26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Previous Years: 2016
Preached at Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/more-habits-of-discipleship/
Transcript
These last few months and particularly in the last few weeks we have been talking about habits of discipleship. Our parish pastoral plan is just a list of habits of discipleship: what are the things that someone who follows Jesus does? What does a life look like if it is given over to the Lord? And this fall, we’re going through Next Steps in our faith. We have these six Next Steps in our faith, which give us another list of habits of discipleship, things that people who follow Jesus do.
Two weeks ago, we talked about confession. People who follow Jesus go to confession regularly. They regularly go to their savior and ask him to save them from sin. Last week, Deacon Larry provided a reflection on meditating on the Word of God. Disciples of Jesus have regular contact with the Scriptures, with the words that God has given us: His self-revelation.
Now on the topic of meditating on the Word of God, all of us should be horrified by the last part of today’s gospel. The rich man asks Abraham to go to his father’s house to warn his brothers because he believes that if someone rises from the dead, then they will believe. And Abraham says, “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.”
Think about your own lives. Is there something you feel like you need to change? Some belief that’s nagging at you, that you’re like, “You know what, maybe I really need to rethink that.” Or some action that you need to take, or some person that you need to reach out to? Something where you have this sort of pseudo conviction, but you don’t really want to act on it.
A lot of times when we find ourselves in those situations, we say “I’m going to wait for the Lord to confirm this. I’m not sure yet, so He has to give me a sign for me to change my belief or take this action or reach out to this person.” But my brothers and sisters in Christ, that sign is not coming. “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.” The Lord has given us His definitive statement in the Bible. If there is something in the Bible that convicts us, that’s all we’re going to get. And if we refuse to listen to that conviction, it’s not going to go well for us. That constant contact with the Word of God is the thing that God gave us so that we can grow closer to Him.
Speaking of meditating on the Word of God and also habits of discipleship, Saint Paul gives us an excellent list at the beginning of our second reading today, Saint Paul’s Letter to Timothy. (Again, Parish Pastoral Plan Habits of Discipleship, Next Steps, Habits of Discipleship.) Timothy was one of Saint Paul’s proteges; this is an intimate letter talking to someone that Saint Paul is trying to raise up, essentially as a successor to himself. So what does he tell Timothy? He says, “But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness.”
I’m always a little bit skeptical of Saint Paul. He likes to use run on sentences. And so when I see a list of words, I worry that he’s doing what I do when I preach, which is just use a thesaurus. I find I make the same point by using three words in a row that are slightly different. And so I worry he’s doing that and he’s not giving us new information. But as I was praying over this list, I could tell each of these six things is new and different and special and ought to be paid attention to. Each of them is its own distinct habit of discipleship.
So let’s go through that list. “But you, man of God, pursue righteousness.” Righteousness essentially means doing the right thing, being upright, living a moral life. It’s a good place for him to start. In my experience, talking to so many people who have fallen away from the church, a lot of times one of the justifications I hear is I don’t need to go to Mass. I don’t need a relationship with Jesus because I’m a good person and that’s all that matters. Well, I hate that somebody has gone from the source of salvation in Jesus Christ to “I don’t suck,” but we have here the gateway drug to religion.
Righteousness is the thing that remains apart from explicit religion. People who fall away from Christianity generally still have a desire for righteousness. You get to the second generation away from Christianity, bets are off, but usually the first generation to fall away has a desire for righteousness. It’s something that is shared amongst the world’s religions. And so Saint Paul is giving Timothy the foundation. Step one: do the right thing, try to be righteous, try to live a moral life. It’s a good step one. It’s a good foundation that most people, almost all people, can get behind.
But with steps two and three, we get more into the things that are specific to Christianity, to a relationship with Jesus Christ: devotion and faith. And we might think of these two as the private and the public spheres of a relationship with God.
Devotion is that loving intimacy that we have with the Lord. I’m always moved by two particular images of devotion; when I when I see them in a painting or on TV or whatever else, I usually tear up a little bit because I am so touched by them. The first is a man or a woman kneeling at their bedside to pray, an image that I hope we’ve all seen and maybe even lived out in our lives. Somebody who when they wake up in the morning, or before they go to bed at night, kneels next to their bed and offers their day to the Lord. It’s a beautiful moment of intimacy, of devotion.
The other one is a French painting, I think it’s French, a painting called the Angelus. It’s two people just standing in the middle of a field, their heads bowed, with a church in the background, offering the middle of their work day to the Lord. Traditionally, the Angelus is prayed at the beginning, middle and end of the workday, and we still ring Angelus bells Monday to Friday at noon. But the image of two people taking a moment in their day to spend a little bit of time and intimacy with the Lord — that’s devotion. I think of the way couples today, particularly younger couples, keep their relationship intimate. A lot of times it’s little texts throughout the day, throughout the workday, just to check in or say that they’re thinking of each other or “remember to pick up milk on your way home.” These little check-ins are a form of devotion, a form of that personal intimacy that we want to maintain. That’s what devotion is, that’s what the disciple pursues: that constant intimacy with the Lord.
