A comedian wrote: “when I woke up this morning my wife asked, 'Did you sleep good?' I said 'No, I made a few mistakes.” That may sound clever, but is it wisdom. Wisdom seems rather more out of reach.
Choice is supposed to be a wonderful thing, but without wisdom, choice is useless. Privilege is to be in the position of having plenty of choice. But wisdom is the capacity to make good choices. And that’s the challenge for those going away to college this week and for many others.
The question is not, “Will I fit in?”, or “Will I get good grades?”, or “Will I get on the team?”, or “Will I learn to tolerate my roommate’s snoring and sleep-talking and sweaty sneakers and seventies soul music?” The question is, over these four years, “Will my privileged access to knowledge, money and social connections turn into wisdom?” For wisdom often happens when we percolate and discern the shared and personal, when we percolate and discern the mundane and wonderful, and when the discoveries, adventures and reflections of body, mind and spirit work together, all that and perhaps more constitute wisdom.
When you were baptized you become a part of the church, and the church is at least as bewildering as a college, often a lot more so. The church stretches back and forward in time, across every nation and people, and between the saints in heaven and the faithful on earth. But also true is that from time to time we also show our small mindedness.
Yet alongside this sits a host of sacrificial examples of discipleship and mission and ministry and holiness. There are countless works of theological wisdom and insight. There are myriads of testimonies of hope and guides for prayerful living, along with dizzying varieties of worship and witness and music, let alone polity and politics and pot luck dinners. All of this is contained in the word “church.”
When we like it and feel inspired and moved and transformed by it we call it the beauty of holiness. For beauty is that emergent sense of grace and elegance seen in how we use yesterday in creative insightful ways to enhance tomorrow.
I remember once sitting down with some folks and we each drew a graph of our own faith journey, tracing the highs and lows of our closeness to God as if taking a printout from a heart monitor. When we shared the graphs we saw that some had had dramatic or difficult childhoods; some had had profound moments as teenagers. Some had grown deeply in later life. But what shone through loud and clear was that every single one of us had had a significant faith experience between the ages of 17 and 24. You’d think that experience was that I saw God high and lifted up surrounded by cherubim and his words to me were, go and make zillions of dollars on the futures market. But it was more ordinary than that.
It was working at a summer program called Caravans. We had rented a cottage for the summer and back in the 70s we decorated it in somewhat of a Bohemian coffee house motif. Rugs and tie dyed sheets hung the walls and tree branches were tied to the ceiling. Well the owner, a women in her eighties, came to visit and was shocked to see her summer home transformed. We tried to explain that the changes we made were not permanent. However it was all too much change. She complained to the United Church head office in Winnipeg. I remember a minister came by to check out our program. We filled the place every evening with 100 plus teens. Folk signing groups came from all parts of Canada and the USA. So when he stopped by a few nights later, he saw what was happening and was overjoyed.
The next week he came back with the owner and she softened, when she talked and heard what her cabin meant to so many.
It was a time when I discovered I could make something beautiful with other people. We could talk through ideas and understanding and share ignorance until well into each night and morning.
This week I heard John O’Donahue speak of Soul. He said soul is where you have never been wounded; it’s that space in you that speaks to that sureness about you, that seamlessness in you. That summer I became fascinated with a kind of spirituality and love that now and again could visit that sanctuary. I learned that that God is a mystery whose intentions are to love.
In other words, what we were saying was that we had made church our own, and realized that it belonged to us as much as it did to anyone, and in fact it was a gift passed to us to enjoy and benefit from and dig deep into.
I still get infuriated with church and feel let down by it and even feel unworthy of it, but it has become the source of my life… and I deeply, unalterably, love it.
Back then in Clear Lake National Park I had a great awakening. Because I’d found that to be a Christian one can even love the church. It’s vital to find a way to make church your own, to make friends with its saints and make its books your library and make its sacraments your staging posts and make its rhythms your daily song.
And it’s been at the heart of my own ministry to say to people, “Make these things your own, use them and enjoy them and love them,” and to try to help them discover their own gifts and plug them into self expression using those gifts.
