“Calling All Saints” by Peter Bankson

November 5, 2017

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

INTRODUCTION

Long, long ago, in a land far, far away … at a time when the anger and fear and frustration around us was less well-developed, I looked at the Scripture for this week and thought the lessons might give me an opportunity to reflect with you on what it might mean to be called by God to speak truth to power. So, I volunteered to bring the Word this morning.

Then, Celebration Circle decided to invite us to focus on All Saints Day, and chose to use the lessons we’ve been reading this week, which include the Beatitudes, but NOT that passage from Matthew about narcistic community leaders. In fact, even though I printed the lectionary for the season, I hadn’t really read what we’d decided for this week until the week began.

As I started working with the ASSIGNED lessons for this week I was immediately struck by the image from Revelation, with the crowd of people all dressed in white: All Saints Day! One thing I immediately wanted to share about was how we are all called to be saints, and what difference that makes in our lives. Then, after the reminder that we are also reflecting on the Beatitudes, I realized that although I needed to let my planned sermon wait. But, the change in focus had given me an opportunity to take a fresh look at one of those parts of the Gospel that I thought I knew … but probably didn’t.

So, I want to start with that image from Revelation about the great multitude that no one could count, from all tribes and peoples and languages: the ones who have come out of the great ordeal and gathered to thank God. Then I can offer some thoughts about the beatitudes, and how they might serve as guides for our journey as members of that multitude.

FOR ALL THE SAINTS

What makes a saint? Is it, as our lesson from revelation suggests, only those who have come through the ordeal and washed their robes white in the blood of the lamb? Or are there others who we know as saints because of their commitment to an intentional journey of loving and doing God’s will? My sense, honed by my time here in Seekers Church, is that each of us is invited to find our place in the Body of Christ, and offer what we are called to offer there. And, that those who are on the Way are on a path to some kind of “sainthood.” As the familiar folk hymn reminds us about all saints:

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still;
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I want to be one too.

New Century Hymnal, #295

One of the ways I look at “saints” flows out of our basic tenet here at Seekers: that God has a particular call for each one of us, and that responding to that call is choosing a saint’s path.

Here’s how that focus on Call is stated in the introduction to Seekers Church:

The life of Seekers Church is based on an amazing belief: each one of us is called by God to a particular area of service. Young or old, regardless of experience, skills or education, despite our past successes or failures — God calls each of us to a life of love and service. Concretely, it is a highly individual desire, placed by God in the heart of each person, to be about particular works in the world and in the church.

A Guide to Seekers Church, p ii

Young or old, regardless of experience, skills or education, despite our past successes or failures — God calls each of us to a life of love and service.

This committed focus on discerning and following God’s call has been a core value of Church of the Saviour since its founding in 1946. Initially, the nature of these calls was largely focused on volunteer or staff work with missions and ministries helping people in need, many of them begun within the Church of the Saviour community.

From our beginning in 1976, as a separate faith community in Church of the Saviour, Seekers has broadened that focus to include family and workplace as important places where we hear and respond to God’s call.

For us, Christian servanthood is based on empowering others within the normal structures of our daily lives (work; family and primary relationships; and citizenship) as well as through special structures for service and witness.

This focus on what I often refer to as “ministry in daily life” leads to some really interesting stories about saints in our midst.

REMEMBERING ONE OF OUR SAINTS – MURIEL STEFFY LIPP

Muriel Lipp is one of our saints here at Seekers. She helped push the envelope of our understanding about the nature of call. Muriel, who had been active at Church of the Saviour since the 1950s, was employed as a teacher in a public school in a very poor neighborhood in Alexandria. But in order to be a committed member of the church then, she had to join a mission group with a separate call to literacy. A job teaching troubled children how to read didn’t seem to count as “call” in those days. It was Muriel’s advocacy within Seekers that helped us affirm that “for us, Christian servanthood is based on empowering others within the normal structures of our daily lives (work; family and primary relationships; and citizenship)…”

Muriel was a prolific writer, publishing many poems, children’s stories, and articles, in addition to two books, a history of her birthplace in Denver, Pennsylvania, and a children’s book, Secrets of the Forest. She was active in community life in the neighborhood near Mount Vernon where she and Ed nurtured their family, three vibrant daughters, and son Eddie, whose tile is next to Muriel’s on our memory wall. As we leave the sanctuary today we will have the opportunity to see the Seekers Memory Book, with the pages for Muriel and Eddie, and the new tile for Muriel on our memory wall.

