Spiritual Disciplines

It sounds more formal than it actually is, this notion of the "spiritual disciplines." To most Christians, this sounds like the more secular concepts of "diet" or "exercise," and it's often met with a great big groan. It sounds restrictive. It sounds hard. Who has the time to monitor this kind of thing in their life? Who has the time to even get started? Who has the energy to keep it going? 

It's the kind of thing that most of us start and stop a thousand times over our spiritual journey. It's an undertaking that we try and fail, then a few years later, try and fail again. We continually criticize ourselves - and our faith - because we just "can't" get it "right." It frustrates us. It makes us feel defeated. It keeps pounding us into the ground because at the very moments that we most seem to need our faith, we don't seem to know how to access it. 

I have even heard Christians say, "Oh, no, I don't read the Bible because I can't understand it" or "Nah, I don't pray; I don't know how to pray." Even in the age of digital music and streaming services, we have Christians among us who say that they don't know what to listen to or how to find it. And heaven forbid we suggest implementing a Sabbath. A whole day of rest? In a 24/7 world? 

It just seems the spiritual disciplines require more from us than we have to give. Which leaves a lot of Christians questioning, why would God do this to us?

We don't have the time. We don't have the energy. After a long day of clothing, feeding, driving, entertaining, and supporting a family and our children, of managing our responsibilities in the office, of taking care of the house, of laundry and dishes and bathtimes and, if we're lucky, a few minutes to catch tomorrow's weather, where on earth are we supposed to find the time or the energy to do one more thing? Even one more thing that God "requires" of us?

There are those among us who say, triumphantly, that they had "a little extra time" this week and so sat down to read their Bible. And we applaud them. Gosh, I wish I had a little extra time for reading my Bible. I wish I could get even five minutes to do the things that I want to do. 

We spend much of our spiritual journey apologizing to God, promising to do better, making agreements about how we'll spend our time when we actually get some. And we claim that this is a holy position that we've taken. 

We have so convinced ourselves that the spiritual disciplines are hard, that they require 100% of our focus and attention if we are ever to do them right, that we have to be able to be fully invested in them at any given moment if they're going to "work" or be fruitful or whatever it is that we think they're supposed to be for us, that we have determined without even an ounce of guilt that if we're not all in, it's better to be all out. That if we can't give 100% right now, it's better to give 0. That somehow, we are honoring God by not even trying. 

Read that again, because heaven forbid we say it out loud - too many of us think that we're honoring God by not even trying to live holy lives because we "can't" do it perfectly. Because we "can't" do it wholly. Because we're not 100% in, God wants us out. That He likes it when we do this. 

But what if that's not true? (C'mon - you know it's not.) What if none of that is true? What if this isn't what the spiritual disciplines are all about? What if it's not like diet and exercise at all? What if it doesn't take some massive feat of dedication or strength or resolve? 

What if living the disciplined spiritual life isn't hard? 

It's not. We're the ones who make it hard. But we don't have to. 

This week, let's talk about it. 

Redeeming We

My hope is that, as we have worked through this week, your understanding of the very real heartbreak of thousands of Catholics this week is deeper, that you are more filled with grace when you hear these headlines. That you are less quick to jump on your self-righteous religious horse and pound broken men and women into the ground because, not only have their baptisms been nullified this week, but you're here heroically to tell them that maybe they were never baptized at all because they clearly don't understand this whole enterprise. They don't even know what God wants, so of course, they were wrong before they were even wrong. 

It is just amazing to me how quick we are to condemn someone else when we don't understand them, rather than thinking there might be something wrong with our understanding. So my hope is that this week, you've seen how the Catholic church's use of intermediaries is something that is actually deeply ingrained in Judeo-Christian religious history, and it's something that we, as self-righteous as we are in our own doctrine, really ought to learn something more about. 

So we're back, then, to where we started - with thousands of our brothers and sisters who are waking up this week uncertain of where they stand with God because the person who has mediated their faith for them has messed up. A number of priests have said, "we" baptize you instead of "I" baptize you. 

This is not merely a word, not merely a ritual. This is the priest's breaking of the very covenant with which he took his vows. He said that he would be the one to stand between men and God, but the moment he says "we" instead of "I," what he says is that he's not the one standing there. He has abdicated his position. He has chosen, quite frankly, not to be a priest. He's said he's not the one who mediates, but that the whole community does. 

That's why this is so difficult. Not only does it shake the souls of the baptized, but it shakes the foundations of the Catholic church's organizational structure. If the priest is not willing to be an "I," if he's not confident and convicted enough in his calling that he knows he is the guy, if he doesn't take seriously his vows as an intermediary and understand the importance of the position to which he has committed his life, then whole thing starts to crumble. 

But...

But there is a silver lining here, especially for those of us who want to be so ready to jump in with all of our personal understanding of why "we" is better anyway.  You see, for most of us, this comes from a doctrine that has taught us God's emphasis on "one anothering" - on being brothers and sisters in Christ. We have been raised in the culture of the fellowship, of what it means to be on this journey together, of doing life together. As one of my favorite pastors likes to say, we live a faith where "we are all just walking each other Home." 

