"Spiritual Inventory" | Roy Cole | February 25, 2024

In 2014, Time Magazine published a list of the 100 most influential people of the world. Any guesses as to who was on the top of that list? Don't need to shout it out, just get it in your mind: who would be on the top of the list in 2014? Well here it is – Beyoncé. Number one. I don't know if that makes our Dean happy or not... where'd he go– there you go. If you don't listen to Beyoncé, you certainly have heard her name and read about her, um, and I think it is fair to say that she was indeed the Taylor Swift of her day. Even though Taylor Swift has eclipsed every pop artist that has ever been. And it will come as absolutely no surprise to any of you that I am not a Swiftie, but it's hard not to know who she. She's stating some guy who does something with football? I don't get that one either. But further down that list, there appears the name of an Episcopal priest, and I'm sure some of you will recognize the name. Perhaps you even read some of her books, perhaps even met her– we are a rather small tribe as Episcopalians. Her name is Barbara Brown Taylor, and in the words of the Time Magazine, which I would certainly agree with: they write, "Few souls are as synced to the world's mysteries as Barbara Brown Tayor, an acclaimed Episcopal preacher and best-selling author. Taylor rivals the poetic power of C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner." Years before I knew that she was going to be in top 100, I read an interview that she gave in Christian Century, and she was asked in that interview what she thinks was the state of the Christian church. This is what she said: "My secret fear about churchgoing is that it works like a vaccine– a couple of drops under the tongue..." (and just pause here for those of you who are younger. When your parents, grandparents, myself included, got vaccinated, it was a little drop under the tongue, not a needle in the arm. So there was a couple drops under the tongue each week, and pretty soon we were immune to the whole thing.) "The God beseeching language requires no extraordinary effort. The summoning of the Holy Spirit expects no untoward response. Even the sacrament," she writes, "when it comes, tastes more like breakfast than sacrifice." That last line has stayed with me for the last 25 years of my ministry: "Even the sacrament, when it comes, tastes more like breakfast than a sacrifice." As a counter to that tendency to turn the sacrament into breakfast, the Book of Common Prayer for quite a new few hundreds of years has provided a rather lengthy exhortation as to how we are each to prepare ourselves for the reception of Holy Communion. It's on 316 and 317, takes two full pages of small print to tell you how to prepare yourself for communion. Get ready, okay? Not all of it, but just to give you a bit of the flavor of it. "For if you wish to share rightly in the celebration of those holy mysteries etc etc... the benefit is is great, but if it is done with a p– and if it is done with a penitent heart and living faith, we receive the holy sacrament. So also is the great danger if we receive improperly–so improperly means that you held your left hand over your right hand instead of right hand over your left hand, because in seminary right hand on left hand– no that's not it. So if you receive him properly (I guess he's not talking about that) but oh here it is: if you receive it improperly for not recognizing the Lord's body, judge yourself, therefore, lest you be judged by the Lord. Examine your life and conduct by the rule of God's Commandments and then you may perceive wherein you have offended in what you have done and left undone, whether in thought, word, or deed and acknowledge your sin... and on and on and on it goes. Wow, we don't use that much anymore, not only at Trinity as a progressive Episcopal church, but I think then very few rectors, priests in charge will use that exhortation, except maybe on a good Friday. That exhortation is not often used at all, and there certainly are a couple reasons for that. First, it's very long and it's rather old-fashioned in its language and theology. And second, I think it's because most contemporary people, most people of this age, they really don't want to be told what they ought to do and how they ought to do it. And lastly most people, if they actually go to church, come to church to feel good about themselves, or at least better about themselves, than they did before they walked into the door. And I will count myself as one of those people. Why in the world would you get up on a Sunday morning, get dressed, drive down to church just so you can get beaten up? I grew up in churches where Bible bashing was just the way to do it: bang, bang, bang. (You're going have prayer books.) Why go a church to be beaten up? The world can do that to us well enough on its own. Nevertheless, it does behoove us to take a spiritual inventory from time to time. A time out, if you would, a bit like the helping profession's encouragement for us to participate in Dry January, that month-long sobriety challenge that begins each New Year. A time to take stock, as it were. The season of Lent is for us that time out, a time of intentional, sustained self-examination, a time of confession, repentance, and reconciliation with those around us. Perhaps even reconciliation with our deepest self, our truest self, so that each of us