I thank God that Muriel and I were together in this small part of the Body of Christ. She has been a guide for me on the Way with Jesus.

GUIDELINES FOR THE JOURNEY

Now, let me turn to the beatitudes. Early in my shift to this week’s Gospel lesson, Marjory suggested that I might take a look at Cynthia Bourgeault’s reflections on the Beatitudes in The Wisdom Jesus.” I was delighted to see how her description created the sense that the Beatitudes might be taken as guidelines for the faith journey. Here’s my quick take on her insights:

Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for they are empty of ego and open to revelation.
Blessed are those who mourn, for their grieving opens the gates to God’s love.
Blessed are the meek (or as Cynthia says, “the gentle”) for they are able to care for, rather than consume Creation.
Blessed are those who long for harmonious connections, for they will join the chorus of Creation.
Blessed are the merciful, for the chorus of Creation sings through them.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will learn how to harmonize.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will help add to the chorus.
Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for they are freed to love.

As I prayed my way into the beatitudes described this way, they settled into four guidelines for living out of call:

Stay open: Life is all about change
Step into the flow: Your life needs to change as well.
Domesticate your inner beast: Build harmony with love.
Pan for the gold in the gravel: Let your heart purify as you go.

I want to tease these apart just a bit. They offer guidelines for the spiritual journey – not so much rules to be judged by, as reminders of how I want to spend my time and energy each day.

Stay Open

The first guideline is to stay open to change. No matter what I’m doing, I want to “stay open to change.” Or maybe it would be more honest to say, “I want to want to be open to change!” Like many of you, I can use some guidance about both what I want to accomplish and how I want to go about it.

It isn’t easy to stay open to change in the face of angry judgement, but I try to remind myself of that 12-step maxim that the only person I can change is me. I can choose to stay open.

Step Into the Flow

The second guideline about attitudes for being on the Way is to be ready to step into the flow. In our call to be Church we acknowledge that we still have some ways to go:

By “Seekers community” we mean an intentional body which sees Christ as our true life source. Koinonia with one another and genuine self-giving to the world are the ways we can be in Christ today. Seekers are not persons who have arrived, but persons who are intentionally on the way.

Sometimes for all of us (and all the time for some of us) it’s a real challenge to step out in faith. Being “intentionally on the way” is often easier if I’m not alone, if I have someone who shares my journey, or at least knows about my struggle. Having a spiritual companion or guide, our version of a 12-step sponsor, gives me a place of accountability and a source of support as I step from contemplations into action, across the “poison river,” as Marjory refers to that shift. Thank God we’re in this together!

If you feel alone facing questions about taking an important step on your faith journey, you might engage your spiritual companion or director. And if you don’t have a relationship with this level of accountability and feel like it would be important, you might talk with one of our Stewards about developing one.

Domesticate Your Inner Beast

The third guideline is to work at domesticating my inner beast. One of the challenges of being on an intentional journey is how I deal with my egoic patterns. I can let them guide my actions, and deal with the consequences as my behavior triggers your behavior, which triggers my behavior… Or, I can learn how to work with my inner beast so his power is harnessed to help me respond to God’s call in loving ways

Turning your inner beast loose to respond in fear – through fight or flight – can feel exhilarating, but often adds to the tangles of the web of life.

We’re certainly seeing a lot of NOT following this guideline in the world around us these days. Cynthia Bourgeault says this about the importance of domesticating our inner beast:

Only when we have dealt directly with our animal instincts, and the pervasive sense of fear and scarcity that emerge out of our egoic operating system, are we truly able to inherit the earth rather than destroying it.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p 44.

A domesticated inner beast can be guided toward harmony, seeking to be in tune in relationships of all sizes, from personal to global. The image of “harmony” has come up a lot lately. In the Virtue Ethics class last Tuesday, we were talking about how very different musical instruments harmonize, and how harmony seems to be a common denominator. Most of us can tell instinctively when sounds are in harmony.

Let’s try a little experiment in harmony.

(Invite all to join in a harmonious sound …

end with the chime …

then another that ends in cacophony.)

It’s tough to build harmony without some kind of love. It only takes one sour player to bring discord to any relationship. That’s one reason, I think, why “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” is one of the core beatitudes. Here’s an observation by Cynthia Bourgeault:

Our visible, created universe is not simply an object created by a wholly other God in order to manifest God’s love, but the created universe is that love itself—the very heart of God, fully expressive in the dimension of time and form.

