1-24-10 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

CHRISTIAN APATHEIA

     By now, I suspect, most of us are aware of the story of John Newton, author of the hymn, Amazing Grace.  He wrote the hymn after he became an Anglican clergyman, but before that    he was the captain of a slave trading ship.  Although he received some early religious instruction from his mother – who died when he was six – he had given up any serious religious conviction by the time he reached adulthood.  Then one night, as he attempted to steer his ship through a particularly violent storm, he experienced what he later referred to as his “great deliverance.”

     He recorded in his journal that when all seemed lost and he was convinced the ship was about to sink, he cried out, “Lord, have mercy upon us!”  Later, he reflected on what he had said, and began to believe that he had actually encountered God in that storm.  Perhaps that storm was the source of verse three of his famous hymn:

 

            Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come;

            ‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

 

     May 10^th, 1748 was the day of John Newton’s “great deliverance.”  Yet John Newton continued to pilot slave trading ships, although he did come to treat the slaves on his ships a little    bit better.  Some years later he had a stroke and in the aftermath of that, he again had a profound encounter with God.  It was then that he said that he felt truly at peace with God for the first time in his life.  Yet even then, he continued to invest financially in the slave trading business.  He finally became an abolitionist much later in life.  Then he apologized for a confession that, as he put it, “comes too late, and will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I once was an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.”  Perhaps that confession is the source of verse one of Amazing Grace:

 

            Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!

            I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

 

     Ladies and gentlemen, there is more than one kind of blindness.  Of course, there is what     we call physical blindness.  Yet perhaps there is also a kind of blindness we might call spiritual blindness.  John Newton was not healed of physical blindness.  John Newton was healed of spiritual blindness.               

    Does spiritual blindness remain in our world today?  Perhaps we could say that Bernie Madoff suffered from spiritual blindness with his Ponzi scheme.  How could anyone with a conscience do what that man did?  I think anyone who suggests that the people of Haiti are only getting what they deserve, because some of them practice voodoo, may be suffering from spiritual blindness.  How can anyone see their suffering and think God remains oblivious?  And those of us in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world who want to hear our preachers talk about how we can get more out of God – who long for what we call the “prosperity gospel” – may be suffering from spiritual blindness as well.  Here we could ask, “How much is enough?”  Ah, there seems to be a bit of spiritual blindness in our world today, as well.

   Jesus addresses the subject of blindness in the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke.  He comes to Nazareth – his own home town – and enters the synagogue on the Sabbath.  As he stands up to read, he is handed a scroll from the book of Isaiah.  Jesus reads:

 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to

the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to 

 the blind; to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

 

    Much can be said about the aforementioned passage, but I want to focus on the recovery of sight to the blind.  How does Jesus restore sight to the blind?  More specifically, how does Jesus heal spiritual blindness?

   Spiritual blindness occurs when we suffer from what a fourth century monastic scholar named Evagrius called the eight deadly thoughts.  Two centuries later, Gregory the Great revised the concept of the eight deadly thoughts and called them the seven deadly sins, but for our purposes today, we’ll stick with the eight deadly thoughts.  Spiritual blindness occurs when we suffer from the eight deadly thoughts.  What are the eight deadly thoughts?  They are: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, accidia, vainglory, and pride.

   Gluttony is exactly what you think it is.  It has to do with overconsumption.  As I said in our staff devotions last Wednesday, many of us who attended the Lunch at First program last Tuesday were guilty of gluttony.  The sin of gluttony is that our own overindulgence can lead to a scarcity of resources for others.  The second deadly thought – lust – is what you think it is as well.  Just the thought of indiscretion can lead to its commitment.  I don’t think I need to go into that here.

     Avarice is the third deadly thought.  Avarice might also be called greed, but there’s a little more to it than that.  Our minds become so full of the desire to gain enough material goods to make ourselves secure against every possible calamity that we fail to pay sufficient attention to our neighbor or to God.  The opposite of avarice is generosity.

     Sadness is the fourth deadly thought.  Sadness arises when we compare our achievements with those of others, and we become deeply disappointed with our own lives.  This sadness is a form of self-pity, which we may experience as we think about what we might have become  had we not suffered with the restrictions that come from being Christian.  In other words, if it weren’t for the limitations our faith put upon us, we could’ve gotten more out of life!

