A Parable About Spiritual but Not Religious.

      Lazarus owns a 1999 Dodge Neon, a car with a bit of Y2K disaster built right into its glovebox.

      Lazarus’ Neon, by popular acclaim one of that year’s “Ten Worst Cars,” is by now very rusty. Its leaky oil pan stains the driveway. The wheels are out of alignment. It doesn’t have any get up and go. Foam stuffing is coming out of the seats.

     

The infamous 1999 Neon

 One day, when the brakes feel especially spongy, Lazarus decides he has to take his Neon to the Nazareth Auto Repair shop. In a moment of carefree optimism Lazarus even asks the mechanics to give the car a tuneup. It has been a long time since the car has had a tune up—forever, in fact. Some car owners are like that.

      So the Nazareth mechanics go to work. They discover that the compression is way down in two cylinders. The spark plugs are still original equipment. The brakes need new rotors and discs all around.

      In fact, the Nazareth Auto Repair mechanics finally tell Lazarus that the car isn’t worth tuning up. It needs a resurrection. Repairs will cost at least 4,000 dollars and that wouldn’t even cover the upholstery or rust. The Nazareth mechanics advise Lazarus to buy another car, instead. They actually have a good used Aura on their lot.

      So Lazarus goes home to consider his options. He decides that he doesn’t trust the Nazareth mechanics. Never has, really. You see, he actually only trusts how he feels about cars—just as many of us only trust our feelings about spirituality. In fact, Lazarus trusts his feelings more than he trusts the Nazareth Auto Repair shop’s expertise. And that is how it is with most people today when they think of religion, too.

      That is how it is for the church. When it comes to faith—whether rusty or none at all—people tend to trust their intuitions, feelings, and whatever they last read on the Internet more than they trust the church as a religious institution.

      Of course, Lazarus’ story is a parable. I’m exaggerating when I say that people only trust their feelings when it comes to spirituality. I actually know some very thoughtful people who pursue personal spirituality vigorously. They’ve studied the great religious prophets like Martin Luther and Martin Luther King and maybe have even read the Upanishads or the Koran. They meditate according to some Eastern discipline or another. They devote time and intellect to their spirituality.

      But usually, when people say that they are spiritual but not religious, they make the claim based on their feelings and intuitions.

      This is especially so, I think, for one key reason. We live in an era when most of us—whether we go to church or not—most of us are very skeptical of all institutions. We don’t trust government institutions that go to war because we know that once upon a time they did not find weapons of mass destruction. And they tax us too much, we think. They can’t build the subways or transit or run Hydro (the electric utility) the way such things ought to be run.

      People are skeptical about institutions. Classrooms are too crowded. Persons of Colour end up being carded or languishing in jail more than White folks. Banks push their own investment instruments rather than the best ones, and then charge too much for doing so. Oh, and they charge a million user fees. Millennials can’t find the jobs they trained for and when they do find one it’s merely a “gig” rather than a career.

      People are skeptical about institutions. They don’t like them and don’t trust them. So what are they supposed to do? Mostly, we cannot quit the institutions that are part of our daily lives. We can’t take our money out of the bank and put it under a bed and then buy stuff on Amazon. We can’t quit taking cars on government roads or public transit to work. We can’t stop being citizens of Canada or of the US—national free agents. Most institutions, whether we love them or hate them can’t be avoided.

      So, to express their anti-institutional angst, one thing that many people do, often unconsciously, is leave those few institutions they can choose to leave. Like the church. People reject Nazareth Motors because it satisfies their longing to thumb their noses at an institution, any institution.

      This frustrates me. On the one hand, I get it. Churches have, through history (and like banks and governments and militaries through the ages) done some very stupid, very bad stuff. Fought for Constantine. Went on crusades. Persecuted Jews. Participated in the Residential Schools cultural genocide.

      I get it. You can’t quit being a citizen of a country that sometimes does very bad things, but you can quit being party to this ancient institution called the church that did so much wrong. 