When we speak in these terms, of course, we begin to use the classic language of the mystics, the language of visionary utterance. For Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) the name in German for mercy was Barmherzigkeit—“warmheartedness.” Boehme saw mercy as “the holy element”: the root energy out of which all else in the visible universe is made. The Mercy is “holy substantiality”—the innermost essence of being itself. It is that “river of God,” running like the sap through the tree of life. [2]

[2] See Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (Paulist Press: 1978).

Cynthia Bourgeault, in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation,

Cosmology: God’s Heartbeat, November 3, 2017

As we discover how to domesticate our inner beasts, we discover how to open our inner ears to deeper harmonies and tune ourselves to the harmonic mercy that is the innermost essence of being.

Pan for the gold in the gravel: Let your heart purify as you go

The fourth guideline is to “pan for the gold in the gravel; to let your heart purify as you go.”

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” is a tough one. I’ve often understood this as a call to self-sacrifice – to voluntarily lay down my life, my dreams, my desires, for the good of another. That looks like plain old-fashioned martyrdom. (That’s one way of understanding the motivation of the “virtuous girl scout,” who’s story about helping an old man cross the street is part of our focus in the virtue ethics class.) But there are other ways.

In The Wisdom Jesus Cynthia Bourgeault suggests a different perspective. She says:

Jesus is not talking about martyrdom here, but about freedom. The Gospel of Thomas records this beatitude with a slight but telling variation that captures the very essence of Jesus’ meaning here – and in fact throughout all the beatitudes:

Blessed are you in the midst of persecution who,

When they hate and pursue you even to the core of your being,

Cannot find “you” anywhere.

Talk about freedom! (Cynthia says) whatever this elixir of pure liberation may be, it is what the journey is all about. And it is obtained gradually within us – distilled drop by drop from the terror and turmoil of our egoic selfhood – as we learn to let go and entrust ourselves to the Divine Mercy. Situations of persecution (or anything else that shakes us out of our egoic comfort zone) can become great teaching tools if we have the courage to use them that way.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, pp 46-47.

I call this core value “panning for the gold in the gravel” in part to try to go beyond only life-and-death encounters. There’s a lot of learning potential in the big ones, but there are often nuggets of love in the smaller occasions when we are challenged and can stand aside from defending our “self,” our ego, and listen for the harmony that broadcasts God’s love for ALL of Creation. Or rather, God’s love AS all of creation. That kind of open, faithful, lifelong loving is a mark of all saints.

My experience with panning for gold began during the 3 years we spent in Fairbanks, Alaska in the early 1960s, just as the gold days were quieting down along the Yukon and Chena Rivers. In those days, there were still stores in “downtown” Fairbanks where a miner could pay for a new dogsled, or a bar bill, by pouring gold out of his poke into a scale on the counter. The miner had picked those tiny gold nuggets out of tons of gravel that he had been picked up in his heavy gold pan, washed in the cold stream and carefully inspected to separate the treasure from the trash. By picking through the burden of all that gravel, miners could come to the store with a poke full of gold, ready to buy what they needed.

It may not have looked like they were purifying their hearts, but there was gold down there in the cold gravel, and they could collect it gradually, collected bit by bit, drop by drop.

As we learn to let go and entrust ourselves to the Divine Mercy. Situations of persecution (or anything else that shakes us out of our egoic comfort zone) can become great teaching tools if we have the courage to use them that way.”

As I think about how we learn, I’m impressed with how much we learn from our “failures,” and how often what feels to me inner beast like victory doesn’t offer much learning.

So, I’ve had an opportunity, brief as it has been, to think about the beatitudes as a source for tips on how to approach the journey emotionally. You might even think of them as “DO-attitudes ”for the faith journey.

Looking at Jesus’ teaching of the beatitudes from this more mystical perspective has given me some fresh ideas about guidelines for saints on the journey:

Stay open: Life is all about change
Step into the flow: Your life is about change as well.
Domesticate your inner beast: Build harmony with love.
Pan for the gold in the gravel: Let your heart purify as you go.

I hope this fresh look at the beatitudes, as guidelines for growth, has given you one or two fresh ideas about how you can respond to God’s call on your life. Remember:

New Century Hymnal, #295

As we gather in a wide circle to share the bread of life and the cup of forgiveness, remember that we all are works in progress.

This week’s reading from 1 John offers us a lovely promise:

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is…”

1 John 3:3

… keep praying …

Amen.