Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

When we set the preaching schedule, I'm not sure I realized what "juicy" lectionary passages I was passing up by not preaching today.  Not only do we get the Beatitudes, but there is also the famous passage from Micah that asks, "And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

I think that both passages undermine some popular notions of faith.  The Micah passage speaks quite plainly against religious ritual that isn't accompanied by a changed heart.  The Beatitudes locate God's special favor in some pretty unpopular places.  And both passages challenge Christians to examine what it means to follow Jesus.

Over the years I have often heard people thank God for their "many blessings."  But rarely, if ever, are they speaking about the sort of things Jesus names on his list.  Very often, the culture determines what we think of as blessings.  In our country that means things such as a good job, a nice house, a new car, and so on.  Most Christians don't go so far as a Joel Osteen and his "God wants you to be rich" message, but we have difficulty conceiving of being "reviled and persecuted" as a blessing.

I think Jesus sees this as a blessing because he, like most prophets, has a clear sense of God's hope for the world.  Because Jesus lives in full communion with God, he longs for the world to be as God wants it, as God means it to be.  And so he is acutely aware of the tension between how things are and how they will be.  And he expects those who draw close to God through him will experience this same tension.  He expects that they will find it impossible to simply accept how things are and ask God to make it a bit easier for them.  He expects that, like him, his followers will live in ways at odds with how things are, in tune with how they will be.  And he is quite sure the world will not appreciate this.

Someone asked me the other day about how my spirituality and faith had changed over the past few years.  As I tried to answer her question, it occurred to me that the most profound change has been a partial bridging of the gap between spirituality and living the faith.  Though I don't think I ever would have articulated it this way in the past, I often thought of spirituality as an esoteric pursuit meant primarily to enhance my private faith life.  But I have begun to realize that those who do the most good in the world are more often than not those whose hearts have been bent toward God's vision for the world.  And at its core, that is what spirituality is about, about our hearts becoming one with God.  And with such hearts, it is hard to live lives that are out of sync with God.

I have to admit that as a pastor, I often spend far too much of my time trying to figure things out.  What programs will work?  What should I say in next week's sermon?  What does the Bible say about this issue of that one?  And while understanding is important, it is not the same thing as faith.  Faith is more of a heart thing, and I need to spend more time allowing God to work there, so that I can perceive more as Jesus does, and so act more as Jesus would have me act.