It’s what you’re going back to school or leaving for the first time will do. You will make a strange campus, a strange roommate, your home.
This is what the final chapter of the letter to the Ephesians is doing. What we’re given is a list of some of the most pious and abstract vocabulary in the Christian dictionary. He lists truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and finally Spirit.
Most of us have heard people toss these words around that made them seem way too pretentious, where we were left feeling small. So Ephesians concludes by whispering hey, if you want a clue, this is how you make these cherished, but rather grand words your own.
Truth – think of truth like a belt. It should be all the way around you, where your top half of idealism meets your bottom half of reality.
Righteousness – think of righteousness like breastplate. You may want others to admire your biceps or your shapeliness or your coat hanger shoulders or your hairy chest. But what they’re really looking at is whether your life is as truthful as your words.
Peace – think of peace like your shoes. It’s the most important garment of all, and it’s useless making it out of soft tissue, it needs to be sturdy and hardwearing, but flexible and comfortable. When you imagine peace, it’s got to be like shoes that will walk a very long way.
Faith – think of faith like a shield. A shield doesn’t stop bad things happening, it doesn’t prevent you being attacked, and it doesn’t usually change the external reality that much. But it keeps your heart pumping and your life going and your spirits thumping even when the slings and arrows of favor and fortune would otherwise destroy you.
Salvation – think of salvation like a helmet. Salvation is forgiveness, healing and eternal life all wrapped into one, and it’s too much to keep in your head, so you have a helmet to keep these most precious fruits of faith safe. A helmet is like a shield – it can’t be used as weapons against others, it just shields the gifts God gives you and lets you know they’re safe with God forever.
Spirit – think of Spirit like a sword. What we’ve had here is a description of the outfit of a Roman soldier, because the Roman soldier was the literal and metaphorical description of power in the life of the early Christians. But only this last item actually does something – the others are all forms of clothing or protection. And that’s because the first five are about us, whereas only the last one, Spirit, is describing a dimension of God.
Think of Spirit like a sword, sharp and exciting and a way of focusing power in one particular place. The writer talks about words. What word can we say will we say that focus love onto another?
What we’ve been given here is an invitation to make the language and beliefs and actions and hopes of the Christian faith our own, just as if we were putting on a set of clothes and leaving on them, with our own crease marks, and stains, slight tears and worn patches. Inhabit the faith, the letter says, put these beliefs to work, make them yours, try them out. They’re given to you so you can discover what it really means to be part of the church.
And what it really means to be part of the church is to be part of a people using and enjoying these gifts, so that we in the process might be transformed into a reflection, sometimes good, sometimes bad, seldom perfect, but nonetheless a reflection of the crucified and resurrected body of Christ.
Make this Church’s rhythm of song and service and prayer your morning star and your entrancing sunset. Make this place your own. Make these people your people. Make this life your life.
Remember the Tom and Jerry cartoons, Jerry the tiny mouse pounds the enormous feather pillow over and over until he’s made it his own and then settles down to rest into it like no one had ever slept before? Downers Grove First is like that pillow. Downers Grove First UMC is no more than a pile of stone and a labyrinth of hallways and a legend of Great music, good stories, fine sermons and celebrations until you inhabit it, burrow into it, pile into its pillow and make it your own. Then you can allow it to make you its own – to share your gifts and loves and laughter’s with it. Make it your own and then let it make you its own. But more importantly, pound the pillow of truth, righteousness, peace, faith, and salvation, until you find out what these words mean in body, mind and spirit, and make the life of the church your own.
And then let the sword of the Spirit make you its own. Receive the heritage and destiny of the church that is more than any of us could desire or deserve. That way you’ll discover true wisdom. Because true wisdom and true holiness are to know, reflect and embody the mind of Christ. And the mind of God in Christ is this. He has wrestled with us, he has cherished us, and he has longed for us and sought us, for one reason and one reason only. Because God has shaped his whole life, to make us all his, or her own; so we in turn shape ourselves to reflect His love.