     The fifth deadly thought is anger.  Here Evagrius is referring to the anger that arises from injuries we have suffered – or think we have suffered – from others.  They can so possess us   that anger becomes our permanent disposition, needing very little to set it off.  The very thought of those who have hurt us – or who we think have hurt us – fills us with hatred and ignites the burning passion of anger.

     The sixth deadly thought is accidia.  Accidia can also be called sloth, but it’s perhaps better understood as boredom or apathy that leads to despair.  Accidia arises from discouragement over our lack of progress in the Christian life, the failures of fellow Christians, mean spiritedness, gossip, and even church politics.  The point is that love between Christians is not in evidence.  No one seems genuinely interested in anyone else.  In short, accidia is what tells us that we do not seem to be getting anywhere in the spiritual life, and the church as a whole does not seem to us to be making any progress either.

     Vainglory is the seventh deadly thought.  It’s kind of the opposite of accidia.  As we find ourselves improving in the Christian life, we find that we want others to notice.  Perhaps we need to remember here that we are the branches and that Jesus Christ is the vine.

     Last but not least is the deadly thought of pride.  It’s similar to vainglory.  With vainglory, we crave notice for our achievements.  With pride, however, we take full credit for the progress we have made as if God had not been involved at all.  C.S. Lewis once called pride the ultimate sin.  “It’s what made the devil the devil,” he said.

     There you have it; the eight deadly thoughts.  The eight deadly thoughts are what lead us to spiritual blindness, not to mention, perhaps, a few other things.  How are we to overcome those eight deadly thoughts?  How can Jesus heal us of our spiritual blindness? 

     What we need is Christian apatheia.  Apatheia refers to a state of mind where one is free from emotional disturbance.  When we attain the state of Christian apatheia we are no longer disturbed by the eight deadly thoughts.  We are free to love God with all our heart and with all our strength and with all our soul and with all our mind.  And, we are free to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. 

     What does Christian apatheia look like?  I’m reminded of a wonderful story that is attributed to Catherine Marshall.  She wrote:

 

There once was a king who offered a prize to the artist who could paint the best picture of

 peace.  Many artists tried and the king looked at all the pictures.  But there were only

 two he really liked, and he had to choose between them.

 

The first picture was of a calm lake.  The lake was a perfect mirror for peaceful towering mountains all around it.  Overhead was a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.  All who saw this picture thought that it was the perfect picture of peace.

 

The other picture the king selected had mountains in it too, but these mountains were rugged and bare.  Above them was an angry sky, from which rain fell and lightning flashed.  Down the side of the mountain tumbled a roaring waterfall.  At first glance,   this picture did not look peaceful at all. 

 

But when one looked more closely, one could see that behind the waterfall was a tiny bush growing in a crack in the rock.  In the bush, a bird had built her nest.  There in the midst of the rush of angry water, sat a mother bird on her nest – in perfect peace.

 

Which picture do you suppose won the king’s prize?  The king chose the second picture.  He explained, “Peace does not mean an absence of noise or trouble or trauma.  Peace means to be in the midst of all those things, and to still be calm in your heart.”

 

     That, my friends, is the picture of Christian apatheia as well.  As Christians, we seek to be free of the turmoil caused by uncontrolled passions that we might be free to love God and neighbor.  The question is, how do we get there?

     The ancient spiritual masters believed that we reached such a state through what they called ascetical practices.  Ancient ascetical practices included things like prayer, fasting, spiritual study and almsgiving.  As Diogenes Allen put it in his book, Spiritual Theology, “As long as   our attention is distracted because we ourselves are divided in our wishes, wants, desires, and hopes, we cannot attend to the word of God.”  In other words, our spiritual blindness will continue – we will always fall short of the goal of Christian apatheia – as long as we remain distracted by the things of this world.  

     We must learn to separate ourselves from the things of this world.  We must take the time to focus exclusively upon God.  How are we to do that?  Let me give you one way to get started.  The ancients called it lectio divina.  Lectio divina consists of four basic things: reading a passage of Scripture to yourself out loud; meditating or thinking about what you have read; praying about what rises up in your heart or your mind in meditation; and then contemplation – simply resting silently in God for a time after you have prayed. 

