Text: Luke 3:21-23
This July, I walked back into my gym for the first time in more than two years.
When everything shut down in March of 2020, I tried to do the online workouts for a bit.
When the gym reopened, I wasn’t ready to go back and sweat and breathe with large groups of people in a small space.
I tried to make my own plan and we bought a weight bench and put it in the basement.
But I never really got back into the swing of doing things on my own.
I definitely wasn’t paying attention to other areas of physical health like what I was eating.
And you know what… my body felt it.
I started going to the chiropractor and physical therapist because of aches in my shoulders and back.
I had less energy and I was drinking a whole lot more coffee to get through the day.
And I realized that I was treating symptoms instead of going back and looking at the cause.
I had stopped taking care of my body and I no longer had a group to be accountable to.
So, in July of this year, I signed back up for classes and I’ve gone at least four times a week for the last two and a half months.
My family has been more conscientious about eating healthier food.
I pushed the reset button.
And I’m starting to feel better.
How many of you can relate to some part of that story?
To falling away from a practice that was working for you?
To trying to solve the problem by focusing on symptoms instead of causes?
To finally pushing the rest button and starting again?
You know, I just shared that experience about my physical health… but I could just as easily have told the exact same story about my spiritual health.
The other day, I was sitting in my office,
juggling an email from someone who needed rental assistance,
preparing for a meeting about episcopal elections,
trying to figure out what prayer to add into the worship service,
when my smart watch buzzed at me.
It said, “Your stress level seems high. You should take a breathing break.”
Oh.
Thanks.
I looked up from the keyboard and my star word from Epiphany is taped to the wall.
“Contemplation” it reads.
Contemplation in the Christian faith is a form of prayer or meditation where we sit still in order to experience the divine.
Next to my desk is a pack of these little 20 minute candles.
Each is designed to burn for just 20 minutes so that you can take a short break to unplug, pray, and renew.
They were a gift from a dear friend and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.
But here I was, sitting at my desk, swamped with important ministry tasks, with a thousand signs all screaming at me saying the same thing.
Maybe you need to stop and be still with God for a minute.
Maybe you need to stop rushing around to fix all the problems and recenter yourself.
Maybe you need to recharge your spiritual battery.
Maybe you need to remember who God made you to be.
Maybe you need to push the reset button in your spiritual life.
Just as I could tell you about the symptoms I was trying to treat with my physical health, I can tell you about some of the symptoms of an unhealthy spiritual life:
- Reacting out of our emotions – like lasting out in anger… or ignoring them all together.
- Pretending like we don’t have flaws and we haven’t made mistakes.
- Dividing our lives into “secular” and “sacred” compartments
- Getting busy doing FOR God instead of being WITH God.
Do any of the items on that list resonate with you?
Maybe we all need to push that reset button.
Maybe we all need to stop focusing on the symptoms like stress and busyness and instead start taking care of our spirit.
And the good news we hear from the book of Lamentations that God’s mercy and grace are new every morning.
We may not have been consistent… but God is faithful.
God keeps showing up.
So whenever we are ready to push that reset button… there God is waiting for us.
Where do we start?
You know, one of the things that I have heard from several people is that they stepped away from church for a time during the pandemic and realized that they weren’t missing a lot.
It had simply become one more thing to do, in the long list of things that keep us busy.
If anything, the pandemic has been a time to refocus on what is really essential in our lives… and maybe Sunday morning worship just didn’t seem so essential anymore.
I think part of that is because of how we have gone about worship.
We have treated it like another item on our to-do list rather than an opportunity to be in God’s presence.
We have isolated our spiritual life to an hour or two on Sunday morning and then forgot about it the rest of the week.
We showed up in our Sunday best and didn’t give ourselves… or others… space to be vulnerable and real about what is happening in our lives – the good and the bad.
In some ways, we’ve been playing right into those symptoms of spiritual unhealth.
Peter Scazzero calls this “using God to run from God.” (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality)
But you know what… one of the things that we have remembered and tried to embrace during this pandemic is that God is not contained solely within the four walls of this building.
God goes with us wherever we are.
