The Rev. Keri T. Aubert    March 29, 2009

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 51:1-13

Hebrews 5:5-10

John 12:20-33

Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B, RCL 

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that there are times when it’s odd being a priest. It’s most noticeable to me when I meet someone new and they ask, “What do you do?” I have learned to first take a breath and brace myself before I answer. “I’m an Episcopal priest,” I say. I get an interesting range of reactions, and these reactions are seldom neutral or matter-of-fact. On the positive side of the spectrum, the questioner will happen to be a churchgoer who greets my answer with much excitement, and we’ll talk about the communities we’re involved with.

But most people don’t go to church any more, and therefore the reaction I get is more often an uncomfortable silence. After the person has recovered enough to speak, I usually hear in their voice defiance or guilt or pain, or some combination of these emotions and more. Sometimes a sort of confession is involved. For example, standing on the sidelines of the field where our middle-school-age daughters were playing soccer, one mother told me with what seemed to be guilt, but perhaps also regret, “We used to go to church when the kids were younger, but it’s just too hard to get them to go these days.”

The more common reaction to the fact of my vocation is some variation of, “I’m spiritual but not religious. I don’t need church to be close to God. I feel closest to God in nature.” For many people, that is undoubtedly true. But this response raises caution flags for me, because implicit in it is a criticism of organized religion. There are understandable reasons why a person might avoid religion. Some reasons are related to the church itself. Two of the more mature men in our congregation, offered the opinion, independently of one another and months apart, that the more religious a country or society is, the more prone it is to religious violence. I don’t know whether this is true, but it does illustrate one of the many cultural negatives associated with religion. Even I am careful not to let myself be confused for one of those “other” kinds of Christians. Nonetheless, though religion has its share of problems, I think it’s too simplistic to say that religion itself is behind all the reasons that people avoid it.

Confession or criticism, the common strand is this: if a person feels compelled to offer excuses to a perfect stranger, then there’s a good likelihood that something more is going on. I suspect that many non-churchgoers are not as at-peace with their non-churchgoing as they would like to be. I suspect that many people’s yearnings are going unfulfilled. It may be that the problem is, in one case, religion without spirituality, and in the other, spirituality without religion. Perhaps either case is problematic.

If we’re going to talk about religion and spirituality, then we should define the terms. I do this with some trepidation, because they’re slippery and somewhat subjective. The Merriam-Webster dictionary generally describes religion as a system of belief or practice[i] and spirituality as individual attachment or a state of being.[ii] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church lacks a definition for religion, but it says that the term spirituality is used “to refer to people’s subjective practice and experience of their religion, or to the spiritual exercises and beliefs which individuals or groups have with regard to their personal relationship with God. It is usual to regard prayer, meditation, contemplation, and mysticism as major factors in spirituality.”[iii] I Googled the term “religion versus spirituality,” and 48 million hits came up. I looked at only a few of them. Here’s what one blogger had to say: “Religion is form: tradition, doctrine, rites and rituals. Spirituality is content: communion with the divine, seeing the holy in all creatures and objects.”[iv] That might be a bit of an oversimplification, and I’m going to risk simplifying even further. If you wish, you can express your disagreements at coffee hour, but I tend to think of religion as associated with the church and spirituality as associated with God.

Religion and spirituality have the power to inform one another and to challenge one another. In our religious tradition, almost across the board, our most important religious teachers have also been spiritual masters. In their lives and in ours, it may be that the central risk of spirituality is narcissistic individualism, while the central risk of religion is dogmatic authoritarianism.

It seems to me that the work of the church is to facilitate our relationships with God, not to get in the way of them. Rules will never bring us closer to God. As Jeremiah puts it, the Lord says, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Only you can find the covenant that is written on your heart. Whether you seek that covenant through prayer or meditation or walks in the woods or even work with the poor, this I think is the gist of Christian spirituality.

The Gospel of John has been described as the most “spiritual” gospel. Compared to the other canonical gospels, John’s Jesus is less active and more philosophical. But while he talks at length with transcendent language about a world beyond this one, he is still firmly grounded in the gritty physicality of the people around him. In today’s reading, some Greeks—standing in for generic Gentiles—ask to see Jesus. Jesus responds that, with their appearance, it is now time for him to die. As one writer put it, “It can be put off no longer, as the world is coming to Jesus.”[v] But there’s more to the exchange: Jesus also calls those Greeks to join him—not in literal death, but in offering their lives in service to God. I think this suggests that when we look for Jesus, we will hear Jesus calling us to offer our lives in service to God. I think this suggests that genuine spirituality necessarily results in increased commitment to God’s work in the world.

We hear the echo of Jesus’ exchange with the Greeks in our celebration of the Eucharist. Consider this, my favorite line from the Rite I Eucharistic Prayer: “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies.” The celebration of the Eucharist is both religious and spiritual in nature. For example, the Eucharistic Prayer is religious in that it states the essentials of what we as a church believe to be Truth. It is spiritual in its opening invitation to lift our hearts to God, and in its sending us forth to do God’s work. We might broaden this example to say that religion provides a framework within which we seek God and guidelines about how to respond to what we find. It provides a community of support, and a community of accountability. Despite our cultural religious commitment-phobia, I think we need and even yearn for these things.

And despite all the old rules, it seems to me that Lent is at least as much about spirituality as it is about religion. It is perhaps an excellent example of how our tradition at its best integrates spirituality and religion, and this is part of the Good News that we need to learn to talk about beyond these walls. Spirituality and religion can go hand-in-hand. Spirituality and religion must go hand-in-hand.