And if that is true, if we're all just walking each other Home, if we believe in the glorious beauty of one anothering, if we place a great emphasis on being together and the culture of Christian fellowship, then there's the thing: we have thousands of Catholic brothers and sisters right now who absolutely need a we. 

That's right - I said it. Time to live it out. Time to actually be the we that we claim to love so much. Time to demonstrate what it means to have a we in our Christian culture, the goodness of all our togetherness and the value of drawing close to one another in times of heartache and doubt and uncertainty. If you've been out there this week thinking, okay, you can kinda see how it all works but you still think the Catholic church would be better off with a we, then it's time to prove it. Time to live it. Time to be it. 

Show up. Stand in the gap. 

Making Disciples

If we then recognize that most of us have a faith that is mediated by someone else, if we have all come to Christ because of the willingness of someone else to stand in the gap between man and God, the next question we naturally ask ourselves is...is this how it's supposed to be?

Actually, it's a very "American" question to be asking. Or very "Western," perhaps. 

We live in a very individualistic culture. We are told that our lives are our own and that what we do with them is up to us. Add to this the notion that has surfaced that faith is meant to be private, that our religious preferences should be kept to ourselves, and we come to the conclusion that if we choose to "do" Jesus (whatever that means), it should be an individual pursuit. We should pick our own shattered heart up in all its pieces by our own bootstraps and just journey our way to the Cross, if that's "our thing." 

Because of this, many of us bristle at the suggestion that we have ever used, let alone needed, anyone else in our faith journey. Many of us staunchly object, often with a measure of shame, to the idea that our pastors or our parents or our matriarchs have anything to do with our pursuit of Jesus. We all want to pretend that we just picked up a Bible one day or saw a Cross hanging on a wall, picked Jesus, and made Him our own. All on our own. Just like that. 

But that's not how faith has ever worked, and it's not how Jesus says it's supposed to work. 

The Christian faith has always been formed in community. It has always been mediated through one another. From its earliest days, God has commanded His people to take all this stuff to heart and share it with others. Tell it to their children. Remind their grandchildren. Invite resident aliens into the Temple with them. Carry the banner of the Lord in front of them as they marched, together, into battle. And overwhelmingly when we see the second person pronoun in the Bible, it's in the plural - y'all - not the singular; God is so very, very seldom talking to just "you."

Even when Jesus is sitting on the shore with His disciples after His resurrection, look at what He tells them. He does not say, "You guys should write my story down so that anyone who wants to discover it can read it for themselves and adopt it into their lives." No. What He says is, "Go and make disciples." Teach others. Mediate for them. Bring them to Me so that they can truly encounter and meet Me through you, who have been on this journey with Me for awhile now. 

Jesus intended us to introduce one another to Him, and if that's the case, then He meant for us to keep being intermediaries for one another. 

No, that doesn't mean that we let others build a faith that depends on us, but that's not what we're talking about this week. We're talking about the role of the priest in the Catholic church, and we're talking specifically about baptism, and that means that we're talking about the very foundation of the Christian journey - the coming to Christ. We're talking about that moment when someone chooses the journey for him- or herself, that moment that the person takes on the burden of their own spiritual journey and starts to separate from the intermediary a bit. At baptism, at confession, at confirmation, the Catholic is embracing the spiritual walk for him- or herself and committing to a life of living it. That moment is the turning point, but that moment requires the intermediary. 

Which is why it's so important that the priest get the words right. This isn't just some empty ritual. This isn't just some next step on an organizational chart of religious activity This is a turning point in faith, and if the intermediary that has brought you this far is about to turn you loose into your own heart to really follow Jesus, then we have to admit - we want him to get it right. We want to be sure. We want to be certain. 

Because if anything, even the smallest thing, feels "off" here, the whole thing suddenly feels weaker. Flimsier. More uncertain. 

And that is what thousands of our Catholic brothers and sisters are feeling right now.  

Pastor as Priest

Yesterday, we talked about the role of the priest in the history of the Christian faith, and maybe you're thinking, "Sure, Aidan, but Jesus did away with all of that. That may have been true for the people of God once upon a time, but once Christ came onto the scene, we're supposed to just come directly to Him. No more intermediaries. Just Christ. Can't these Catholics just get on board with the gospel of grace?" 

And so, here we are again, trying to assert some kind of moral authority, trying to stand on some kind of theological high ground where we are certain that we are the ones who have figured it out and if everyone would just adopt our kind of faith, our kind of worship, our very doctrine, then the whole world would be saved by now! 

But not so fast.

Because how many Christians - protestant Christians - do you know whose faith depends upon an intermediary? Even today. How many Christians are among us who don't have their own habit of spiritual disciplines, but only take what they are fed by others. 

