Sermon: A Spiritual Business Plan

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A Spiritual Business Plan

By Charles Rush

July 8, 2001

you are on the strange e-mail list that I am on you have probably gotten the annual ‘Darwin Awards' list. It is a collection of bizarre and tragic news items of people who have died in the course of famously stupid accidents, thereby ridding themselves from our collective genetic pool and improving the species as a whole.

I doubt that Jesus had these folks in mind when he shared this parable with his first century peasants, but then again who knows. In Spain, a poacher decided to take a shot at a stag deer that was standing on an overhanging rock right above him. He shot the deer right through the heart. It collapsed, fell directly onto the poacher and killed him instantly.

Not to be outdone, there was another tragic story of a 22 year old man who was killed when he taped together a bunch of occy straps or bungee cords in order to bungee jump off a 70 foot railroad trestle. He wrapped the end of the cord around his found, tied the other to the trestle bridge and jumped to his death. Why? The length of cord was greater than the distance from the trestle to the ground. The article in the paper noted, big surprise, alcohol was involved.

Perhaps you remember the 3 young men from last year who planned a perfect robbery in Brooklyn. They pulled off a flawless heist and drove away in a stolen car. The car even had an E-Z pass so they could save time and money by going through the E-Z pass lanes leaving the City. Unfortunately, they didn't know that E-Z pass takes a video picture of everyone going through the lane. Unwittingly, they handed the prosecutor some beautiful photo's of themselves, brandishing the weapons they used in the robbery and even some of the loot they were smiling about.

But you don't have to be a criminal to be poor at planning. You could be a bureaucrat. The American Center in Paris was forced to close just 19 months after it opened its dazzling new $41 million building designed by West Coast Architect Frank Gehry. Why? Construction costs ate up the center's entire endowment, leaving nothing for running the literature, language and dance classes that had made the center the pre-eminent showplace for American artistry in Europe.

If you think that one is a little close to home. I read about a small church that spent $140,000 for the renovation of their sanctuary but didn't have enough left over to buy the pews. Yes, on the day of the dedication of the new space, the church organist, had them turn to hymn 351 and sing, ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus.'

In one sense, you can't really know what you are getting into with God. If I had to describe my spiritual journey, I would say that I backed into doing something good, progressively getting myself deeper and deeper in to goodness without really realizing it. The protagonist in Graham Greene's novel, The Burnt Out Case, has run away from England in order to shed himself of responsibility. He just wants to get away from people, away from having to achieve and make something out of his life. He just wants away from everything British, so he goes to visit a relative in Africa. He is a studied case in self-absorption, refusing to get involved in any relationships, just keeping everything on the surface. But there in the jungle, he can't avoid people who come from all over the bush to th clinic that his cousin runs. He meets this one man who has a horrible leprosy. His skin, especially that of his hands, is literally rotting away. He keeps bumping into this man over and over. Slowly, without his ever realizing it, he gets more and more involved with this African man and the many woes that attend his having leprosy. Quite against his will, quite in spite of what he would want for himself, he finds that he is taking on more and more burden, more emotional responsibility. Slowly, he is coming back to life, spiritually speaking. The African man with horrible leprosy has taken a new name when he was Christianized. He calls himself Deo Gratia, the Latin phrase for ‘The Grace of God'. The irony, and the deep truth of the novel, is that quite in spite of the curse of his illness, he has experienced the grace of God and, no question, he has been the grace of God to the protagonist in the novel, who comes back to life in quite an unexpected way, quite in spite of himself. Who could have imagined.

Yet, I think there are the vague outlines of a spiritual business plan that are suggested in the background of the Gospels. The first is to worship God. We probably need different language than that. There is a verse in Isaiah 40 that says, “Those who rest in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” That is a beguiling image ‘to have wings like eagles'. Eagles indeed migrate over very long distances and fly at great range in search of their prey. But unlike the vast majority of birds that are forced to flap their wings frantically at lower altitudes, eagles rely on thermals, columns of hot air to lift them high into the sky. The eagle just spreads its wings in the thermal and soars.

How is it that we find our rest in God? I want to suggest one fundamental thing might be easier to actually hear in July than in the busy season of early December. The concept comes from Buddhism but it has always been part of the spiritual practice of some Jews and Christians as well. It is called ‘wakefullness', being truly present in the moment and attending to the world around you fully.

I have a colleague that has been in my academic group. He is very bright, probably with ADD, though that was never diagnosed. We were recently sitting at a lecture together on the robot they are building at M.I.T. and what the ontological status of robots with Artificial Intelligence ought to be. My friend is listening to the lecture, carrying on a side conversation with three other people. He has a book open and is underlining passages. And he is writing a column for his Church newsletter on his P.C. This is not what he does occasionally. This is the way he lives all the time. People have even raised this phenomenon to something of a virtue called ‘multi-tasking'. Indeed, I have done it most of my life. You talk on the phone, type on your P.C. and sign letters that my secretary is laying on my desk. And there are certain times of the year, and certain cycles in every job, where it is not only a virtue, it is a necessity.

