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Spiritual Formation
By Riviera UCC | May 3, 2009
Spiritual Formation
a sermon based on Luke 17:20-21
given at Palm Bay, FL on May 3, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Recently in church (from this pulpit) someone referred to me as the “Woo-Woo King.”
I looked “woo-woo” up in an on-line dictionary and found over twenty definitions. Woo-woo can mean anything from the sound a whistle makes to a 99.9% fruit drink to being stupid to being something great.
Notwithstanding these other meanings mostly I know “woo-woo” as a West Coast term for matters relating to spirituality (The person who made the comment assured me this was her meaning).
This definition, of course, begs the question: What is spirituality?
I once represented a Native American in a civil rights case and his brother was the Shaman of the confederated tribes. He defined spirituality like this: “Religion is for those who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.” Looking back I think the Shaman meant that religion can be a surface thing, but, spirituality requires a deepness that comes with living in the ups and downs of life.
The official theological definition of spirituality is in essence “being spiritual.” Spiritual, meaning concerning spirit or non-material things. So spirituality is defined generally as being concerned about the spirit or the non-material.
My own definition of “spirituality” within the context of Christian theology, however, is a little more specific. I understand spirituality to mean God’s beckoning within creation that calls us toward experiencing God’s love, and it is also how we acknowledge that call and reciprocate by actively participating in God’s love throughout creation.
In short, I understand spirituality to be about God’s call and our hearing and responding to that call– each of which is, when you get right down to it, all about love.
I base my understanding of spirituality on God calling us through New Testament verses that teach us to see that we are loved by God (John 3:16), that we are to love God (Matt 22:37) and that we are to love others (Matt 22:39).
Now I want to make this clear, God loves us whether we acknowledge God or not, and we all experience God’s love at some level just by our existence. Indeed I would go so far as to claim that anyone who believes in love believes in God even if they do not understand God as love.
At any rate, in order to best participate in God’s beckoning, most of us need to recognize a higher power (by whatever name we might call that power, “God,” “Sacredness,” “Holiness” “Allah” “Mystery” “Yahweh,” “The Web of Life,” Christ” “Love”). Upon recognition of that higher power, loving others is how we respond to that Love and participate in Love’s work.
Riviera United Church of Christ, a church in this community for one hundred-and-twenty years, has long been doing something called “Spiritual Formation;” the process by which humanity– all of us gathering here as church– affirmatively respond to God’s call for individuals and community, to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s work. Love’s work.
Spiritual formation amounts to the acts and methods we use to answer God’s call to be loved by God, to love God, and to love others.
Since I have defined spirituality as a beckoning or call by God, I tend to see spiritual formation as the mirrored response to that call. This fits in neatly with the Biblical idea of covenant. Which is not surprising since covenants are an exchange of promises, and in turn an exchange of promises is how lawyers understand contracts.
And contracts used to be the bread and butter of my law firm. In the law a covenant is a type of agreement. It is a fundamental principle of American contract law that agreements only come into existence when an offer is mirrored in the acceptance.
Using this contract analogy, Spiritual formation can be seen as humanity’s attempt to accept and fulfill our covenant with God, the promises we give to God which are a mirror, or to use another Biblical term, an image, of God’s love.
In other words, we are loved and are called to love and we accept this call – this offer– by trying to mirror it through our loving God and others.
My contract analogy only goes so far since breaches and enforcement are cosmic matters not courtroom matters. Nonetheless spiritual formation is about acting on our mutual promises with God. God’s “I will love you” is met with our “I will love you too” and because God is in others and each of us and all creation and God loves all of that, all there is, our “I will love you too” properly played out means we will try to love all that too, all there is. Which is what Jesus was teaching and calling us to do.
In today’s reading Jesus teaches those listening “that the kingdom of God is among you.” See, if we fulfill our promise to love all as God loves all, the realm of God breaks further in. It’s among us now fully potential, all we gotta do is love.
Marcus Borg, a popular theologian who did not practice law, has another simpler approach than my contract law analogy. He calls spiritual practices “paying attention to God and what God loves[,] ” 1
Dr. Karen Tye, a professor at Eden Theological Seminary considers spiritual formation a “process.” 2 She asserts that Spiritual formation is the process by which “our capacity as human beings to recognize and participate in God’s redemptive and creative activity in all of creation” is recognized and nurtured.
Whether spiritual formation is thought of as a process , practice or acceptance and fulfillment of covenant, spiritual formation boiled down amounts to how we respond to God’s love and call in reality. It is how we bring in the kingdom of God that is amongst us presently (just waiting to burst forth and full into the world!).
A key part of spirituality is to “Be aware of the wider identity of ourselves.”3 We have to be in touch with ourselves for sure, but also our oneness with everything else. I know that might sound like I had a little too much granola this morning, or that my inner-Californian is peaking through, but our identity includes not only our own individual gifts and limitations and person, but also the parts that include God, others and creation in our whole being.