There are Christians among us who leave a church just because the pastor leaves. Whether he resigns or is fired or feels God's call to a new congregation or whatever the reason, Christians will leave a church to follow a pastor (or disengage from church entirely because their pastor moved away from them). 

There are Christians among us whose faith is grounded in the faith of a mentor or perhaps a matriarch or patriarch, some figure present in the church or in their life who has taught them the ropes and who keeps them on track. It's usually an older person who has been practicing faith for a long time, who knows the Bible well, who prays faithfully and regularly and with great hope and trust in the outcome. Take this person away, through death or illness or geography, and the faith of these Christians crumbles. 

One of the things we've been seeing a lot of in the church in the past couple of decades is young Christians, children who grew up in the church, pushing back against simply having the faith of their parents. They've been to church every Sunday for all of the formative years of their life, but they've found that they believe what they believe only because that's what their parents believed, and they often take a break from the church or branch out entirely because they want to discover their own faith. They want to know what they really believe, if anything at all. They don't want the faith of the intermediary, and yet, that's what so many of our young people have - the "family" faith. 

The truth is that for more of us than would like to admit it, we have an intermediary in our faith, even when we adamantly proclaim that we don't need to or even that we're not supposed to. So much of our faith still rests upon someone who stands between us and God, whatever role that person is in and whatever role we have assigned them. 

So it's strange, then, that we try to sit on some high horse and scoff at the Catholic faith that openly confesses its intermediaries, that plainly admits their role in building the Catholic faith. It's strange that we sit here and try to laugh at how silly it all seems that one priest using the wrong pronoun during a thousand baptisms could mean anything at all (and the news reported last night that it's more than one priest in more than one location). 

And yet, change our pastor or our mentor or our spiritual guide, and we are ready to walk out of our church entirely. 

See the hypocrisy?

The Role of the Priest

When we talk about things that protestants don't understand about Catholicism, the number one question that comes up is: why are they always praying to Mary? What's up with that? Closely related to that question is the question of other intermediaries in the Catholic faith, persons and saints who stand between the people and God and facilitate blessing and dialogue, and it doesn't take long before we get from there to the role of the priest, which seems incredibly authoritarian (at the very least) to most of us outside of the Catholic church.

So let's back this thing up a bit and talk about it. 

Remember that from the earliest days of Judaism, the people always had an intermediary between them and God. They had to. If you remember when Israel first came out of Egypt and entered into the wilderness, God met with Moses on the mountain. And the people were warned - do not come near the mountain. Do not even touch the base of it. Don't let your livestock graze on the grass that is on the mountain. For the mountain is holy, and God dwells here. 

And the people didn't even really need more of an explanation than that. They could see that God dwelt there. They could see the smoke and fire. They could hear the rumbles of thunder as He spoke. They could feel the earth shake with the power of His presence. There was no question in their mind that God was there on that mountain, and they even begged Moses to continue to be their intermediary. "You go meet with God and tell us everything He says, and we'll do it. Whatever it is. Just don't let us be overwhelmed by His glory."

From the mountain to the tabernacle, this honor of meeting with God was starting to shift from Moses (who would eventually die) to the priest, Aaron, and his sons who would come after him as priests. It was the priest who offered the sacrifices, the priest who made atonement, the priest who cleansed the unclean, the priest who declared cleanness, the priest who stood between man and God. The very rules that God set forth about bringing an offering to Him ran right through the priesthood. 

And if we're being technical, it still does. There are many of us in the Christian church who say that all of that isn't necessary any more because Jesus has come. Jesus has cleared the way to God. We read the stories of the crowds following Him around Galilee and Jerusalem, of persons pushing through just to touch Him, of even a Roman soldier declaring, face-to-face, that this was the Son - the glory - of God. So to us, we don't need all that priesthood stuff any more because, on account of Jesus, we just come straight to God. We just come right up onto the mountain. 

But remember that Jesus is called a great high priest. Remember that He is called the most holy. We still depend on the priesthood, even if Jesus has changed the way that that looks for many of us.

In fact, the whole world still depends on the priesthood, for Peter has told us that we - Christians - have become a royal priesthood. We have become those who meet face-to-face with God, who converse on the mountain with Him, who reflect His glory, and who stand between God and men. We have become the intermediaries that the world needs. 

And if the world still needs intermediaries, then why does it seem strange to us that the Catholic church actually uses them? 

This is the foundation of understanding what's going on in the Catholic church right now with such a debate over what seems like so simple a word. Why can't "we" baptize you? Why does it have to be "I"? To understand, just imagine how Israel might have felt if Aaron had messed up the words. Imagine how Israel did feel when its priests went astray, as is recorded for us a handful of times in the Bible. Imagine how God's people have always felt when their intermediaries messed up protocol. For that matter, just look at how the people freaked out when Zechariah (in the early chapters of Luke) took too long in the Most Holy Place. 

The people of God have always depended on their priests. The Catholic church (and a few protestant denominations) still do. 

So do...many protestant Christians.... Stay tuned.