The Church of the Advent - Sermon by the Rev'd Daphne Noyes, October 14, 2007, The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

As members of an enthusiastically consumerist society, we are bombarded daily with slogans as various enterprises demand our attention, seeking to imprint their words in our minds and hoping to alter our behavior, so that we might be drawn into whatever the current campaign may be. For example:

New York City has abandoned its famous, over-the-top “I Love New York” for the somewhat flat and restrained, “This is New York City.”
Ebay for a time proclaimed, “You can find it on Ebay!” This has been retired in favor of “Shop victoriously.”
Even our own diocese is a player in the slogan game, with its quartet of action verbs: “inviting, forming, sending, serving.”

And here’s another popular phrase that I’m sure you will recognize: “Welcome wherever you are on your spiritual journey.”

These words have become one of the workhorse slogans of the church in the late 20th and early 21st century. From Boston, Massachusetts, to Beulah, North Dakota, to Berkeley, California; congregations of all persuasions and sizes are trumpeting this message to communicate their openness and acceptance -- or perhaps in another current phrase “radical welcome” – to all people no matter where they are on their spiritual journey. What are some of the implications in these words?

First, to state the obvious, we immediately deduce that there is a spiritual component to life. Communities of faith seek to form connections between people who hunger to be acknowledged in their fullness, and to strengthen their knowledge of and relationship with the Divine. One theologian summed it up this way: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.[1]

Second, the word “journey” conveys that life – including the life of the spirit -- is not static. Between those dramatic moments of birth and death, between the entry point where we burst into life and the final exit where we draw our last breath, there is a vast territory over which millions and millions have traveled and are traveling and will travel – yet which each one of us must map out for ourselves. We have the advantage of experienced guides (parents, friends, godparents, teachers, grandparents, mentors, and so on). We have the advantage of reliable – and not-so-reliable! -- guidebooks (Holy Scripture, self-help books, philosophical tomes, biographies, autobiographies, poems, legal systems). But we also have the blessing of freedom to make our own choices (or mistakes), to plot our own course, to accept or ignore the wisdom of the ages, handed down through philosophy, theology, anthropology, medicine, law, psychology, and any other disciplines you care to include. Mark Twain sums up this conundrum quite nicely: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

The third message revealed is that we humans attach value to the spiritual life – or more specifically, we attach value to the routes, resting places, and destinations of the spiritual journey. Indeed, the very phrase “no matter where you are on your spiritual journey” implies that there might be one “where you are” that is more acceptable or desirable than another. So I ask you: Are all spiritual journeys created equal?

As a hospital chaplain, I am privy to hearing people’s stories – the stories of the journeys, both physical and spiritual, that have brought them to this particular time and place. The poet R. S. Thomas has written: “Circular as our way is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted garden, but onward to the tall city of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.” [2] And in this laboratory of the spirit – which for me, is populated by the ever-changing census of a large teaching hospital – the DNA of humanity is laid out in raw and unvarnished form. Even while I honor the unique nature of each person’s history, I also acknowledge the common themes that run through these stories: love and loss, hope and despair, isolation and connection, anger and forgiveness, fear and joy, frustration and gratitude.

The passage through life can be both inspiring and terrifying, if we only stop to think what exactly we are doing. I recently heard this chilling, but accurate, description: We are born, we spend most of our lives trying to figure things out, then we die.

But as today’s stories of Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and the ten lepers make abundantly clear, oh those in between time of trying to figure it out! Here are rich relationships, deep yearnings, unanticipated gifts, unexpected losses, unlikely combinations, horrifying cruelties, and amazing, saving graces. And here is one truth that emerges: When the rotting floorboards of life buckle under our feet, when the weight of generations comes crashing down around our shoulders, there is One who awaits us with outstretched arms, offering mercy, offering healing, ready to welcome us home.

Today’s readings – even the collect for the day – offer vignettes of God, God’s Son, God’s grace, and God’s people in motion, moving through time and space. Naomi and Ruth journey to Bethlehem; Jesus is headed toward Jerusalem. We hear the voice of the marginalized, the disenfranchised, in the cry of ten lepers: Jesus, Master, have mercy on us! The cry for mercy is one of the most profound and universal, emanating from every tender place of pain. Eleison, we sing, Kyrie eleison! (Have mercy, Lord, have mercy!)

The ritually unclean, diseased lepers encounter Jesus and are made clean, healed. This reversal of fortune allows them to rejoin society, to reconnect with the community of faith, in a sense to reinvent themselves. They are no longer outcasts. One of them returns to his healer, pausing to savor the transformation and offer thanksgiving, eucharist. Just as the healing power of God’s love moves the leper from seeking mercy to singing praises, so can it move us – no matter where we are on our spiritual journey through what the intercessions so eloquently call “this transitory life.” Step by step, the presence of Christ moves us from eleison to eucharist. The God-given gifts of eleison and eucharist are inexhaustible, inexplicable, and infinite, shimmering stars lighting the eternal path that stretches behind us and before. Thanks be to God.

[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

[2] “Emerging,” from Collected Poems 1945-1990; London: Phoenix Press, 1995.