Morning Worship SUMC – June 16, 2013
Reflection: Notes from a Fool’s Journey
Rev. Rob Angus Jones
This month you’ve been exploring the ancient practices – looking at how our first faith ancestors responded to the experience of God shining through the life and person of Jesus of Nazareth. You’ve examined how worship and the discipline of prayer gave our ancestors the tools to respond to God in a formal way. Next week we’ll explore music as another way to respond to God.
Today I want to talk a bit about the Christian practice of the fool’s journey as a response to God in Jesus.
I was raised in the culture of Puritan New England, and part of that inheritance means you have a constant worry over ‘what will the neighbors think?’. There’s a powerful common sense message in there: tow the line, do what everyone else does, believe what everyone believes, don’t rock the boat. Fit in.
We hear the Apostle Paul referring to this very human dynamic in his first letter to the church at Corinth. And our worship theme reading this morning, written by the Iona Community, reflects this back to us in a contemporary voice.It’sone thing to like God; but it’s a risky thing to say ‘Yes’ to God.
As I have gotten older and I hope a bit wiser, I have surprised myself to find some affection for old Paul. Paul was passionate about figuring out what it meant to say ‘Yes’ to the living Christ. Paul was a brilliant thinker – even if sometimes out in left field. Paul was articulate – I admire his gift for words. And Paul was driven and organized.In Paul we can see what it looks like to be passionately and deeply committed tothe God revealed through Jesus.
But Jesus was all about the ambiguity of the journey. Jesus’ Way was a life in motion, a life of practice.The Way of Jesus was all about‘subverting the dominant paradigm’. Everything Jesus taught and revealed in his actions was about turning popular Roman culture on its head. Just think about the Beatitudes! EvenJesus’ own family thought he might be crazy.
So here’s Paul, living out the paradoxes of this upside down spirituality. Paul, whohad once lived quite happily in the dual conventions oflife as a faithful Pharisee and as a responsible Roman citizen, a life of doing the right thing, obeying authority, worrying about the neighbors. And then Paul fell off his horse, blinded by a new reality, and said a life-changing Yes to it.
For Paul, the Gospel is all about being foolish in the eyes of the conventional world. There is worldly wisdom, the kind of common sense wisdom everyone knows to be true. And then there is God’s wisdom, as revealed through Jesus. And God’s wisdom sounds completely foolish to anyone with common sense.
I have to wonder what did not make it into Paul’s letters. Part of the fool’s journey is taking wrong turns, mistaking our ego or our need for God’s invitation. What course corrections did Paul make over time as he learned to differentiate his own will from God’s will? Is there some grace in being able to recognize a wrong turn on the journey, and grace in changing course?
So the marquee out front teased you with the promise that I would be speaking about some things from my own foolish journey. Willing to be foolish for Christ. So let’s do that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about journey this year, and how each of us areon a path, a journey. For many of us, a particular event or person or decision has transformed us and set us on a new path in our lives. For others, sometimes life just begins to lean quietly in a new direction over time.
When my partner and I came to Sonoma three years ago, a dear friend quipped that our decision and our transition from Oakland looked as though God had given us gas money and a road map. The universe seemed to align around us getting here, leaving Oakland, and beginning life again in the North Bay.
Because of that sense of directedness, I had been watching for what God might have in store for me here in the valley. I could not get my friend’s comment out of my mind. And last year as a result of that watching, I felt the urging to come full circle and return to a mainline denomination.
As I began to respond to this sense of feeling invited to rejoin the mainline world, sadly, I still found the United Methodist doors closed to me, but found a positive reception in the United Church of Christ. Being a driven and organized kind of guy, I threw myself into the process of discernment.
Now for the story to make sense, I have to tell you that 30 years ago, when I was in seminary, the United Methodist Church and then the UCC made it very clear to me that I had no path into ordained ministry as a Gay man. I can say now, looking back, that this experience left a bit of unfinished business roosting in my soul.
Despite that, for the last 30 years I’ve been active in ministry, but outside the mainline denominational world. I was ordained in one of the micro-denominations whose calling is to live and work out in the tall weeds of American religious life, and to minister to those who have been exiled or wounded by churches, and who would never cross the threshold of a church. This is rich work, but certainly is a different career model. Among the micro-denominations we’re all bi-vocational, supporting our ministries with day jobs. And so I was a business consultant for many years, and more recently joined my partner in real estate.
In my ministry I have always been a pastoral counselor, with a bit of spiritual director thrown in. Truth be told, I never recognized this path of ministry as something God invited me to. It always seemed to be a sort of fallback rather than a conscious ‘Yes’.
For me the opportunity to come in from the cold as it were was quite seductive, and I was sure that God was inviting me to do this. Just imagine, to finally mesh together a work life with professional ministry.
So I threw myself into the UCC process, applying to have my ordained status recognized, and after months of taking classes and writing papers for my application and getting references from wonderful people, this past January I had my interview.
John Wesley talked a lot about grace, and how we are basically living in a sea of God’s grace. It comes to us to lead us forward; it comes to us to invite us to right decisions and actions in the moment; it guides us to find God in what has transpired. We cannot escape God’s grace. But if we remember to do it, we can discover God’s grace and God’s leading in the moment, and be guided.
My interview did not go well. At all. I came away confused and questioning. Surely God had led me to this place, as the culmination of my path to Sonoma! I had a plan! I had goals!
I was not at that time open to the moments of grace – at first. I was stuck in trying to sort out what happened, and why.But as the days passed I began to let myself consider whether this whole thing was God’s invitation, or just my own unfinished business. Did I simply need to close a door in my journey that I had left ajar so many years before?And I began to pay attention to what was actually happening in my life here. People were coming to me for counseling and guidance. My work life and my ministry were coming into a new focus as I adjusted to this different rhythm of life in the valley. While I was off in my head, busily making plans, my life and ministry were happening all around me.
Part of the foolishness of saying Yes to God is that sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we’re saying yes to what we hope is God’s invitation, but may just be our own desire. The wisdom of this world urges us not to take risks, and above all, don’t fail. Common sense tells us we need to organize our lives around reasonably assured success. Don’t get it wrong. God’s wisdom invites us to take a risk, trust the process and not cling to an outcome we cannot assure.
As Wesley reminds us, God is at the ready to sanctify that wrong turn with insight and a course correction.
Looking back, I know that God’s invitation for me was 1. to find a peace that I did not know I was lacking – to shut a door that needed closing; and 2. to recognize that 30 years ago when I found ministry in the micro-denominations, I was not choosing second best, but had actually responded God’s invitation to my true ministry and the most wonderful adventures in faith that I could have imagined.
Anne Lamott says that there are three essential prayers: Help; Thanks; and Wow. We pray ‘Help’ because we never truly know what exactly we need in order to get out of the jam we’re in – and so ‘Help’ is the right word for our limited insight. We pray ‘Thanks’ because we never truly know how far God’s reach has been in the good we discover. And we pray ‘Wow’ because we suddenly understand how small and limited we are in the vastness of God’s creation.
I am deeply convinced that there is a fourth essential prayer: Yes. I have experienced that God is inviting us in every moment, woven into every experience and conversation and activity and quiet moment – God is inviting us to take the fool’s path. This essential prayer is our foolish assent to God’s invitation. I say it’s foolish because we can never have enough information to make this an informed response. We never know when we say Yes where this invitation is leading us, and what it will require of us.
In my spiritual life, I experience the sense that God asks each of us to be foolish in the eyes of the world. I firmly believe God asks each human being: will you be foolish for me today? And our prayerful crazy response can only be ‘Yes’.
Amen.
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