When spiritual practices are done right we are “paying attention to God.”4 A part of this paying attention includes loving God and taking part in God’s passion, and “God’s passion is not the redemption and salvation . . . of individuals from the world, but the redemption and salvation of the world.”5
As Christians, then, we must intentionally and consciously include in our own identity the identity of others, and creation, and God. The more we get that we are one with the all, the more all matters to us, as it does to God, as it does to Jesus; and the more we fulfill our promise of fully bringing forth the kingdom of God.
While we may think that spiritual matters and spiritual formation are all about personal solitude and private soul searching actually it “is never a private activity”6 it always, always involves our identity with others, church, community, creation, and God.
I ran into Dr. Deb Krause, the Dean of Eden Seminary on my way to take my ordination exams, she happened to be in the airport and bought me a cup of coffee and explained all of this in five words “Just remember,” she said, “It is all about relationship.” She is not Dean for nothing! How we relate to God and creation, including others and self is precisely what it is all about. Spiritual formation necessarily includes the entire web of life and the process of God’s creating and creation.
All we do as church should be spiritual formation. That is, our church activities should always be intended as responses to God’s call to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation.
Theologians Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra agree with this idea when they write: “Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time in response to and in light of God’s active presence for the life of the world.”7
All we do as church, as the Body of Christ, ought to be spiritual formation. Spiritual formation should be taking place whenever and wherever Christian community is. It is the process of attending to our affirmative response to God’s call for us as individuals and community to experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation. 8
Such a process includes “instructing and informing” through imparting knowledge and experience; “socialization” through a community of faith; “developing [and] nurturing” the faith community and its individual members; and “transforming” those communities and individuals toward the world God calls us to, the world where God’s kingdom doesn’t just exist as potential, but reigns as an everyday reality for everyone. 9
As a church we need to be intentional about our involvement as a place that helps guide folks on the journey through the process of spiritual formation. As Dr. Tye puts it “Educating for spiritual formation is the creation of landscapes, of space, where we are open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world” 10. She goes on to note that it is this creating of such a landscape that “we are called into”11.
In the months to follow we expect – to paraphrase Dr. Tye– to begin creating some new landscapes, of space, where we can be open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
One of these new landscapes is our family theatre production of Alice in Wonderland with auditions in May and rehearsals in June and a show in July we will connecting youth to community through the performing arts. This ministry shows youth they are loved and shows others that they ought to be loved.
Another landscape on the horizon is Shelle’s efforts to find children interested in singing choral music on a Sunday in June with hopefully the ever popular youth band playing as well. We are trying to provide a landscape that provides opportunities for us to shower love on children and youth and connect them to the community and God.
And it’s not just for the children that we are aiming for the creation of landscapes, of space, where we are open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world. We are hoping to hold a spiritual retreat here at the church one weekend in September. Not enough folks expressed interest in going away for a weekend, so we are going to try it out here. We envision a Friday night with a communal meal and other spiritual practices, then all going home and returning in the morning for a full day of contemplative and meditative prayer and practices, and meals together grounding us in hearing God’s call and responding to it.
In December we hope to have an Adult Sunday School course that also considers and focuses on such practices.
We are also having gatherings as one congregation each Sunday in June and July at one service to celebrate our one God together in worship, fellowship and spiritual formation.
Plus I will be preaching in the months ahead on matters on practices and ideas that might help us to be more open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
Since I have already confessed that all we do as church, as the Body of Christ, ought to be spiritual formation, you know spiritual formation is already at the heart of what we do and have been doing. We’ve long been at the process of listening to God’s call and attending to our affirmative response to it. As individuals and community we already experience God’s love, acknowledge and reciprocate God’s love, and actively participate in God’s loving work in creation.
What we hope to do in the months ahead is add more variety, options and means to accomplish the creation of new landscapes, of space, where we can be open to the Spirit’s creative and redemptive life in the world.
As always all are invited, all are welcome to these new opportunities for spiritual formation.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
1 Borg, 187.
2 Tye, Karen, Educating for Spiritual Formation, January 30, 2006 handout.
3 Tye, Karen, Educating for Spiritual Formation Course Lecture, January 30, 2006.
4 Borg, 188.
5 Ibid., 200 (the italics are Prof. Borg’s).
6 Tye, Karen, Lecture, January 30, 2006.
7 Bass, Dorothy, Practicing Our Faith, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (1997),5.
8 This definition borrows again from Karen Tye who defines education for spiritual formation as including a “process of attending with people to the activity of God in our lives and to our capacity . . . to recognize and participate in God’s . . . activity in all of creation.” Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, February 20, 2006 handout. I have added Dr. Tye’s “process of attending” to my own definition of spiritual formation (which as I note above I also came up with by borrowing heavily from Dr. Tye’s definition of spiritual formation ).
9 Tye, Karen, February 20, 2006 handout.
10 Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, March 6, 2006 handout.
11 Tye, Karen, Education for Spiritual Formation, March 6, 2006 lecture.
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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