The Spiritual Gateway
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Picture this: You are on your way to the airport to catch a flight to a wedding where you are in the wedding party only to become stuck in traffic. When you finally get to the airport, you have only minutes left to check in. Unfortunately, there's a long line at the airline desk and you know there is no hope of getting to the front of the line in time. Do you:
A. give up and say, "Oh well, they'll just have to go on without me"?
B. march up to the front of the line, push people out of the way and say, "Get out of the way. I'm going first"?
C. walk to the front of the line and say to those standing there, "Excuse me, but my flight's about to take off. Would it be all right if I went ahead of you?"
Some of us might choose option A, and just give up, but assuming we weren't giving up that easily, how many would choose option B and bully our way to front knocking people of way? None of us, I suspect. But we might try something like option C, politely asking people to let us ahead of them.
But why is the bully method wrong? It's not just that other people wouldn't like it, but that everyone in the line believes in a certain standard of fairness and right. In other words, every person in line, regardless of what their religious convictions may be, or whether they are religious at all, believes in a basic standard of right and wrong regarding behavior in a line. It's not right to cut in front of others without permission.
So option C, politely asking to step ahead of others might work because unlike the bully option, you are not trampling on the standard sense of right and wrong. You are acknowledging it but asking to be excused from it because of extenuating circumstances.1
Where does this universal, commonly understood standard of fairness come from? We can say it is a human value, and insofar as people have values, they have a spiritual nature.
With the possible exception of people whom psychology would class as psychopaths or sociopaths, everybody in the world has a spiritual side to their personality.
That is a pretty sweeping statement and I imagine that you can immediately bring to mind several people who you would view as having no spiritual nature. But notice that I did not say that all persons are spiritually minded. I am simply saying that almost everybody has a part of themselves where values reside, where a conscience exists, even if it is only a glimmer, where faith, even if it is only faith in themselves, arises, and where the impulse to worship lives.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who disappeared a few years ago and was later found murdered, was the best-known atheist of our time. Did she have a spiritual side to her personality? Sure she did. Here is part of what she wrote in her initial petition to have prayer removed from public schools:
An atheist loves his fellowman instead of a God ... He seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know God. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death ... He believes that we cannot rely on God, channel action into prayer, or hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter....2
Obviously, O'Hair denied belief in God, prayer, and heaven, but her words suggest that she had some values. She spoke of believing in love for her fellow human being, of doing good deeds, and of remaining involved in life.
It might seem odd to be talking about spirituality when our text today is drawn from the book of Proverbs, for that is one of the most "secular" books in the Bible. The sayings in Proverbs were collected and written down during a period of Israel's history when religious practice was in decline, when it wasn't "cool" to appear overly pious. Prophets and priests in this period were not so much sought after as were so called wise men, learned men who could teach the practical side of religion without layering on much theology. Their teaching was not godless by any means, but it was belief system in which God was addressed not by sacrifice in the temple, but by cooperating with the order God had built into life. We will say more about this next week when we visit another portion of this book, but for our purposes this morning, suffice it to say that the verses in today's reading, like much of the rest of Proverbs, read more like common wisdom that even non-religious people would affirm than any religious tract. Nonetheless, they were intended to teach the oncoming generations the common values of the people, and anytime we are talking about values, we are talking spiritually, even if in a roundabout way.
Values, you see, always arise in the spiritual part of our being. Any time we acknowledge that there is something outside of ourselves that has value in its own right, we are speaking out of our spiritual nature.
Admittedly, some people have a much more highly developed sense of the spiritual and are able to sense the nearness and reality of that which is greater than themselves more easily than do some others. But most of us have at least some spiritual activity in our lives even if we are not overtly religious.
The values expressed in today's verses have to do with valuing one's good reputation; acknowledging that all people, whether rich or poor, have intrinsic worth; affirming the wrongness of injustice and rightness of generosity to those in need; and not kicking those who are down and out.
For the sake of clarity, let us define our spiritual side as the place where at least one of the following happens.