    This is spirituality.  Spirituality, to me, is one’s union or one’s oneness with God.  And where are we to encounter God aside from Scripture?  As we grow closer to God, we will find our spiritual blindness going away.  It won’t likely happen overnight.  Recall, for example, how long it took John Newton to see the error of his slave trading.  It won’t likely happen overnight, but you will find yourself being mysteriously drawn closer to God.  You will find your spiritual blindness gradually fading away. You may even find yourself encountering Christian apatheia as the things that once seemed to matter so much…suddenly don’t seem to matter anymore.  Amen. 

    

 

1-10-2010 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

     We seem to have developed – as Americans – a strange fascination with the supernatural.  Television airwaves are full of programs that deal with the subject at hand.  There’s a show called Ghost Hunters and a spinoff called Ghost Hunters International.  There’s a show called Ghost Adventures and a show called The Ghost Whisperer.  There wouldn’t be so many of these shows if there wasn’t a captive audience.  Like I said, we Americans seem to have developed a strange fascination with the supernatural.

     In fact, there’s a movie on that subject that recently became a blockbuster hit, entitled, Paranormal Activity.  Paranormal activity begins when a young man named Micah purchases a camera to record the strange things his live-in girlfriend, Katie, claims to be experiencing.  Micah’s purchase of the camera is more to appease her than anything else, and we soon find    out he’s more interested in electronics than he is in the strange occurrences that seem to be haunting his partner.  As the film progresses, however, the ghostly happenings become more   and more apparent – and intense – while the hand-held camera documents these occurrences,    as well as the sheer terror this young couple experiences.

     There’s an interesting exchange that occurs in the film when Micah and Katie go to visit a psychic.  Katie wants to use an Ouija board to discern what the entity wants and is puzzled by Micah’s lack of understanding.  Micah says to her, “I understand where you’re coming from.  Just remember too, that you didn’t exactly warn me about this kind of stuff before we moved in together, so I think I have a little bit of say in what we do.”        

     Katie replies, “I get that, but honestly, what was I supposed to say?  On our first date, ‘Hey, I think there’s a demon that I think has been following me.’”  Micah says, “No, but maybe on our fifteenth date, or our thirtieth date, or when we decided to live together…that might’ve been a good thing to bring up!”

     We seem to have developed – as Americans – a strange fascination with the supernatural.  Why do you suppose that is?  Is it merely because we like to be scared out of our wits?  Or is there something more?  Life can be very hard on all of us.  Is this perhaps a part of our process  of trying to discern if there’s something beyond this earthly life?  Is this perhaps a part of our process of trying to discern if there’s help from above?  Whatever the reason is, we have a strange fascination with the supernatural – with what we call the paranormal. 

     Paranormal is a term that describes unusual experiences that lack scientific explanation.  Approaching the paranormal from a research perspective is difficult because of the lack of physical evidence from most of the purported phenomena.  These phenomena are alleged to be outside of science’s current ability to measure or explain.  In other words, ghosts and ghouls and goblins are called paranormal because they’re beyond the realm of scientific explanation. 

     Perhaps, in a manner of speaking, we could say that Jesus himself experienced some paranormal activity in the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke.  John the Baptist  went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  Jesus himself went to John to be baptized by him.  The question we should ask here, I suppose, is this: “Why did Jesus go to John for a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…when he, himself, was without sin?”  Some commentators say he did so as a mere formality.  Other commentators say he did so to appease his Jewish mother.  But the fact of the matter is, when Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan, he received his commission from God.  More specifically, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove.

     Technically, this constitutes the paranormal because no scientific inquiry can explain the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Yet we don’t usually call baptism paranormal activity; we call baptism a sacrament.  A sacrament is an outward and physical act, instituted by Christ, with an inward and spiritual meaning.  Again, a sacrament is an outward and physical act, instituted by Christ, with an inward and spiritual meaning.

