Beyond Our Comfortable Christianity....

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,

if you have love for one another.

- Jesus Christ, as quoted in

The Gospel of St. John, 13:34-35

Today in church, my esteemed Rector preached one of his best sermons, one that elevated and moved me and the others who were privileged to share in it.  Ruminating on the Beatitudes, he began by noting that, given the layout of the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes which form its core are really the first of Jesus' lessons in Scripture.  He then noted that Jesus' first Beatitude is focused on "the poor in spirit," those for whom life's burdens cause pain and/or doubt, whose suffering we have all felt/shared at some point in our journey.  He further noted that our "brokenness can lead us to see the Kingdom of Heaven" as well as to recognize the myriad blessings that we still invariably enjoy amidst our pain and that we have all been poor in spirit at one point or another in our life journeys.  And then he asked a simple question that 'set it off' for me:  

"What role do we play in creating the Kingdom of Heaven"(here on Earth)?

He went on to exhort us that "We are called to walk with each other in the Darkness" (to which I've added the capitalized 'D' to reflect the widespread and deep sense of foreboding created in so many by this amazing - and, to many, horrifying - first week of the new Administration).  He then shifted to the current furor around the new president's immigration ban and how, regardless of your view on it politically, it concerns us all and especially those of us, our neighbors whom we're called to love just as much as ourselves, who are directly affected by it.  After which he relayed a story from his participation in a Sanctuary Churches organizational meeting earlier in the week.  Suffice it to say that as he recounted Alejandra's experience as an illegal immigrant in our society, at that moment there were eyes brimming with empathetic and guilty tears as well as an awareness that our inhumanity today hearkens all the way back and relates too well to that in biblical times.  Our religious forebears, the Jews of antiquity, have also been refugees at many points in their journey and suffered greatly under various regimes, not dissimilarly to how Alejandra and her family suffer now.

And then it hit me:  If we are truly called to love our neighbors as ourselves and called to help create the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth, what do we feel compelled to do every day to live into this spiritual calling?  The question that coalesced was a simple but powerful one:

Who have I or you blessed today?

Oh sure, some of us come to church reasonably regularly and by supporting the institution can claim some credit for making a meaningful contribution to our neighbors' well-being.  We may even participate on a committee or two over the course of the years.  And we volunteer occasionally.  In sum, we're self-considered "good people."  And, indeed, what we do and what we contribute are truly good things.

But did this goodness cost us anything, really?  Did we have to sacrifice meaningfully to achieve it?

Whenever I ask myself this seriously - and others rhetorically - the answer always seems more tepid than it should be.  If I/we follow a Patron whose altruism was complete and whose example of selflessness truly legendary, shouldn't our experience of followership be a more meaningfully proactive one?  If Jesus gave his life, shouldn't we at least have to give enough to force us out of our comfort zones?  If we're really going to call and consider ourselves Christians, shouldn't we be forced to get beyond our 'Comfortable Christianity'?

When I look at my own congregation, whom I'm fortunate to serve as a Warden, I'm proud of our collective good works.  And yet, in my heart of hearts, I know that we could do so much more ... if we were able to push beyond our comfort zone, our Comfortable Christianity.

Yes, the community kitchen that we support served almost 69,000 meals to neighbors in need last year - something of which we should all be proud because our support of the church leads directly to the support of this worthy effort - but, truth be told, only a small percentage of those who volunteered during this service last year were fellow congregants.  In fact, in this blessed communal meal provision and hunger relief effort, the majority of volunteers are community members who are not members of our church.  I ask myself how many meals we might be able to serve were, say, 25% of our congregation volunteering regularly in this worthy cause ... or 50%....

The same holds true with respect to a recently founded effort, called the "Caring Community," in which we do good works for neighbors in need who are mostly also fellow parish members.  And, despite a growing and impressive list of kindnesses extended - be they meals cooked and brought to shut-ins or rides given to and from doctors' appointments or any other number of legitimately good deeds, what our Jewish friends call mitzvahs - we are always struggling to find more people to participate and thereby to alleviate the increasing burden on the small, core group of leaders who've built this burgeoning and beautiful legacy.  I can't help but ask myself the same question: what if we were able to get 25% of our parish to volunteer regularly, how many more people could we serve?  Or 50%....