But, the barrage of multi-sensory stimulation that surrounds us, encourages a certain distraction. Over a period of time, we find ourselves virtually unable to sit still and pay attention to any one thing for an length of time whatsoever. This distractedness is usually combined with a high energy, so that a lot is being done, but in a bigger sense we start to get the feeling that nothing much is being done at the same time. Life begins to lose its savor and that is because, spiritually speaking, we are not taking time to taste much of what it has to offer.

Wakefulness must be practiced. And I think that it is what Isaiah means when he asks us to ‘wait on the Lord' or to ‘rest in the Lord.' How is it that you practice peace in your life? How do you actually center yourself. Wakefulness is a by-product of meditation and at the heart of meditation is the assumption that when you are at one with yourself, when you are at peace with yourself, you are at rest in God. St. Augustine once said, ‘my heart was restless until it was at rest in Thee.'

When my children were much younger, we took our vacations at the beach. I am sure that I was drawn to the shore on an unconscious level because the crashing sound of the surf overrides any other chaos around it. One child could be in a screaming fight with another child, and they would still be drowned out by the sea. A the end of the evening as the sun was disappearing, I would usually go to the edge of the ocean, and just sit. We were lucky to go to beaches that were almost empty at the end of the evening. So there was just a huge orange sky, the sound of the ocean, a few dolphins in the surf, and a great open expanse of sand in either direction. My kids would wander over one by one for warmth. They would always ask me, ‘What are you looking at'. ‘I'm waiting', I would say. ‘I'm waiting for the big wave to come and I'm going to body surf it all the way to the Rockies.'

They would sit there in my lap. “Dad, I think I see it out there. Look.” Even after some years, they would come sit and say ‘Are you still looking for that wave?' And we would sit without talking and just watch. What little I knew about peace, I began to develop in that setting. I needed, and I still need, something so loud around me like the crashing surf, that everything else is drowned out. And I can be present.

People who know nothing about meditation often think, ‘isn't this a waste of time. I could be doing so many other things.' But it is not. It is the way that you pay attention to your soul. It is the way that you get in touch again with ‘the you' that transcends the many changing identities you have gone through. ‘The you' behind the you who was child, who was spouse, who is parent, who is divorced, who is manager, who is philanthropist. In all these different roles people project expectations upon you and you live out of those expectations. That, of course, is fine and important. But spiritually you have to touch base with ‘the you' that was before those expectations and will be after those expectations.

People who just meditate a little bit, sometimes think, “I don't want to do this because it brings up a lot of internal conflict. I don't have the time or the energy to deal with the contradictions in my life right now. I know that the way that I am living is not spiritually productive but I'm not going to change for now, so what is the point of dealing with this stuff.” And it is true that meditation, to the degree that it brings us in touch with ourselves, also makes us aware of some burdens that we have carried with us for many years and the ways that our lives have compensated for them. Sometimes this is conscious but often it is not conscious because we are not so self-aware. Often we just have a vague sense of anxiety or dissatisfaction.

Gradually, over the years, I have come to see the importance of transferring that experience of deep peace at the evening shore into my ordinary life. We are trying to figure out ways to promote and facilitate that in worship. Someone paid attention to it when they built this building and put in the Rose window up above us and the stained glass windows all around us. It is easier to find a focus and let thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow disappear staring at the rose window.

Most of our lives are so filled with activity, responsibility, and work that unless we intentionally create some sanctuary, like we intentionally schedule a workout. I'm thinking of those meditation gardens that the Japanese have taken to a fine art, creating places where they can be at peace, at rest. It is important because it is out of our resting in God, being awake to ourselves and the world around us that we can creatively respond, spiritually respond.

Part, and only part of Jesus' angular message in today's lesson is that we have to be intentional in our spiritual lives. Spirituality doesn't just happen automatically. We have to plan for where we are headed. In most of our lives we have quite a discipline, an order that reflects our commitments and values. But our spiritual lives, we think will just happen automatically. As a result too many of our spiritual lives resemble a college dorm room, with stuff just strewn wherever it was dropped. Here, as elsewhere, we get what we planned for.

A colleague recently wrote about going to Germany and driving on the famed Autobahn. There is a native appeal about the Autobahn because there is no speed limit. You can drive as fast as you want. There are three lanes. The left lane requires that you go 120 m.p.h. The middle lane is for those 80-100 m.p.h. and the right lane is for those 60-80 m.p.h. My colleague got on the road and, of course veered for the fastest lane in his rented car, ready to let her rip. He writes that there is only one catch to the Autobahn. At such dangerous speeds, you better be sure that you and your car can withstand the consequences of the lane you choose. He got his rented Ford in that left lane, pedal to the metal. Not only would it only go about 100 m.p.h., it was shaking all over the road, about to come literally unglued. Too often our lives feel pretty much like that poor rented Ford, driven to hard, out of control, about to come unglued. God has given us free will to choose to live any way we want. But we better be sure we can withstand the consequences of our choices. We better make sure our choices make life for ourselves and others better and not worse. This summer I hope you change your schedule more than a little. I hope you take time to find your peace and practice just being present. It isn't time off. It is really significant time on.

Amen.