      But the church doesn't always fail. At its best, the church has done some pretty incredible things. I like the story in Acts chapter six.The newborn church faced a problem. You see, idealists that they were, they had gotten into the habit of selling everything they had and sharing the cash with each as each had need. Not a system guaranteed to work for very long, but they did it with the best of intentions.

Worship at Lawrence Park Community Church

      Except that some members of the church were overlooked in the distribution of the food. The early church did right by its Jewish members, but not by its non-Jewish gentile members. The Jewish members were well looked after, but the Greek-speaking widows went hungry.

      To resolve this problem, the church organized itself, as institutions do. It organized itself religiously, in fact. It selected several men to make sure that money was shared fairly. And the amazing thing was that the church selected—we can tell by the names we read—the church selected only Greek-speaking men, the children of those hungry Greek-speaking women, to take over all the financial leadership of the church, for both Jews and Greeks.

      Amazing. For us, it would be like putting only people with the biggest mortgages on the boards of banks. Like putting only homeless people on Toronto’s City Council. Like only allowing only First Nations people to work for the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs. Very idealistic. Irregular. Perhaps unworkable.

      And yet this sort of risky, selfless, upside-down behaviour is actually what organized institutional religion, at its best, is all about. Churches are a time, a place and an opportunity for spiritual people to join hands with other spiritual people, learn together, and work together for the good of all humanity, even if at great personal cost. It is risky, because as is the case with all human institutions, churches sometimes fail. But it is necessary, because when people try to work out what it is to follow Jesus together, the potential good multiplies exponentially.

      So, for example, my church brings refugees to Canada, even when we know that it will cost us in time, big time, when they finally arrive. We contribute generously to fund a children’s summer camp even though we don’t personally know the impoverished kids who go there. We encourage our City Councillors and MPs to keep working for the least and the last even if it means more taxes. We insist together that our planet is a temple and we will do what it takes, politically and personally to keep it beautiful, even if it is only our grandchildren, rather than ourselves, who will benefit. We inspire our bankers to work for shareholder profit and the common good—and they try. We remind each other that racism isn’t just a matter of personal prejudice, but a matter of systems that wed prejudice to power, systems that mostly white folks benefit from.

      Our denomination has done some pretty awesome things too. The United Church of Canada, at great cost to itself, was the first major Canadian institution of any stripe to call for equal rights for gay people. As a denomination, we keep raising the ire of corporations and politicians, and even some of our members by demanding social justice for Palestinians, refugees, the poor, and the environment—among a hundred other causes.

      Spirituality can be great. It is an inescapable human need, like exercise or food. But religion can be great too. Religious institutions unleash the hopeful power of spirituality to change minds and other institutions and even whole cultures and planets. Spirituality with religion is more than merely a feeling or intuition. Religion at its best is the potential we all share to become both more deeply human, more like Christ or the Buddha, and more connected to each other and the divine--not solely for private benefit, but for the good of all people.

      I am still bothered by the long history of institutional failures on the part of the church, even though I can point to many successes as well. Failure is what humans do. Still, there are some problems that we need to join hands to overcome, even if we have failed in the past. So let’s try again. Let’s join spirituality to religion and give it a go.

      The truth is, we all begin to sag, and rust, and slow down when we try to do spirituality merely as an intuition or gut feeling. It is hard to keep a private spirituality firing on all cylinders. So what we all really need, to do spirituality right, to keep it in good repair, is check in at the Nazarene Repair shop, to tune it up. Regularly. While keeping an eye on each other to make sure we do it better!

Olympic Spirituality

[This is a sermon about the relation of modern sports to spirituality, based on Ecclesiastes 9:7-12. It seemed fitting on the eve of the Olympics. What is more, the church I serve, Lawrence Park Community Church, just ran a four-week series on Sports and Spirituality in January. Our Sunday speakers included Paul Henderson, Maria Tourpakai (a Muslim squash player, TedXTeen speaker and Taliban opponent), Jerry Howarth (Voice of the Blue Jays), Kurt Harnett, Jason DeVos and others, mentioned here in this summary talk.]

            Thousands of years ago, in ancient Greece, where the Olympics were first played, the games were held in honour of the Greek god Zeus. Every champion was paraded to Zeus’s temple, where he—it was all “he’s” back then—he was given an olive crown like the one Zeus wore on his head. Greek art often pictures the goddess of victory, Nike—yes, that is where the sports company gets its name—putting the olive crown on the victors’ heads. Winning at the ancient Olympics meant joining the company of the Gods—in a way. Winners were carved in stone, and their images would be placed in the garden outside of Zeus’s temple, near Zeus’s image.

            During the ancient Olympic opening ceremonies, athletes and judges slaughtered a pig and sacrificed it on an altar of flame. Then they put their hands over the flames and promised Zeus to play fair. After the Olympics were over, winners ate at a banquet where hundreds of cows were sacrificed to Zeus and then eaten in his honor. Ultimately, the Christian and Roman Emperor Theodosius shut down the Olympic games just because they were full of these pagan religious practices.

            So do our modern Olympics still have a spiritual angle? Sure. The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, wrote in the nineteen-thirties that sports was "a religion with its church, dogmas, service . . . but above all a religious feeling." He called his new religion Olympism, and said that its goal was world peace. Ironically, De Coubertin wrote his stirring words about Olympism as a religion of peace just before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, a propaganda show for Hitler’s racist and violent Nazi juggernaut just before it rolled over Europe. One hopes no similar comparisons will be made fifty years from now to the Olympics being held in Sochi, which is partly a propaganda show for Putin’s dictatorial, increasingly homophobic, nationalistic, and corrupt government.

            Of course at the Sochi Olympics there's no pig meat sacrifice, though the ancient Olympic flame and oath have been revived. And if anyone doubts that these things don’t feel religious to modern Canadians, I recall that when some spectators began roasting hotdogs on one of the smaller Olympic flames at the Nakiska ski site at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, the newspapers reported that "The sacred Olympic flame is being desecrated by spectators." I’d call that a religious sentiment.

            But it isn’t just the Olympic sports that have a spiritual feel. Most professional sports do as well. A few months ago the Scottish tennis player Andy Murray won at Wimbledon, the first person from the United Kingdom to win at home in 77 years. Afterward, Simon Barnes wrote this in Britain’s paper of record, The Times. “Joy puts it too conservatively. This was beyond all earthly concepts of joy: this was, for a few moments of eternity, nothing less than bliss . . ."

           The modern world of sports has its departed saints who are forever revered—its Babe Ruths and Rocket Richards. It has its archangel coaches, people like Bo Schembechler and Scotty Bowman. Sports has its gods, the superstars before whom we kneel and swoon—the Wayne Gretzkys, Serena Williams, and maybe now our own Eugenie Bouchard. Sports has its rule-making synods, like the IOC and the NHLPA. Like ancient Judaism, it has scribes, too—that special class of priest who prints all the news that is fit to print about the saints. Sports has its temples, such as Yankee Stadium and Wimbledon’s Centre Courts. And of course, modern sports has its symbols of faith—Stanley cups, autographed baseballs and hockey sticks, maybe even signed by Nazim Kadri or Haley Wickenheiser.

           You see, we live in an experience economy. That is, today’s consumers—of anything, whether it be cars or religion, sports or vacations—today’s consumers (and I’m including myself) all want more than just a material product, we want an experience that moves us, that feels good. My all time favorite ad that gets at this is from BMW. The catch-line goes: "Engineering. Science. Technology. All worthless . . . unless they make you feel something." And what the whole sports economy is ultimately about, for competitors whether they win or lose, and especially for spectators—the sports economy is designed to make us feel something, deep inside, that we can share with others and that will glom us and our fandom and our adoration to the team. At its best it is an almost ecstatic, religious feeling, and at its worst, as when the Jays keep on losing, or our child comes in last at a school sports day, we feel something close to despair.

            But are religion and spirituality—I’ll use them synonymously for now—are religion and spirituality really just about feeling good? I have my doubts. I hope not.

           

            So, the most telling moment during the Sports and Spirituality series, for me, was when Paul Henderson spoke. He had not just one, but actually three great moments that still rank among the top-ten shining bright moments in world sports history. Henderson scored not just one, not just two, but the last three winning goals—three Joe Carter-like world series homeruns in a row—in the great Canada-USSR summit of 1972. All of Canada, gathered around TVs in school gyms and coffee-break rooms went crazy with joy when Henderson scored that last goal and won the series for us. The famous picture of Henderson celebrating that third goal show that he was feeling pretty good about it himself. It was a great experience. Very emotional. It felt spiritual. We worshipped Paul.

            And yet, Paul Henderson told us that soon afterwards, that moment left him feeling empty, unfulfilled, and ultimately, unhappy. The ecstatic joy only lasted a short time. The greatest sporting achievement of any Canadian ever soon left the hero personally defeated and lost.

            And then, as he told us, he “found Christ,” and became an Evangelical Christian, and he’s been spiritually happy and fulfilled ever since.

            Now, I’m not interested, really, in the fact that he became an evangelical Christian, or that Maria Tourpakai is a Muslim woman. Henderson could have become a Zen Buddhist, for all I care. What I am really interested in is that after he scored those three goals, Henderson realized that even at its best, when he was feeling his best, and the whole nation was feeling his glory, Paul Henderson realized that these feelings were not enough to give his life meaning.

            Feeling great, being moved to jump out of our seats and cheer, participating in the wave—this is all wonderful, but even when it is bliss, it doesn’t add up to something to live for. Henderson, in the quiet after his triumph realized that his destiny, that the reason the universe exists and we play a part in it, the big questions we all face about divine love and world peace, and how to love our wife and be responsible citizens—Henderson realized that such questions would never be answered on the hockey rink or even in the din of a whole nation singing his praises. He realized that building his life on even a great fleeting feeling is like building your house on the sand—whether that feeling is occasioned by a BMW or a Leaf win or too much wine, it matters not. The minute the feeling passes, the minute the rains come and the floods rise. Henderson crumbled, and so he went in search of real spirituality.

   Now listen carefully. I’m not saying that search for great experiences and the positive feelings that follow are bad. Not at all. The writer of our text from Ecclesiastes encourages us, in fact, to have the sort of experiences that leave us feeling good. He—it was probably a he—says we ought to drink wine with a merry heart. We ought to wear white clothes—a great luxurious splurge in an era where there were no washing machines or dry cleaners but lots of dust. The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that we ought to enjoy whatever it is our hands find to do and the wife—or husband, or partner, of our youth. He might as well have said we ought to have a blast watching our kids win blue ribbons in relay race. God has long approved of such worldly pleasures and success, says the author.

   Except that—and here the writer of Ecclesiastes, in a moment of great insight to the human condition, uses a sports analogy—except that even when we’re having fun, we need to remember that the race does not go to the swift, and the battle does not go to the strong, and meaning cannot be found in feeling good about fleeting pleasures. All of that stuff is ultimately vanity. There is too much tragedy and suffering, too much pain and hurt in the world to devote ourselves to games. It is all, as the Apostle Paul pretty much says, killing ourselves for an olive crown that will whither.

No, religion and spirituality have to be about more than winning a race. True religion and spirituality are not about fandom ecstasy, but they are about Paul Henderson devoting the rest of his life, and much of his resources, to Teen Ranch, helping disadvantaged kids get a leg up on life. True religion is Maria Tourpakai overcoming Taliban extremism for the sake of women and children who are being kept in the dark. True religion is Kurt Harnett raising a family, supporting a wife in her career, and using all his spare time to support Special Olympics. True religion is Jonathan Power  responding to a letter from a scared girl in Pakistan, and giving her a new lease on life—not to mention his volunteer work to use squash to help scores of children in the Jane-Finch corridor stay out of the clutches of gangs or worse. True religion is all about you and I leveraging our politics, our jobs, our social standing, our resources, wisdom, and hearts to create a little bit of heaven here and now.