United Methodist pastor and consultant, Rebekah Simon-Peter recently researched what happened to churches during the bubonic plague – which lasted for several centuries in Europe.
One of the positive things she discovered was a growth in lay-led spiritual movements.
The church of the time had been consumed by power and wealth, influence and politics.
But when the plague stopped everything in its tracks, she noted that people were hungry for a relationship with God, for relationships with each other, and found new ways to reach beyond the walls of the church.
The Black Death forced a kind of reset.
Covid-19 has, too.
I think that’s part of the reason that John the Baptist went out and set up camp at the Jordan River.
He knew that people were going through the motions of their faith.
They were focused on checking the boxes and doing what they were supposed to do… and not on focused on their relationship with God.
But once he started issuing that invitation… “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”… people started flocking from all over the place.
People really and truly were hungry for that experience of God.
They… we… are yearning for a chance to let go of our pasts…
To be made new…
To connect with something larger than ourselves…
John reminded them that this experience of baptism and washing yourself clean was only the beginning…
It couldn’t be compartmentalized but needed to become a part of their everyday experience.
It needed to change the way they lived and interacted with others.
He knew that all by ourselves we don’t have what it takes, but that with God’s help…
Well, with God anything is possible.
One day, as all of those people stepped into the waters to be baptized, Jesus stepped into the water, too.
The skies broke open.
The Holy Spirit descended.
And God spoke: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
But as Debie Thomas wrote, “In receiving baptism, Jesus doesn’t set himself apart from us; he aligns himself with us.”
What that means is that we are invited into an experience of God with Jesus.
And, “to embrace Christ’s baptism story is to embrace the core truth that we are united, interdependent, connected, one. It is to sit with the staggering reality that we are deeply, deeply loved.”
I have been doing some soul searching these last few months about what it is that we do in worship.
If we are just going through the motions, there really is no point.
God doesn’t want or need our busyness.
And God doesn’t want to be relegated to just an hour of our lives.
What if we pushed the reset button on what we do in worship?
How can we instead experience in this time that core truth that we are “united, interdependent, connected, one”?
What would it mean for worship to help us “sit with the staggering reality that we are deeply, deeply loved”?
I remember the day my youngest brother, Darren, was baptized.
Because they moved churches, he ended up as a junior in a confirmation class filled with sixth graders.
He was a foot and a half taller than the other students, and while he looked slightly out of place, those young kids looked up to him and they grew to be great friends.
And as he knelt to be baptized on confirmation Sunday, the pastor invited friends and family to come up and lay on hands… just like we do here.
Every single one of his classmates came and stood around us and reached out their hands, too.
Darren’s baptism was not just something to check off or going through the motions.
It was an experience of grace.
It was an experience of connection.
It was an experience of the reality that we are deeply, deeply loved.
I think part of pushing the reset button is coming into our time of worship EXPECTING to EXPERIENCE a connection with God and one another that affirms that we are loved.
I think it is creating space for us to be still and simply be in God’s presence so that we might hear and know that we are beloved.
And it is about being in a community of people who will not only affirm that love, but give us the opportunity to connect and share that love with others.
And my hope filled prayer is that what we experience here, with God’s help, will empower us live out that love in our everyday lives.
So we experience in worship a baptism…. And then in our daily life whenever you touch water… whether you are washing the dishes or stepping into the shower… let that water wash over you and remind you that YOU are a beloved child of God.
We experience in worship stillness and prayer… and we can find a quiet moment in each day to sit in God’s presence and simply be still.
We pray and confess in worship, and it helps us remember as we work and study and care for our family that your worth in God’s eyes does not depend on what you have done… but you are loved simply because God has declared it so.
We greet people with the love and peace of Christ… and as you go about your day and encounter other people, think of them first as a beloved child of God… see how it changes your interaction with them.
You see, that’s what our acts of praise and words of confession and moments of fellowship in worship are all about.
They are moments to encounter the holy, yes.
But they also train us to see others… to see ourselves… through God’s eyes for the rest of the week as well.
And YOU my friend… no matter what the world says or what kinds of labels it throws at you…
YOU are a beloved child of God.
