admin

Second Sunday of Christmas
January 2, 2011 (Year A)
Preached at St. Paul’s Brookline
Brookline, MA

The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello  
Sirach 24:1-12
Ephesians 1:3-14
John 1:1-18  

I received an interesting message from a friend on Facebook this week.  Well, I received it along with the three thousand seventy-two other “friends” of theologian Diana Butler Bass.  Butler Bass studies trends in the church and in religion in general.  Up on my news feed popped a question about the trend in people identifying themselves as “Spiritual But Not Religious”, or SBNR for short.

The news initially seemed good to me.  While the number of people who identified as Spiritual But Not Religious has stayed about the same, the number of people identifying themselves as Religious Only has gone down and the number identifying themselves as Religious AND Spiritual has gone up, from 6% to 48% in a ten year span.[1]

But then I thought about it.  That means that 52% of people who consider themselves religious do not consider themselves spiritual.  How can that be?
I don’t think you can be religious and not spiritual – if by religious you mean a person of faith committed to living that faith out in a shared community.  You can’t really do that, I don’t think, without a relationship with God, or at least a longing for such a relationship.  

And, frankly, I think the opposite is true.  I’m not sure how you can be spiritual, connected to God, without a community in which to practice that connection.  I’m curious when I see a bumper sticker that reads “I’m spiritual but not religious.”  I wonder what that means.  I wonder if they really mean that they have a commitment to bringing God’s dream for the world to reality, but that they choose to do it on their own, or if they mean something else.  Do they really mean, “Institutional Religion is off its rocker and I long for connection, but haven’t found a place that works for me.”  That, I understand.  
But it seems to me you’ve got to have both.  In order for a community of faith to have any integrity at all, it must be committed to nurturing a relationship with God, and seeking God’s purpose on earth as it is in heaven.  Without spirituality, religion is empty, fallow, a skeleton of rules and hierarchies doing nothing more than keeping itself in business.  

And I think that spirituality without community is dangerous.  I think it’s dangerous because being in relationship with God without being accountable to a larger community does nothing to effect the transformation the world desperately needs, the transformation for which God longs.  The transformation for which God became flesh.    

Now, believe me, I see God everywhere.  I see God in oceans and forests.  I do some of my best praying in the middle of the woods.  These moments of connection to my own spirituality are incredibly nourishing.  But they nourish me to carry out the work God has given me to do in the world, in community, with the people of God.  

I wonder if part of what is behind the attractiveness of calling oneself “Spiritual But Not Religious” is that being “spiritual” is so much cleaner.  Spiritual is all about beauty and mystery, it is about connecting to eternity.  

Religion is a little uglier.  It isn’t neat.  It isn’t pretty.  It isn’t perfect like a sunset or majestic like a redwood.  Religion, and by religion, I mean church at its best – a community of seekers, longing for God and longing for God’s peace and justice and love.  I think that kind of Religion is messy.  The sunset never disappoints.  A community of humanity, though?  Well, you’re just asking for trouble.  

We’ve always tried to separate the eternal majesty of God from the messy, clumsy, awkward incarnation of God.  Throughout our history, humans have created Gods that have had nothing to do with humanity.  These Gods exist up there, somewhere.  These are the Gods of majesty, of awe and mystery. Gods live in the spiritual realm.  And humans?  Well, we live here.  In the muck.  

But with Jesus’ birth, God changed all that.  As though there was a great tear separating humanity from God, God sought to end that separation for ever by becoming human and living among us.  

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”  

Eternity; Wisdom, Majesty, Word – all this now human, now flesh and blood.  Like one of us.  

In the birth of Jesus, God became flesh, in all its frailty; in its mess and muck.  And the great work of restoring all Creation to relationship with God began anew.  

That is what we celebrate at Christmas.  Though the paintings on the front of our Christmas cards tell a pretty story of a night filled with majesty and awe and warm halos emanating from a quaint stable, what really happened that first Christmas was that God rolled up God’s sleeves and began the messy job of working among us, as one of us.  

As many of you know, my partner, Paul was in the hospital with pneumonia over Christmas.  He’s home and doing well now, but it was a very messy Christmas.  

As I ran back and forth between Paul’s hospital room and the church, I felt as though I was travelling from one world to the next.  From blood pressures and heart rates, to carols and poinsettias.  From fear and anxiety to hope and joy.  The hospital seemed to exist in a time outside of Christmas.  And the glorious services here seemed to exist in a time and place far removed from the sounds and smells of the hospital.  

I realized, though, after about the third or fourth trip, that the separation between these two worlds, the separation between fragile humanity and glorious majesty was a separation I had invented.  I realized that, indeed, what happened that first Christmas was probably somewhere in between the hospital room and the midnight choral Eucharist.  Jesus’ birth occurred somewhere between humanity and majesty.  More accurately, Jesus birth was all humanity and all majesty.  

And what God began in Jesus continues to pulse through the veins of humanity.  God’s eternal Wisdom, God’s mysterious Word now dwells in us. In the fear.  In the anxiety.  In the mess and the muck, that’s where God will be found.  

Yes, I would have liked my Christmas a little neater.  I could have used a little less flesh and blood and a little more Currier and Ives.  But it’s the flesh and blood that makes it all worth it.  It’s the flesh and blood that makes God manifest in the world today.  Without becoming flesh and blood, God’s dream for the world remains mere fantasy.  

If I’m completely honest with myself, my bumper sticker should probably be “Religious, but not always Spiritual.”  Because I don’t always know where God is in the mess.  I don’t always feel certain of God’s presence in the fear.  But I know where I can go to find it.  And when I can’t find God, I know where God has a pretty good chance of finding me.  

Flesh and Majesty.  
Blood and Mystery.  
God and human.  
Spiritual and Religious.  
Thanks be to God!          


Amen.  
© 2010 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello