Our first Thanksgiving in Gainesville, John and Fonda Eyler let us use their beach house in St. Augustine for a few days. We planned a rather elaborate Thanksgiving feast for the two of us, so after a beautiful night listening to the waves through the open windows, we woke up ready to cook.
By noon, the stuffing, mashed potatoes, turkey and cranberries were all ready to go. The sweet potatoes and green bean casserole needed to bake for 20 minutes or so. We popped them in the oven and shut the door. And at that moment, it seemed to one of us that the oven door was not closed all the way. There seemed, in this person’s mind to be a slight gap between the door and the rest of the unit. And then that person – doesn’t matter who it was – saw a lever between the door and the stove top and she decided to pull it.
But of course, as that person immediately realized, ovens don’t have levers that help them close all the way. But, as it turns out, some older ovens do have levers to lock them during self-cleaning. So that person tried to pull the lever back the other way and we heard a pop, and the lever jammed, and half our Thanksgiving meal was locked inside.
As sad as we were about lunch, our overriding emotion was panic about the oven. These church members whom we had only known for a few months had done an extremely generous thing in inviting us to use their house, and we had destroyed a major appliance. For the rest of the day we hovered over the stove, shining flashlights into its inner workings, taking off any piece or panel we could unscrew, trying anything we could think of to open the oven, but it was no use.
The next day, the electrician who came out said he could haul it to the dump for us when we were ready to give up. We started Googling how much new ovens cost. Having seen the electrician attempt to pry the door open with a screwdriver, I decided to try it a few…hundred last times. Until finally, another pop and our food was free. And while the self-cleaning lever was broken beyond repair, everything else worked fine.
The next morning, as we prepared to leave, someone was too nervous to call the Eylers, so Rachelle did it. And instead of threatening a congregational vote on my ministerial fitness as I had assumed they would, they were extremely gracious and said they never used the oven much anyway.
I share this story as we begin our three-year plan worship theme, thinking about who we are and who we will be as a spiritual community, because to me, that’s church: you loan someone your beach house, and they break your oven. And then you see them every week, sometimes multiple times a week. And if you’re lucky, you become great friends.
A few observant people noted that the sermon title on the marquee outside is not the same as the sermon title in the bulletin, and truth be told, neither of them is the actual title of this sermon. The actual title, at least at this moment, is “Vince Amlin’s Patented, Foolproof 2-step Plan for Spiritual Growth.”
Seven years ago this Sunday I preached my first sermon at UCG. Our worship theme was “Weaving the Web,” and in my sermon I introduced what I now see as step one of Vince Amlin’s patented, foolproof, 2-step plan for spiritual growth. Today, almost 100 sermons later, I’m ready to give you step 2.
But in case anyone hasn’t read my 2009 sermons recently, let me remind you of step one. Step one, as I said it then, is to get a little stuck in the web of this community, to allow yourself to be woven into the lives of those around you. Getting stuck in this web I said, “means allowing people around us to expect things of us, and it means expressing our expectations of them. It means meeting some of those expectations and frustrating others. It means conflict, and it means the commitment to work out conflict in love.”
Step one of my patented, foolproof, 2-step plan for spiritual growth is simple: weave yourself into one another’s lives. Start a business together. Loan each other power tools. Date one another. Share a family vacation. Go to each other’s doctor’s appointments. Celebrate holidays in one another’s homes. Pick up each other’s kids from school. Let someone use your beach house. That’s step one.
And now for step two: try to love them. When they break your oven. When they break your heart. When they show up late…again. When they don’t return your calls or your tools. When they don’t invite you to their holidays. When they disappoint you or hurt your feelings. When they get sick. When they get depressed. Or manic. When they die. When they leave. Stay woven together, and try to love them.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much of a plan to you, certainly not for something as beautiful and mystical as spiritual growth. When I try to picture spiritual growth it looks more like a temple on a mountain than a broken oven. Spiritual growth is supposed to be sitting in lotus position under a tree or spending 40 days in a desert hermitage. But when I think of the experiences that have really helped me grow, it’s usually the humbler, daily activities that come to mind: learning to be a husband, learning to be a father, a son, a friend, a pastor. It’s the relationships I’ve worked to sustain, those with whom I’ve woven my life together and whom I have tried to love as well as I could.
Going to Plum Village with a group from UCG and hearing one of my spiritual heroes, Thich Nhat Hanh, was incredible. But it was sharing one bathroom with ten UCG women that was a growth experience. Thay himself sees the spiritual in the simple. As the piece of calligraphy we brought back says, “the miracle is to walk on earth.”
Spiritual growth, I’ve come to believe, is a lot less exciting that I might have hoped when I started seminary. It’s less a series of mountaintop epiphanies, and more like the boring scripture I picked out for us this morning.
I love the Book of Acts, but this passage reads like the minutes of a congregational meeting (which Kitty does an excellent job on, but still-) Earlier in Acts we get the story of Pentecost – rushing wind from heaven, flames dancing over everyone’s heads, the disciples speaking in languages they don’t know. It’s exciting! Then they follow up all these divine pyrotechnics with this story in which a subcommittee is appointed to address concerns about the procedure for widow-feeding. It could not be more mundane.
Even the disciples make a distinction between this work and the ‘real’ work of faith. They say, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.” They elect other people to do that ordinary work while they do the more spiritual job of spreading the word of God. They’ll stay on the mountaintops and let others deal with the broken ovens.
But the story goes on to prove them wrong. Because immediately after this boring subcommittee is appointed we get two chapters of stories about how those table-waiters do incredible things, working miracles and spreading the word of God’s love to new people, even in the face of death. It’s the people who take on the ordinary everyday work in a spirit of love and service who move the story forward. It’s the simple life of community that becomes miraculous.
One of my favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, talks about the church as a continuing miracle. But he understands that not everyone sees it that way. He writes, “to speak of the church as a continuing miracle simply doesn’t not sound like any church we know or experience. The church is not just a ‘community’ but an institution that has budgets, buildings, parking lots, potluck dinners…and so on. What do these…have to do with the miracles of God’s continuing presence in our midst?” And then he answers, “There is no ‘ideal church’…no ‘mystically existing church’ more real than the concrete church with parking lots and potluck dinners. It is the church of parking lots and potluck dinners that comprises the sanctified ones formed by and forming the continuing story of [God] in the world.”
In other words, it is the concrete community, the ordinary everyday us, sharing our lives in budgets and backpacks, in pride parades and parish ministry meetings, in theological differences and all our however knowns – it is our life together and our attempts to care for one another and the world guided by the God of love that is the continuing miracle, and it is the best source I know for spiritual growth. To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, “the miracle is to form a subcommittee on earth.” The mundane is the miraculous. The everyday is sacred, and this ragtag group of people that we live alongside is God’s continuing presence on earth. Every day.
That’s how I understand our three-year plan. We decided for this season of our life together to focus not on adding new programs, not on making ourselves more busy, but on doing the things that we do as a church, day in and day out, in ways that create space for spiritual growth, in ways that lead us to care for one another, and in ways that promote justice, especially around issues of race, poverty, and the environment. We have challenged ourselves in the ordinary weaving together of our lives and in our attempts to love one another, to bring forward miracles of justice, and inclusion, and growth for ourselves and for one another.
It’s a lot to ask, but I wouldn’t have called it foolproof if I didn’t believe it could work. I wouldn’t be so certain that it was possible, if I hadn’t experienced it day in and day out, living here with you.
I ended that first sermon with these words:
“You and I have both been fishing for many months: you for a pastor and me for a church. And now we have caught one another. We are already full of hopes and expectations for each other, for what we will mean to one another. Some of these have been laid out, and many are still unspoken or even unimagined. We have netted each other: netted each other’s strengths and each other’s weaknesses, each other’s joy and each other’s sadness, each other’s pasts and presents, and we are shaping one another’s futures. We have caught complicated, conflicted, and holy people in our nets. And we have been caught by complicated, conflicted, and holy people. It remains only to decide where we will go from here. Will we allow ourselves to get a little stuck, a little attached, a little hooked? I, for one, am unpacked, and I am ready to be woven in.”
You have woven me into your lives so fully and so generously. You have loved me so well and let me love you as best I could. You have let me break your ovens, and you have forgiven me for it. And nothing in my life has helped me grow more in knowledge of and service to the God of Love, than sharing life with you these seven years.
Now that growth is calling me forward to a new place, to love unknown people. It is work I could not be doing if you had not taught me how. The same growth is calling you too, to weave in strangers and learn to love them. Some of them may be here right now.
To those folks, the ones not yet woven in, welcome. You have stumbled into an amazing community. It is actually the continuing presence of God in the world, though we’re not all sure about that language. The growth you find here may look different than you had assumed. You are likely to have some mountaintop experiences, but there are also a lot of subcommittees. Get on one or two. Join us in our everyday work of justice, of care, of Spirit-seeking. We deal in budgets and buildings, parking lots and potluck dinners. We bring books to prisons. We lead seminars and small groups. We sing, and play guitar and ukulele (more ukulele than you might expect). We share our homes, and our power tools, and out diagnoses. We move chairs and tables again, and again, and again. And sometimes, in ways we’re not even sure we believe and know we do not understand, miracles happen. Every day. I guarantee it.