Daily Office Lessons: Psalm 103; Isaiah 30:18-21; Acts 2:26-41; John 14:15-31
The year I finished seminary I was assigned to a parish where I met a young couple who had a very active spiritual life. They had been through much transition. I suppose they were five to ten years older than my 27 years. The important facts were that they had moved from Orlando, Florida to Asheville after a economic crash. They had tasted the exciting life of a successful beginning in entertainment for her and he had a commercial concern. They had gotten over extended financially. I think there was some substance abuse. All crashed into ruin, bankruptcy and a sense of no future. As they tried to come back from a place that tasted lost and impossibly alone. Then they found their way to a Christian fellowship were they began to learn life over, as a place of hope and forgiveness. They also learned to pray and to be guided under the comfort of the Holy Spirit.
There was only one problem as I saw it. They had developed a sense that the only walk was theirs. The formula for prayer and conduct they learned had to be the same for all. They were Episcopal fundamentalists, which seems an impossible combination. Yet like so many who get caught in a fundamentalism, they were unnerved if another approach to a spiritual life differed from theirs. I did not often see God's hand as clear or demanding as they did, yet I too had an active care for the guidance of God.
Here is what we agreed on which we find in today's reading.
There is available to us in scripture a moral core which comes from the core of God's will sought after and discerned over the ages, in ages past. It comes from God's compassion. It is God's intention that all people grow sensitive to a Higher Good pressing on us, accompanying us, but our choice to do so.
From Isaiah: "The Lord waits to be gracious to you...He will rise up to show you mercy." Though you may taste adversity, "when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'"
In Jesus we discover this moral good is not impersonal, but seeks us, cares for us. We can choose to follow and when we do we are guided with energy, with what has been called the Holy Spirit. This choice to listen after and be nudged by God is what proves the difference between people of faith and those who walk life outside faith, what John calls "the world."
In John's Gospel, we hear today: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live." John 14:15-19.
I suppose what we also agreed on is that this coming was found in the space of prayer. That is why I mostly got to know this couple in times when we gathered not only to study but to share Eucharist. In this Sacrament which is forever more than my mind alone can understand, God comes to mark me as indwelled. I meet this indwelling as I partake of this Sacrament and sign and I am more intensely aware. This is a gift of God's descending and ascending nature. This is part of the gift of the Risen Christ who will not leave us comfortless.
Part of what we mark in the Easter Season is that Jesus did not vanish out of contact with his followers post Easter Day, but kept appearing for some period. In some manner, beyond the mind's limit, Christ was encountered, and the Disciples began to 'make sense' of their life now, but oddly still in Jesus' company. This readied them for the age to come when this encounter would be mediated through the intersection of Word, Sacrament and prayer. This remains a place where we can hear: 'This is the way; walk in it.'
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