And while this sort of true religion doesn’t always feel good, because it can be blood, sweat and tears; while this sort of religion isn’t always convenient, it is the divine path to true inner happiness, and maybe even world peace. The meaning of life is to love God and neighbor, says Jesus; what God loves is that we do justice and embrace kindness says the prophet; true religion to visit orphans and widows in their affliction says the Apostle. And sure there will be tears of joy and happy hugs and laughter and fun and fellowship on the way; but not always. We are talking, after all, about the main thing, what life is all about and not just how we feel about it. We are following Jesus.

Spiritual Warfare? No!

           Not so long ago, a colleague of mine told me that his congregation was marching around their church’s neighborhood to claim it for Jesus, by prayer. When I questioned him further, he suggested that some demons were pretty territorial, and since the devil can’t stand up against prayer, the best way for his church to get a foothold in the neighborhood was by praying the demons away.

            Other Christians see a host of immoral activities—lying, cheating, bitterness—as evidence of demonic possession or oppression, rather than as acts for which one is personally responsible. In some Christian circles such problems are dealt with through exorcism or “binding of demons” rather than repentance and sanctification—Christian lingo for facing up to the wrong you’ve done and deciding to do something about it.

            This is the language of spiritual warfare and it is everywhere in Evangelical circles. From the demon-under-every-bush-fiction of Frank Peretti to the slightly subtler Nicolai of the “Left Behind” series to books on exorcism such as Francis MacNutt’s “Deliverance From Evil Spirits” or C. Peter Wagner’s “Supernatural Forces in Spiritual Warfare,” contemporary evangelicalism is awash with fascination for outsize evil spirit’s below and battling angels above.

            This sort of preoccupation with spiritual warfare seems, to me, to be very dangerous. I think it rooted in a kind of pride in one’s own religious correctness that can—especially under the influence of the language of warfare—become destructive of others, whether locally or globally.

            It isn’t that you can’t find language that resonates with warfare images in scripture. Of course you can. Though not very commonly, the writers of scripture did sometimes use military images of the Christian life as a struggle against evil—even though more often, they wrote of Jesus as having decisively defeated Satan. Scripture certainly suggests the creature called Satan ought to be resisted—but that is a far cry from suggesting he ought to be warred against. Even the famous spiritual armor described in Ephesians—a breastplate of righteousness, shield of faith and even, somewhat ironically, feet ready to move in tune with the gospel of peace—all this armor seems better suited to turning the other cheek as the Christian way of resisting the devil than taking him straight on.

            But contemporary Christians persist in allowing the language of spiritual warfare to be one of their guiding metaphors. It reminds me of how the language of jihad has taken on a powerful and dangerous life of its own, too. In the shadow of 9/11’s destruction of the World Trade Center buildings, few words are so misunderstood and scorned in the West as “jihad.”

            The most common sense of the word “jihad" in Islam, has to do with the religious duty to “struggle” to become a better Muslim. In this sense “jihad” is similar to the Christian concept of engaging in spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, and study.

            But this most common sense of the word “jihad” has been eclipsed for us in the West because a misguided, militant minority of Muslims, who even call themselves jihadists, think of jihad as a struggle against the thrones and dominions, principalities and powers of the “Great Satan,” by which they usually mean the United States and the West in general. This minority of militant Muslims now uses the primarily benign concept of jihad as a religious cover for terrorism.

            Talk of Spiritual Warfare has the same potential for spinning out of control. In fact, in the history of Christianity, we have often channeled our spiritual energy into physical destruction of others who did not agree with us. Consider the crusades, for example, where hordes of Europeans trampled over the Near East carving out kingdoms for profit and spiritual indulgences. In the Salem Witch trials, the overwhelming sense that life was a spiritual struggle with Jesus on one shoulder and the devil on the other led to many innocents being killed in the name of spiritual warfare. More recently, preacher Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations movement used their twisted interpretation of the Bible to invite race war against people of color. And genocides against Jews in WWII or Muslims and Christians both in the former Yugoslavia were fueled by in large measure by spiritual pride that found expression in violence. Christianity has a long history of taking the offensive in the mistaken belief that the other side was demonic.