may come to God by God's grace, and there receive the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ– not as breakfast, but as sacrifice– and in that moment, discover the power of God to reconcile us to one another, reconcile us to God, and reconcile us to our best and deepest self. When Jesus was teaching his disciples that they were– that there was quickly coming a time that he would be handed over to suffering and death, they could scarce believe what they were hearing. It was inconceivable to them that their beloved teacher, the one whom they had come to recognize and acknowledge as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, should be put to death. So offensive were Jesus's words, as you just heard, that Peter took it upon himself to rebuke Jesus. Yet as we know, it was Peter who ended up being rebuked– and rather forcefully– "Get thee behind me, Satan." (It always sounds better in good King James English) "Get thee behind me, Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things. But then, perhaps so as to soften that rebuke just a bit and to be more fully explain the difference between divine things and human things, Jesus continues, "If anyone wants to be my followers, let them deny themselves and pick up their cross and follow me, for whoever would save their life, they will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel, they in turn will save it. And what will profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" Indeed, what can they give in exchange for their life? To be a Christian, to be a disciple of Christ, is to be the one who follows, to be the one– and to be the one who follows is to be the one who loses their life for the life God has for them. It is as that old Evangelical saying goes: to be a disciple of Christ is to put your life under new management. It is to relinquish your will to the will of God, trusting– and here's the tricky part for all of us when we're asked to submit our will to God's will– it's that we have to trust that God's will for you is life, a life more abundant and free than anything that the world has to offer you or that anything that your will, apart from God's will, could ever achieve. This conviction that God was able to do what he promised is what Peter was lacking when he took Jesus aside to rebuke him. In Peter's mind, it was impossible to imagine that Jesus should be betrayed and killed, and then three days later rise from the dead. Such things just do not happen. It is beyond comprehension. And Peter was right from this human perspective, but as often the case when our perspective is calibrated to God's perspective, then our human perspective is often quite wrong. John McQuiston II, in his slim volume 'Always We Begin Again," paraphrases and contemporizes the 6th-century Rule of St Benedict as a devotion for those of us who are not monastics yet seek that deeper spirituality, seek to be authentic disciples of Christ, seek– seek to receive the gifts of God's love and presence each and every day. And so, he writes, the first rule of St. Benedict is simply this: live this life and do whatever is done in the spirit of loving kindness. Abandon attempts to achieve security; they are futile. Give up the search for wealth; it is demeaning. Quit the search for salvation; it is selfish. And come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in life with an attitude of compassion will receive its full promise." Peter, after this stinging rebuke from Jesus, eventually came to believe and see the promises of God fulfilled by his words, his ministry, and his life. Peter, as we know, participated in the incarnation of the church, the body of Christ in the world. And so, in this season of Lent, it's now up to you and me to believe and recommit ourselves to putting away the attitudes and practices of the world that is always, always, always striving to conquer, to control, to exploit every resource including humanity itself, so as to gain power and privilege and hold that power and privilege in the hands of just a few, instead of embracing the promises and assurances of God and of God's love. This is what the season of Lent is asking us to do. Each of us needs to take a time out from time to time and examine our minds, our hearts, our actions, our desires, and see if indeed indeed we have truly set our mind upon the things of God, or if we have fallen into old patterns and habits that draw us away from God and Christ, and cause us, as Peter did on that day, to seek our own way and not God's way. I firmly believe that if you and I can commit ourselves to doing that not just for the weeks of Lent, but we can commit ourselves to doing that again and again and again, even when we stumble and fall, even when we get lost and take the wrong path, even when we think it's hopeless, we can always begin again. We can always begin again. And when we do, if we can make that commitment to begin again, then we– then when we gather at this altar rail, the sacrament is indeed sacrifice: Jesus's sacrifice and our own sacrifice, for we too have been asked to carry a cross. And so we too make our sacrifice. And when we do, well then perhaps Barbara Brown Taylor need not be afraid that the sacrament will taste like breakfast, for the sacrament will be grace, and your life will be filled with all that God has for you in this moment and in each day. In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.