as small as simply something that causes a change in one’s thinking, a comment made in a class or during a church service, seeing something that doesn’t fit into one’s world view, reading something that challenges one’s belief. Small things as well as large things, anything that challenges our thinking, that moves us even a little out of our comfort zone can move us forward in our faith, if we are open to God’s movement within these challenges and changes. Other times the crisis might be larger.

When I was a senior in college, a group of people from the house church in which I lived went to visit Nicaragua and Guatemala to try to understand the poverty, wars and political turmoil those countries were enduring. We were a group of twenty committed Christians, college students who, frankly, believed we had it all figured out and were just going to get more education. All of us were people of faith, though we were in very different places in our faith journeys. But as we listened to the stories of the people in these countries who were suffering, who were struggling, all of us were confronted, deeply, in our faith. Many of us began the journey with faith beliefs such as “God never gives you more than you can handle,” and “everything happens for a reason” only to be confronted by people of faith who had experienced much more than they could handle, and who had truly experienced atrocities that went beyond any possible “reason”. These were people who had their entire families disappeared and killed, people who had been tortured and left to die by the side of the road; deep, faithful Christians who had lost their minds because of witnessing the atrocities of war. None of us were left unaffected by the courage of the women and children who would risk their lives to share their stories with us. None of us were unaffected by the sound of machine guns mowing down local villagers, waking us from sleep one night. None of us were unaffected by the begging of the villagers for us to talk to our government about what was going on and to tell them to stop supporting a war on the peasants that was taking place in these countries at that time. But the ways in which we were affected were very different. How do you handle the challenge to your faith, when the foundation of it has been trusting that if you have faith, you will never experience more than you can handle, only to see that this isn’t always the case? If your faith is only a guarantee against bad things, how do you handle it when bad things happen despite your faith?

One of our twenty decided that these people weren’t really Christian. If they had been Christian, God would not have allowed this to happen to them, God would not have “given them more than they could handle”, and the “reason” for their suffering must be their lack of true faith.  That may have felt like a safe way for her to hang on to her faith, but it couldn’t last very long, as it was sure to be confronted again in some way. Another of our group decided, for a while, that there must not be a God at all - after all, how could a good and loving God allow such atrocities to take place. Personally, I found myself trusting the voices of the people themselves when they were asked about their faith. They said they did not believe God was responsible for these atrocities. People were. And that their experience of God was one of Jesus standing by them, crying with them, being on the cross with them; screaming out against the money changers and the Pharisees and all the injustices in their land as well; calling for other people of faith to step forward and change what was happening, promising that even if their lives were lost, there was new life on the other side that they had to believe in, in order to make a change, in order to bring the realm of God, the reign of God to their countries. And my faith grew because of listening and being moved by their faith. But the person who was most profoundly challenged by the things we witnessed in Central America took time moving through his faith crisis. He went home and crawled into bed and did not emerge for a week. Because we were all living together in a house church at the time, we rallied around this young man. We came and sat with him. We tried to offer advice and our insights, but the campus ministers wisely told us that our presence, our experiences and our love were more important than any answers at that point. So we shared our stories, and we shared our love, we shared our confusion and doubt as well. Together we walked the journey. Together we each emerged with a deeper faith. Even our friend who rejected God altogether is now serving as a Christian missionary now to those same countries, trying to change the situation. The only one whose faith did not survive was the one who refused to be challenged by the situation but who simply rejected those who suffered as un-Christian. She could not allow for the questions and doubts to rise in her mind. She could not, therefore, work through them and walk forward in her journey. And as a result, her faith finally did not survive.

What is the job of the church in light of this? 

I think we have to look at scripture and see what Jesus models for us to do. If the church is the body of Christ, then being that body must look like following Jesus. So what did Jesus do?      First, he brought healing to people. As a church we do this in several ways. We pray for people, in some traditions, that prayer can involve a laying on of hands or a healing service. For others, it is just taking people to the doctor and visiting people in the hospital. In times of crisis, the job of the church is to stand with people and to help them move through their questions, through their experiences, through their doubts, in a way that does not proscribe for another what their individual journey must look like, but that walks gently with each person and encourages above all, continued communication with God. We can’t proscribe a certain path because each journey is unique and God’s relationship with you as individuals cannot be determined by me or anyone else. It is your relationship with God. The best we can do is walk with you and help you hear God’s voice when it becomes difficult to hear. This is what my house church did for those of us who went to Central America. We walked with one another, and that was more powerful than anything.

Secondly, Jesus stood up to injustice. He stood up for people who were being put down by others. This, too, is part of our job as a church. We need to be the voice that stops those who would throw stones at the woman caught in adultery. We need to be the voice that stops those who would condemn Mary who let down her hair to wipe Jesus’ feet. We need to stop the voices of judgement and condemnation, stop the violence against the poor and oppressed, and stand with the marginalized, the outcast, the poor and the voiceless.

Third, Jesus taught about God’s love and care. He told stories, he told parables. We, too are called to tell our stories, to tell the stories we know in a way that challenges limited thinking, that challenges hateful thinking. We need to speak about God’s love in a way that moves people to be more loving.

Fourth, he challenged peoples’ understanding of worship. He changed the symbols of the pass-over meal into our communion meal. He said that wherever two or more are gathered God is there - and wherever that is becomes a site for worship, an opportunity for worship, a call to worship. He challenged people’s faith. And in doing so, he invited growth, he invited change.  We, too are called to experience new things in our worship lives, to not become complacent as a church, but remain open to the movements of the Holy Spirit, even in our worship lives.

Finally, he did things like we read in today’s scripture: he overturned the money changers in the temple, he got angry and confrontive, he stirred things up and challenged the norm, the standard way people did things which they hadn’t examined in a long time and which needed to be looked at, re-examined, spoken about in a truthful and honest way and changed. As a church, we, too, are called to look at things, even in the temple, even in the church, to look at our own actions and patterns, to risk seeing things clearly and to speak about them as they are.

            Clayton Valley is a unique place. It is a church that I believe understands the value of being challenged, the necessity of change as a part of our lives both as individuals and as a community. I have already experienced in you a great deal of openness to experience new things, and a great deal of willingness to allow your crises to be opportunities for growth, opportunities to move closer to God and to experience God in new ways. I want to encourage you as part of the process of spiritual growth to share with one another, your brothers and sisters in the church, those experiences. Share with us when things are good, share with us when things are difficult, share with us when things are challenging, joyful and when things are unpleasant. Your sharing is a gift to all of us. We learn and we grow in our faith journeys, not only from our own crisis and experiences, but from yours as well. I invite you to give us the gifts of your stories and

experiences. And I invite you to remember that sometimes the discomfort you may feel at any moment is an invitation to growth. Other times, that discomfort may be an invitation for the rest of us to grow, for the church to grow, or change. We need to be given that opportunity, too.

Growing us in our faith - that is the job of the church. We can’t do this always by being comfortable, though offering comfort is an important part of the job. Jesus offered it all: comfort and challenge, a safe haven and encouragement to go out and do the work of the church, support and empowerment to change the world, love; and a voice that challenges us to grow and be better.  As the church, we strive to follow Jesus and do nothing less than all of the above.  Amen.