            So no more “Onward Christian soldiers as to war,” and no more talk of spiritual warfare or demons or even Satan. What should we focus on, instead? Well, that Christianity is really about trying to overcome every form of verbal or physical violence by “not resisting an evil person,” and “turning the other cheek” (Luke 5:39). Not spiritual warfare, but giving the coat off of one’s back, forgiving seven times seven, and refusing to judge others. Jesus adds that it is the meek who inherit the kingdom of God and peacemakers who are called children of God. Not spiritual warfare, but walking humbly with God. Not spiritual warfare, but self-examination as to whether or not the light of Christ lives in us.

            Faith has to be immunized against violence in word, deed or intention. Such faith ought to avoid the language of spiritual warfare.

Hate Religion but Love Jesus?

            If you are a Youtube or Facebook fan, you probably noticed Jefferson Bethke’s viral video, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” In the video Bethke contrasts the true wine of Jesus with religion’s vinegar. So, for example, Bethke raps:

Now back to the point, one thing is vital to mention

How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrum

See one’s the work of God, but one’s a man made invention

See one is the cure, but the other’s the infection

See because religion says do, Jesus says done

Religion says slave, Jesus says son

Religion puts you in bondage, while Jesus sets you free

Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see

            Bethke isn’t the first person to say or sing this sort of song. Its most common—and more ecumenical—formulation goes something like this: “I’m spiritual, not religious.” The people who say this sort of thing have—as the Ecclesiastes 3:11 puts it—eternity set in their hearts—they’re spiritual. But they don’t have the church, or synods, or Christian or Jewish or Muslim institutions, or preachers or priests or tithing or Sunday School in their lives. You see, they’re not religious.

            Spiritual, but not religious. I think they mean something like they feel good about God but lousy about the church. They think God is in the business of loving them, and they’ll take that. But they think the church is full of hullaballoo and hucksterism, rules and regulations, sinners and hypocrites, and so they give it a wide berth.

            It will come as a surprise to no one that this sort of language irritates me. But that’s beside the point. However I feel, it is important for me to understand and empathize with this outlook because it is the void into which I preach. Spiritual but not religious is the Siren song that pulls at everyone in my congregation.

            So what to answer people when I hear this? Well, I’m not hip like Jefferson Bethke. But I think my analogy makes sense. Think infrastructure.

            Imagine the Town of Cobourg or Port Hope without infrastructure but lots of neighborliness. Imagine Northumberland County without roads or a power grid or sewers or schools, or bridges—but lots of civic mindedness. Imagine your home without a foundation or furnace or plumbing or natural gas, but lots of love. It wouldn’t work very well, would it? The truth is, we need infrastructure—good infrastructure built to last, dependable, and safe—if we’re going to have any neighbors at all, or a civic life, or a place where it is safe to bring up families in love. As much as we prioritize neighborliness, civic mindedness, and love—they need all kinds of infrastructure support if they’re going to flourish.

            At its best, that is exactly what religion is to spirituality. Religion is spirituality’s infrastructure. And as much as we don’t like to see sewers or be reminded that there is a power grid, we often don’t want to bother with religion either. The truth, however, is that we don’t have much choice. Spirituality needs religion—spirituality needs teachers to point a new generation to its ideals, spirituality needs buildings where communities can learn about and practice costly love, spirituality needs accountability so that it doesn’t drift off into Hallmark sentimentalism, and spirituality needs holy texts so that we don’t make it up as we go while ignoring the wisdom of the ages.

            Of course—infrastructure can crumble. Roads need rebuilding. Even the best new sewers eventually become old and need to be cleaned out of roots and obstructions. Nuclear plants need refitting. It takes wise citizens and good leaders to ensure that infrastructure is up to snuff and supports our flourishing. Similarly, not all religion is up to snuff. Religions need renewal and fixing and reorganization from time to time. They are not perfect, not by a long shot.

            But deep spirituality needs the best of religion. And at its best religion helps organize the spiritually minded to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.