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The Sixth Sunday of Easter

"Choosing God In All Things and Above All Things"

The Rev. David Frazelle

Let us pray. O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire. Amen.

This past century, there lived a man who had a vision of what was wrong in his country and in his world. And he had a vision of a better way to live. He was a charismatic man who proclaimed his message with boldness. He developed a group of followers who caught onto his vision and grew into a community who lived that vision. The community had its evangelists to share the vision with others. Their leader gave them a sense of mission. They dedicated themselves and their resources towards that mission. They wrote songs and liturgies to ground the community in this new vision and purpose. They wrote prayers to ask God’s blessing on this new community and on its way of life. A new, robust spirituality had been born under the strong leadership of a man with a vision.

A few years later, 6 million Jews had been killed, and world was at war. The man I am talking about was named Adolf Hitler, and his spirituality was called Naziism.

The choices we make about our spirituality matter. There is no such reality as not having a spiritual life. We do not have a choice about whether to have a spirituality. We have a choice about what spirituality we will have, or what spirituality will have us. If we do not choose, consciously and daily, to live Christian spiritual lives, then some other force in the culture will be happy to make that choice for us.

In our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul exhorts the people of Athens to open their eyes as they choose the spirituality they practice. Paul had been walking through Athens, the glorious ancient city, observing signs of their spirituality. Athens was renowned for and proud of many of the same good things for which Chapel Hill is known and admired. It was a center of learning and sophistication. It was a place of physical beauty. It even took pride is the excellence of its athletes. I imagine that these similarities have something to do with the stained glass window above and to the right of our altar. Someone thought this passage from Acts so instructive for Christians in Chapel Hill that they placed it above our altar. The window portrays Paul preaching in Athens before an altar inscribed with the words “agnosto theo,” “to an unknown God.” Paul has discovered that the Athenians, as learned and as cultured as they are, do not even know what God they’re worshiping. They are unconscious of their own spirituality. So Paul proclaims to them a vision of the one God who made the heavens and the earth and everything and everyone in it, the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, the God who raised Jesus from the dead. And he tells them that although God has overlooked the times of human spiritual ignorance, God now commands all people in Athens and everywhere to repent, to turn from unknown gods to the God who has been known in the person of Jesus Christ. Paul is saying, your spirituality matters. It is time to make a choice. It is time to choose God, and to stop letting unknown gods choose you. Paul is inviting them, in all things and above all things, to choose the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

In our collect for today, we pray for God’s help and grace in choosing our spiritual path. “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire;” In the English translation of this ancient prayer, we hear the one word “love” three times. In the original Latin text of this prayer, we find two words – “amor”, which must be translated “love”, and “diligere”, which is also the verb “to choose”. So, according to the liturgical scholar, Marion Hatchett, another good translation would read, “O God, you have prepared for those who choose you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, choosing you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.”

We baptized Christians have already chosen once and for all our spirituality. In our baptisms, and every time we renew our baptismal covenant, we renounce all other gods, all other powers, all other spirits that separate us from God. We repent. We turn to Jesus Christ, accept him as our Savior, and promise to follow and obey him as our Lord. And we promise to engage the Christian practices that give shape and flesh to those vows (devotion to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers; seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves; proclaiming by word and example the good news of God in Christ; striving for justice and peace among all people.) This past week, several adults of various ages took these vows, and their act of faith reminds us that we all have chosen God in all things and above all things.

It is when we forget these fundamental vows of our Christian identity, that we find ourselves following some other Lord that offers some other identity. When we do not take seriously the practice of Christian spirituality, then we wake up and find ourselves blindly serving the values of some other spirituality, be it consumerism, social Darwinism, hedonism, nihilism, perfectionism, power symbols, security symbols, the symbols of human esteem, or any number of other unknown gods.

And so we Christians come, again and again, week after week, to remember who we are in Christ, because otherwise it is impossible not to forget. Year after year we renew our baptismal vows, especially in Eastertide. Again and again, we die with Christ to our old selves with our false gods, as we are raised with Christ to the Easter joy of life in the bosom of the Father. Week by week, we come to renew and strengthen our once-and-for-all union with God through the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. We return, because we know that our spirituality matters. We return because we know that even the choice to love God is dependent upon God’s grace. We return because we need each other to remember that we have chosen, in all things and above all things, the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

I will close with another ancient prayer, written by a person who struggled to choose from a variety of spiritualities with which he experimented. The first part of the prayer has to do with worshipping unknown gods. The second part has to do with God reaching out and choosing him through the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. The third part describes finally choosing God in all things and above all things. The prayer comes from the 10th book of the Confessions of St. Augustine. He prays,