September 13, 2020: Thrive Spiritually!
2 Corinthians 10:1-5
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Blevins
I myself, Paul, appeal to you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away!—I ask that when I am present I need not show boldness by daring to oppose those who think we are acting according to human standards. Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.
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You are more than your thoughts. I am more than my thoughts. We are more than our thoughts. All the great world religions, at their deepest levels, agree on this. As we begin this six-week wellness series with today’s focus on spiritual health, this is the underlying truth that will help us realize that much of our suffering and our experience of feeling un-well in all areas of our lives, result from patterns of thinking and doing that lead us to being less than we can be, less than God hopes for us to be. Some things are in our control, other things, not so much. The well-known “Serenity Prayer” by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr helps us with this hard truth. There have been several versions of the prayer over the years; let us begin this morning by praying this familiar version:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I cannot accept,
and Wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.
Niebuhr writes, “if I surrender to your will . . . I may be reasonably happy.” The Apostle Paul frames it this way, in the passage from 2 Corinthians I read a moment ago, “we take every thought captive.” These teachings are about detaching from our thoughts. Jesus uses the language, “Seek first the kingdom of God,” telling his followers that the kingdom is “within you.” Jesus urged his followers to “take up your cross daily,” to daily die to self and to attachment to our thoughts.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I grew up in the evangelical Christian tradition, specifically, the Southern Baptist tradition. From the time I was just a small child, I heard people say, “You have to accept Jesus into your heart.” Now, as a child, I had not yet reached the level of abstract thinking. I was still on the concrete thinking level. I couldn’t really fathom how I could get the long-haired guy in a white bathrobe from the pictures into this tiny place in my (at that time) tiny body.
The language made me imagine that Christ was “somewhere out there” and that I was doomed to hell unless I figured out how to get the long-haired, bathrobe-wearing Jesus in there. It wasn’t until years later that I would grow to believe a revolutionary truth that salvation is not so much about “receiving” Christ (as if from the outside in) but “awakening” to Christ within us (from the inside out). Jesus said it like this, “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 7:21).
How do we awaken to the “kingdom of God” within us . . . to Christ within us? What does this have to do with spiritual health? EVERYTHING!
This is the “pearl of great price” that Jesus talks about in the Gospel of Matthew. “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls,” Jesus teaches. “When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.” (Matthew 13:45-46) The merchant stakes his whole future on this discovery. We would do well to do the same, Jesus suggests.
How? How do we find this “pearl of great price?” The answer, the best I can tell, is twofold, and you’re not going to like it very much.
1. SUFFERING
Part one is . . . suffering. Father Richard Rohr calls it “necessary suffering.” He defines suffering as any time we’re not in control. And your ego, what the Apostle Paul calls your “flesh” at various times, doesn’t like it one little bit. The ego/flesh is who we think we are. It’s our false identity. It’s our personality, our patterns, our opinions, it’s the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what separates us from other people and from creation. Again, the ego is who we think we are. And what was my very first line in this sermon? “You are more than your thoughts.” You are more than ego. More than flesh. To find that “pearl of great price,” the “kingdom of heaven,” we must take up our cross daily and die to self and to ego. This happens, in part, through the requisite suffering Rohr talks about. The Apostle Paul writes about it this way: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)
Who wants to be crucified today? Not too many hands I see.
In the 1999 hit movie, The Matrix, Keanu Reeves plays Neo, who lives in the artificial (false identity) world of the Matrix. When given a choice between staying in the imagined world or entering reality, he chooses reality. But the transition is not easy. He must die to the life he knows, even though it’s a false life. He takes a pill which makes him unconscious. When he wakes up, he is weak, naked and hairless in what appears to be a pod of amniotic fluid. He must be born again. In his weakened state, he is nearly killed by a machine. He must relearn everything, including how to walk, before he is fully reborn into reality.
Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” Dying to self, born to new life, time and again. This is how we grow spiritually. This is the difficult pathway to spiritual health and wellbeing.
Part one is suffering. Most of us do not choose this part, rather, suffering chooses us. And if you’re a control-enthusiast like me and my ego, you don’t like this one little bit.
2. SURRENDER
For the second part of our two-part formula for finding the pearl of great price, we can take a more active role. Part one is suffering; part two is surrendering. Suffer. Surrender.
While surrendering might not be as bad as suffering, it is still not our default setting. It’s not a term we typically think of in positive terms. This is glaringly obvious when we consider some synonyms of “surrender”: abandon, abdicate, acquiesce, capitulate, submit, relinquish, succumb, yield, raise a white flag. Our ego never wants to raise a white flag. It desperately wants to hold onto illusions of control and separateness.
Circumstances, suffering, sometimes cause us to raise a white flag and surrender to the inevitable.
One night, watching TV, successful sports columnist, Mitch Albom, sees his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, on Nightline. Morrie is dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS, as you know, has no cure. The muscles weaken, becoming debilitative. It eventually causes death. Mitch begins visiting his old professor in his declining state every Tuesday, gleaning wisdom, soaking in kindness. He writes a best-selling book called Tuesdays With Morrie. In the book, we see that Morrie has surrendered, he has raised a white flag to physical health, his terminal diagnosis irreversible. But we find something about Morrie that’s entirely inspiring. He is alive! His vitality beams off the pages. He has died to self; he is alive to wisdom, truth, and joy!
In one of the many nuggets of wisdom he shares with his former student, he says, “Learn how to die and you learn how to live.”
In other words, surrender. Yield. Let go. “If anyone would come after me,” Jesus says, “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”
Now, I’ve shared with you the way to find the pearl of great price—the secret to a hidden treasure. Suffer. Surrender. That doesn’t sound like very good news, does it?
So I’m not going to leave you there.
I want to paint a picture, to cast a vision for what it looks like when we’re spiritual healthy. Not that I’ve attained this—knowledge, cognitive awareness, does not equal attainment. (I wish it did!) No, it’s a journey, a process. A series of deaths and resurrections. A daily death to self and rebirth in Christ. But here’s our hope if we engage this process—we will:
Feel more connected with ourselves, with others, with nature and with God.[1]
Produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Respond to situations with less reactivity and more peace.
Enjoy greater health in other dimensions of life.
Generally, you know you’re spiritually healthy when you find peace with your life and when you can maintain hope even in the most difficult times.
Just like physical health requires healthy physical practices like eating right and getting exercise, spiritual practices can help us along the pathway to spiritual health—practices like prayer, meditation, worship, spiritual reading, gratitude, journaling, stewardship, service. As with much of life, sometimes we have to “fake it ‘till we make it.” We may not always “feel” energized by spiritual practices in the same way we don’t always love eating salad for lunch. But we submit ourselves to disciplines, to spiritual practices, that we might attain spiritual health.
Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, speaks of the inward call to spiritual health: “Perhaps somewhere in the subterranean chambers of your life you have heard the call to deeper, fuller living. You have become weary of frothy experiences and shallow teaching. Every now and then you have caught glimpses, hints of something more than you have known. Inwardly you long to launch out into the deep.”
If that resonates with you, be assured you are being called to greater spiritual health, a deeper journey of faith in Christ. It’s not always fun. That’s guaranteed. But it is always rewarding. Always.
This invitation today is simple—to take a step toward spiritual health. Engage in a practice that will enable you to let go to your many attachments. To pray, with ever more sincerity, the prayer of serenity:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I cannot accept,
and Wisdom to know the difference.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6150917/