And then faith would be the the public aspect of that relationship with the Lord. Faith after the Protestant Reformation sort of took on the the meaning of a list of things that you have to believe. But the Greek word is richer than that. It can also be translated as faithfulness, a form of of loyalty and dedication. So we have that personal intimacy of devotion. But faith is our our public dedication to the Lord: I believe these things; I hold to these truths and I live them out in my life; I am loyal to the Lord in these ways. When somebody challenges the Lord or when somebody says this, that or the other thing that is false about the Lord, I stand up for him. I represent him truly.
Again, with that marital imagery: sometimes our spouses are rightly criticized, but if somebody else criticizes them publicly, we usually stick up for the spouse, even if privately we have a conversation. That’s what faith is. It’s that public dimension of our relationship with the Lord: living that relationship out loud, with community, in public.
So these are the three things, so far, that a disciple pursues: righteousness, devotion and faith. But if we’re not careful, they can be too individualistic. It’s easy enough to be righteous for myself; or it’s easy enough to have devotion and faith in the Lord in a way that can be just me and him. Disciples, those who follow Jesus — the one who gave himself up for humanity on the cross — disciples give themselves. And so this is where love comes in. Christianity defines love as desiring, acting for the good of the other. I want what is best for the person in front of me, and I act for that. And so after righteousness and devotion and faith comes love, the love of our neighbor, the service of the community, taking care of the person in front of me.
The last two, patience and gentleness, are less things to pursue on their own and more the ways in which we pursue the first four. Now we have to be careful here because the life of a disciple is integral, which means the life of a Christian does not have contradiction in it. So if we are going to be righteous and devoted and faithful and loving, then our interpretation of patience and gentleness cannot contradict those first four.
Patience, for example. Patience means allowing God’s time to be our time, but it doesn’t mean not doing what we’re supposed to do. If we’re righteous, if we’re seeking righteousness, if we’re seeking love, sometimes there is something that we need to do right there. Maybe we’re seeking devotion and we know our prayer life could use some work. Well, we need to act on that. Patience doesn’t mean procrastination. It doesn’t mean putting things off and waiting for them to take care of themselves. Patience means doing what we are supposed to do and then putting it in God’s hands.
Again, for example, righteousness. Maybe there’s a sin that we’re working on, something we’re trying to get out of our life. And one day we’re like, you know what, I’m going to get this sin out of my life. And then we’re really good about it for two days. And then the third day it comes back and we’re like, “You know what? That didn’t work. And I’m mad about it and I’m peeved at God and He should have done better!” That’s not patience. The Lord is going to work with us. He’s going to give us grace, but in His own time; we have to allow Him to set the agenda. We do what we have to do, but we pursue patience because it is ultimately the Lord’s work, and He must be given the space to work, the time to work.
Gentleness is similar. Gentleness does not mean not speaking the truth. Sometimes love is hard. Sometimes love, as parent for example, means enforcing discipline, or it means having a hard conversation. Gentleness doesn’t mean hiding that and saying, “Oh, I want to be gentle. So I won’t say the thing that I need to say.” There can’t be contradiction. But gentleness does look like a good parent. A good parent knows where their kid is at, where they’re coming from, what their context is; and a good parent is loving in that context. So, for example, it doesn’t make sense to get mad at a three year-old for not perfectly cleaning up their room or getting ready in the morning because they’re just not there. But a 15 year-old maybe needs a little more, “Yeah, your room should be cleaner than this.” Okay. But gentleness means recognizing that and going in with that sort of attitude with love.
Again, we might ask, okay, maybe I need to say something to this person, but what’s their context? Why are they doing this? Are they coming from a place where they don’t know any better? Well, gentleness means recognizing that they don’t know any better, and trying to say, “You know, you might not realize this or maybe you’ve never thought about this.” Or, “There’s just something that I feel like we should talk about.” Rather than saying, “You’re so wrong and you should know better and why are you doing that?” The condemnation is just not helpful.
Gentleness can also apply to ourselves. Again, when we’re pursuing righteousness and devotion and faith, we need to do that and we need to be strong in it. But we also need to recognize we humans are a mess and all of us come with our messiness to the life of the Lord. And so we have to have a little bit of mercy on ourselves and say, “Okay, I am working on it and I am strong in this, but I also know that I’m overcoming a lot of things that have come before and I need to give myself a little bit of mercy in doing so.”
When we talk about these six things or the six next steps or the things in our pastoral plan as “habits of discipleship”, we use that word habit intentionally because Saint Paul says, keep the commandment without stain or reproach, which is to say be perfect, until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. That can seem incredibly burdensome. If we’re not careful, it’s easy enough to say, “Okay, clench my fists, grit my teeth and say, okay, I’m going to be gentle this week.” But doing that, acting by sheer force of will is not sustainable. It doesn’t work. And to think that we have to do that until the Lord comes again, we might feel overwhelmed and say, “This is impossible. Why bother trying?” But a habit is automatic. A habit is something that we’ve done so many times it becomes easy and natural and we don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s not sheer force of will. It’s just part of our character and who we are.
These are habits of discipleship. They are things that we build up over time, and once they’re built up over time, they’re just who we are and what we do. It is what the life of a Christian looks like. So if you want to know where to go from here, pick one of those six things: righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness. Pick one of those six things and work on it until it becomes natural and easy. Maybe it’ll take you a month. Maybe it’ll take you a year, maybe multiple years. Pick one of those things and work. And then you will see in your life the fruits of that, and the benefit of that, now and until the Lord comes again.
Fr. Moore 