First, it is the dwelling place of the conscience, the place were a person's moral code gets imbedded. It is normally present in everyone. We can repress the conscience. We can do something that violates our moral code and argue boldly that we are no longer bound by such antiquated ideas of right or wrong. But when someone else does the same wrong thing against us, we condemn them, showing that we still have some sense of the wrong of certain actions. We may declare that we are not bound to any scruples but we can never be totally at ease with that avowal.
Another thing we may do is to resign ourselves to guilt feelings but say that since they come so easily we are going to ignore them all. Granted, we often do feel inappropriate guilt, but it is not inappropriate in every case.
Second, the spiritual aspect is also the place where, as we have said, values reside. Even if that which we value is not noble, the presence of any values that relate not primarily to our own well-being, but to that of others, means we are hearing from our spiritual nature. A hard-hearted gangster who can kill in cold blood but can also be sacrificial and loving toward his own children has some values, even if they are grossly distorted.
Third, our spiritual nature is the place from which the recognition of higher power and the capacity to worship arises. Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, was for years an agnostic and quite worldly. Eventually, however, he became a zealous Christian. In one of his books, he expresses the fact that even before his conversion he possessed a powerful conviction that there was more truth present when anyone worshiped, even if they were "animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone," than was present in scientific pursuits.3
Now, if there is a power greater than myself, and I am not the end of all things, then that power's values are more important than mine. If this power loves me with an unfailing love, then he is worthy of my worship. And the active trust in this higher power is, of course, faith.
Naturally, the next step is to attach an identity to this higher power, but this humble admission of the supremacy of something beyond ourselves is a first step.
Jesus said that no one could come to him unless the Father draws that person. That was a way of saying that the natural inclination to worship something outside of ourselves is a God-given gift. God draws us to himself. We can resist that pull, but the place where we feel it is in our spiritual side.
And finally, our spiritual nature is where faith begins. Faith does not refer to absolute certainty about the existence of God or even about one's salvation. It does, however, describe an attitude where our tendency to believe in a power greater than and outside of ourselves is stronger than our tendency to doubt that power's existence. Also, faith means trusting ourselves into the keeping of that higher power.
In summary, the spiritual nature is the home of the conscience, values, the worship impulse, and faith. Even if only one of these seems to be evident, we are in touch with our spiritual side. This spiritual nature can also be called the "soul."
You see, God uses various "gateways" to come into our lives. Those gateways can include emotions, intellect, social relationships, and even our physical bodies. Certainly our spiritual nature can be another gateway.
One way that happens is our spiritual nature, our conscience, values, impulse to worship, and a desire to believe, often together create a kind of yearning. Saint Augustine put it: "Thou has made us for thyself, and the heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in thee."
Yearning means God has planted seeds of discontent in our hearts that push us to seek him. Many of us experience a kind of melancholy when we are touched by beauty. For some it is in the surge and thunder of the ocean. For others, the quiet of a late summer evening. Still others are moved by poetry, music, or the smell of wood smoke in the crisp autumn air.
These yearnings say to us, "this is what life should always be" and that is intimation of God.
You see, we may try to dump God out of our lives, but there is something, something that we cannot get rid of. That something is the yearning planted within us by God. We have to deal with it in some way. Either we move toward it or we are haunted by it.
Of course, just like conscience, not every yearning is from God. But we can be reasonably certain that longings for what is true, just, good, beautiful are a nudge from God, who uses such yearnings to draw us to him.
Obviously, having a general spirituality and common values such as Proverbs presents doesn't guarantee that a person will move from there to religious commitment, but it can happen and often does. One thing those wise men did during that period of religious decline was to at least keep values in front of the population, which in turn helped to keep the religious doors open.
The yearning that occurs through our spiritual nature is like God knocking on the door of our lives, asking to be admitted.
The spiritual gateway -- conscience, values, worship impulse, a desire to believe -- is one place God reaches out to us. Even those of us who don't think of ourselves as religious can look at our common values and discover God behind them, beckoning us.