     The outward and physical act of baptism is the placement of water on the head, or in more conservative churches, the act of dunking a person in water.  I don’t want to get into the theological distinctions of methodology here, so let’s just leave it at that.  The outward and physical act of baptism has to do with water.  To say that it is instituted by Christ is to say that Jesus told us to do it, which he does in the great commission.  You can look that up at the end of the gospel of Matthew.  What I want to talk about this morning though is the inward and spiritual meaning.  What is the inward and spiritual meaning of baptism? 

     It’s three things, really.  As water cleanses the filth off our bodies, the waters of baptism symbolize our cleansing from sin.  The sacrament of baptism also symbolizes our reception into the Church universal.  But perhaps even more important, just as the Holy Spirit descended upon

 Jesus like a dove at his baptism, so, too, does baptism symbolize our reception of the Holy Spirit.  Baptism symbolizes our reception of the Holy Spirit.        

     God the Father we know as God over and above us.  God the Son we know as God with us and for us.  But God the Holy Spirit we know as God in us.  So when the Holy Spirit descends upon us as the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, God begins to dwell within us.  That’s a hard thing to measure scientifically, and perhaps it can be a hard thing for us to discern personally as well.

     In churches of the Pentecostal tradition, one knows one has the Holy Spirit when one can speak in tongues.  We are not of the Pentecostal tradition, and the Apostle Paul notes that the ability to speak in tongues is but one of the gifts of the Spirit, so no one needs to speak in tongues here to prove they have the Spirit.  The Apostle Paul describes the fruits of the Spirit in    the book of Galatians.  The fruits of the Spirit are: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Again, the fruits of the Spirit are: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  So in other words, one knows one has the Spirit when one produces the fruits of the Spirit.

     That seems pretty black and white, does it not?  So how do we deal with this when we don’t feel very loving, when we can find precious little joy in life, or when we don’t feel very peaceful or very patient or very kind?  Are we to assume then that we lack the Holy Spirit?  That’s a logical conclusion, wouldn’t you say?

     I’ve always had a hard time with this because there are times when I don’t feel very peaceful or patient or kind myself.  I found my eyes opened by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity.  He contrasts two different people, whom he has named Mr. X and Mrs. Y.  Mr. X is not a Christian, but he is gentle and loving and kind.  Mrs. Y is a Christian, but she is cantankerous and impatient and a bit overbearing.  In light of what we just said about the Holy Spirit, how     are we to view this contrast?

     C.S. Lewis puts it this way.  Imagine how wonderful Mr. X would be if he were a Christian, and imagine how cantankerous Mrs. Y would be if she were not!  The point is this.  Each of us  is a work in progress.  None of us has reached the final destination of who we are or who we can become.  There is no way for us to determine who is in possession of, and who is not in possession of, the Holy Spirit.  The key is for us to strive to grow in the Christian life.  We must continue to work on producing the fruits of the Holy Spirit.  It’s something that could well take a lifetime.         

     Baptism symbolizes our reception of the Holy Spirit.  No one is qualified to determine whether or not we do, in fact, possess the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes we may even feel as if     we’re not qualified to determine for ourselves whether or not we possess the Holy Spirit.  Perhaps we just need to trust that the Holy Spirit is there.  The better we learn to produce         the fruits of the Spirit, the more convinced we can become. 

     But here’s my concern.  You’ve heard me talk about this for about six years now.  Our society continues to raise a generation of young people apart from the church.  Thus, our society is raising a generation of young people absent the sacrament of baptism.  Can we not thus infer from a theological standpoint that we are raising a generation of young people who are essentially bereft of the Holy Spirit?  

     As a church, I think we need to do something about that.  We need to continue to pursue a dynamic and vital youth ministry in this church.  At the rate we’ve been going the last couple    of years, we may not be able to afford such a person.  Thus, perhaps we need to do a couple of things.  First, we need to prayerfully reconsider our giving patterns.  And second, we need to pray for the young people in our community.  They face way more temptations and challenges than many of us ever did.  How can they decide wisely if God is not with them to help them?  We can help to change all that, you know.

     Ladies and gentlemen, we need the presence of God’s Holy Spirit.  Pray for God to send his Spirit to our young people.  Pray for God to send his Spirit to our community.  Pray for God to send his Spirit to our church.  That, my friends, is the kind of paranormal activity we all can use.  Amen.