In sum, we're a good church, a positive, caring community, but we're also largely focused on what goes on inside the church and far less aware of and committed to taking the love we share in the church out into the broader community and society in a more meaningfully impactful way.  We are afflicted by Comfortable Christianity.

And this affliction is quite costly, though in a less obvious way: its primary toll is in a sort of dual opportunity cost.  The first opportunity cost is that we have engaged fewer people than we could, so we do less good than we can.  This in no way diminishes the appreciable good that we do, but it does represent a huge opportunity missed to do even more of God's work right here and now.

And the second opportunity cost is even less obvious but equally meaningful: because we miss opportunities to serve, we miss opportunities to be enriched by our own experience of helping to create the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.  We miss literally tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of chances every year to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And if you've ever done a good deed - especially for someone who can never 'repay' you - you know that the reward of giving - that feeling of having loved generously - is likely even more beneficial to you, the giver, than your kindness is to the receiver.  The cost of Comfortable Christianity, it seems to me, is hundreds of thousands of opportunities to bless and be blessed every year.

(If you're wondering about my math, here it is:  Our parish has over 600 members.  If each of them were to do a mitzvah each day, this would mean that we'd perform 219,000 good deeds in a year.  While I'm sure a meaningful portion of our fellows are doing just this, many are not, thus my belief that we're missing a huge opportunity.  And lest you be drawn to suggest that we may not know all the good that our members do - a suggestion that's both positive in intent and accurate/agreed - we can intuit from how very hard it is to find Caring Community volunteers that whatever their current level of contribution, there's a good bit more that could be given, in alignment with the Gospel imperative.  And now that we've had this little sidebar, imagine if each of us did two mitzvahs a day, one in the morning and one in the evening: how much more meaningfully could we invoke the Kingdom of God here on Earth?)

Please be clear that I'm not criticizing: I truly do appreciate what we individually and collectively do ... but I'm also clear that it pales by comparison to what we could do were we more aware and committed to overcoming our Comfortable Christianity.

For example, what if we were able to summon 50 volunteers to our annual Habitat volunteering effort rather than the typical 5 to 10?  (Or what if we sponsored two such annual service opportunities?)  Or if we were able to get twenty regular volunteers for our Caring Community rather than the core handful or so (and the especially committed founder and leader who still does even more than the rest of the small team combined!?!)?  What if....

As I ponder this sense of sub-optimal spirituality, I invite your suggestions.  As a committed leader in my church, I will endeavor to address these underaddressed opportunities in the years ahead, so any creative input as to how I can help motivate my fellow parishioners to give even more generously of themselves would be greatly appreciated.  After all, as a Warden, I'm bound to help lead us to achieve one of our stated strategic goals: to be(come) a 'Cathedral in the Community.'  Ultimately, we wish to be known by how many and how meaningfully we bless our neighbors.  Now all we have to do is to mobilize more impactfully to get there, including by being able to answer that simple question more powerfully affirmatively every day:

Who have I/we blessed today?

Are we a positive contributor to our broader community?  Absolutely.  But, were we to be more proactive in loving our neighbors as ourselves could we do even/so much more?  Absolutely, too.  And therein lies the challenge: whether we can overcome our Comfortable Christianity to become "Crazy Christians" as our Presiding Bishop calls those who bless proactively and indiscriminately.  Or, to borrow the Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks' term, whether we can rise above being Comfortable Christians and truly become Followers of Jesus....

"Living fully, loving wastefully and being all that we can be" is my definition of seeing the presence of God in human life. To live for another is to escape the natural human drive to survive and to enable us to live for others, to give ourselves away in love for another. It means placing someone beside ourselves at the center of our affections. It is to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we are part of who or what God is. God is the quality of life that I see in the picture and memory of Jesus that transcends the ages. ... That is finally why I am a committed Christian.

- Bishop John Shelby Spong