____________
1. The sense of this argument is from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 1.
2. Quoted in Christianity Today, January 7, 1983.
3. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Chronicle 1; "The Green Stick" (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973), p. 123.
A. give up and say, "Oh well, they'll just have to go on without me"?
B. march up to the front of the line, push people out of the way and say, "Get out of the way. I'm going first"?
C. walk to the front of the line and say to those standing there, "Excuse me, but my flight's about to take off. Would it be all right if I went ahead of you?"
Some of us might choose option A, and just give up, but assuming we weren't giving up that easily, how many would choose option B and bully our way to front knocking people of way? None of us, I suspect. But we might try something like option C, politely asking people to let us ahead of them.
But why is the bully method wrong? It's not just that other people wouldn't like it, but that everyone in the line believes in a certain standard of fairness and right. In other words, every person in line, regardless of what their religious convictions may be, or whether they are religious at all, believes in a basic standard of right and wrong regarding behavior in a line. It's not right to cut in front of others without permission.
So option C, politely asking to step ahead of others might work because unlike the bully option, you are not trampling on the standard sense of right and wrong. You are acknowledging it but asking to be excused from it because of extenuating circumstances.1
Where does this universal, commonly understood standard of fairness come from? We can say it is a human value, and insofar as people have values, they have a spiritual nature.
With the possible exception of people whom psychology would class as psychopaths or sociopaths, everybody in the world has a spiritual side to their personality.
That is a pretty sweeping statement and I imagine that you can immediately bring to mind several people who you would view as having no spiritual nature. But notice that I did not say that all persons are spiritually minded. I am simply saying that almost everybody has a part of themselves where values reside, where a conscience exists, even if it is only a glimmer, where faith, even if it is only faith in themselves, arises, and where the impulse to worship lives.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who disappeared a few years ago and was later found murdered, was the best-known atheist of our time. Did she have a spiritual side to her personality? Sure she did. Here is part of what she wrote in her initial petition to have prayer removed from public schools:
An atheist loves his fellowman instead of a God ... He seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know God. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death ... He believes that we cannot rely on God, channel action into prayer, or hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter....2
Obviously, O'Hair denied belief in God, prayer, and heaven, but her words suggest that she had some values. She spoke of believing in love for her fellow human being, of doing good deeds, and of remaining involved in life.
It might seem odd to be talking about spirituality when our text today is drawn from the book of Proverbs, for that is one of the most "secular" books in the Bible. The sayings in Proverbs were collected and written down during a period of Israel's history when religious practice was in decline, when it wasn't "cool" to appear overly pious. Prophets and priests in this period were not so much sought after as were so called wise men, learned men who could teach the practical side of religion without layering on much theology. Their teaching was not godless by any means, but it was belief system in which God was addressed not by sacrifice in the temple, but by cooperating with the order God had built into life. We will say more about this next week when we visit another portion of this book, but for our purposes this morning, suffice it to say that the verses in today's reading, like much of the rest of Proverbs, read more like common wisdom that even non-religious people would affirm than any religious tract. Nonetheless, they were intended to teach the oncoming generations the common values of the people, and anytime we are talking about values, we are talking spiritually, even if in a roundabout way.
Values, you see, always arise in the spiritual part of our being. Any time we acknowledge that there is something outside of ourselves that has value in its own right, we are speaking out of our spiritual nature.
Admittedly, some people have a much more highly developed sense of the spiritual and are able to sense the nearness and reality of that which is greater than themselves more easily than do some others. But most of us have at least some spiritual activity in our lives even if we are not overtly religious.
The values expressed in today's verses have to do with valuing one's good reputation; acknowledging that all people, whether rich or poor, have intrinsic worth; affirming the wrongness of injustice and rightness of generosity to those in need; and not kicking those who are down and out.
For the sake of clarity, let us define our spiritual side as the place where at least one of the following happens.
First, it is the dwelling place of the conscience, the place were a person's moral code gets imbedded. It is normally present in everyone. We can repress the conscience. We can do something that violates our moral code and argue boldly that we are no longer bound by such antiquated ideas of right or wrong. But when someone else does the same wrong thing against us, we condemn them, showing that we still have some sense of the wrong of certain actions. We may declare that we are not bound to any scruples but we can never be totally at ease with that avowal.
Another thing we may do is to resign ourselves to guilt feelings but say that since they come so easily we are going to ignore them all. Granted, we often do feel inappropriate guilt, but it is not inappropriate in every case.
Second, the spiritual aspect is also the place where, as we have said, values reside. Even if that which we value is not noble, the presence of any values that relate not primarily to our own well-being, but to that of others, means we are hearing from our spiritual nature. A hard-hearted gangster who can kill in cold blood but can also be sacrificial and loving toward his own children has some values, even if they are grossly distorted.
Third, our spiritual nature is the place from which the recognition of higher power and the capacity to worship arises. Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, was for years an agnostic and quite worldly. Eventually, however, he became a zealous Christian. In one of his books, he expresses the fact that even before his conversion he possessed a powerful conviction that there was more truth present when anyone worshiped, even if they were "animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone," than was present in scientific pursuits.3
Now, if there is a power greater than myself, and I am not the end of all things, then that power's values are more important than mine. If this power loves me with an unfailing love, then he is worthy of my worship. And the active trust in this higher power is, of course, faith.
Naturally, the next step is to attach an identity to this higher power, but this humble admission of the supremacy of something beyond ourselves is a first step.
Jesus said that no one could come to him unless the Father draws that person. That was a way of saying that the natural inclination to worship something outside of ourselves is a God-given gift. God draws us to himself. We can resist that pull, but the place where we feel it is in our spiritual side.
And finally, our spiritual nature is where faith begins. Faith does not refer to absolute certainty about the existence of God or even about one's salvation. It does, however, describe an attitude where our tendency to believe in a power greater than and outside of ourselves is stronger than our tendency to doubt that power's existence. Also, faith means trusting ourselves into the keeping of that higher power.
In summary, the spiritual nature is the home of the conscience, values, the worship impulse, and faith. Even if only one of these seems to be evident, we are in touch with our spiritual side. This spiritual nature can also be called the "soul."
You see, God uses various "gateways" to come into our lives. Those gateways can include emotions, intellect, social relationships, and even our physical bodies. Certainly our spiritual nature can be another gateway.
One way that happens is our spiritual nature, our conscience, values, impulse to worship, and a desire to believe, often together create a kind of yearning. Saint Augustine put it: "Thou has made us for thyself, and the heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in thee."
Yearning means God has planted seeds of discontent in our hearts that push us to seek him. Many of us experience a kind of melancholy when we are touched by beauty. For some it is in the surge and thunder of the ocean. For others, the quiet of a late summer evening. Still others are moved by poetry, music, or the smell of wood smoke in the crisp autumn air.
These yearnings say to us, "this is what life should always be" and that is intimation of God.
You see, we may try to dump God out of our lives, but there is something, something that we cannot get rid of. That something is the yearning planted within us by God. We have to deal with it in some way. Either we move toward it or we are haunted by it.
Of course, just like conscience, not every yearning is from God. But we can be reasonably certain that longings for what is true, just, good, beautiful are a nudge from God, who uses such yearnings to draw us to him.
Obviously, having a general spirituality and common values such as Proverbs presents doesn't guarantee that a person will move from there to religious commitment, but it can happen and often does. One thing those wise men did during that period of religious decline was to at least keep values in front of the population, which in turn helped to keep the religious doors open.
The yearning that occurs through our spiritual nature is like God knocking on the door of our lives, asking to be admitted.
The spiritual gateway -- conscience, values, worship impulse, a desire to believe -- is one place God reaches out to us. Even those of us who don't think of ourselves as religious can look at our common values and discover God behind them, beckoning us.
____________
1. The sense of this argument is from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 1.
2. Quoted in Christianity Today, January 7, 1983.
3. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Chronicle 1; "The Green Stick" (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973), p. 123.
