The Radical Center 6. The Goal of Spiritual Maturity Hebrews 5: 11-1; Philippians 3: 12-15 Sid Batts First Presbyterian Church Greensboro, North Carolina October 7, 2012 I am not the same person I used to be. Neither are you. I was different at seventeen from when I was ten; different at forty from when I was twenty-five; different today from twelve years ago when I came to Greensboro. And I say Praise the Lord that we are not the same people we used to be! I have done my share of stupid and selfish things. And I have changed my mind on issues I was once sure of. When I was in Princeton and near graduation in seminary, I interviewed with a church s search committee and I said something like: Ministry is not going to drink afternoon tea with the elderly or shut-ins. I mean how stupid was that? At twenty-five I was training to be the resident theologian who studied, preached, had a church vision shaped by the gospel. I had not yet learned that drinking tea with ninety-year-old Ms. Etta was the stuff of ministry. We learn, we grow, and we change. So if you invite me to drink tea in the afternoon, I will be there! The study of human development seeks to understand and explain how and why we change throughout our life. We change physically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. Our personalities change and develop.and so does our faith and our spiritual life. There are age old questions that surround our change: Is development due more to genetics or environment? Nature or nurture? Does our development occur slowly, smoothly and predictably according to age, or do life circumstances initiate the changes? Do early childhood experiences have the greatest impact on our development, or are later events equally important? So we learn theories from Freud, Erikson and Piaget and as parents, we try to understand the difference in a three-year-old, a six-year-old and an adolescent; and in some part to assure us that
2 when they don t do the things we think they should (that is what we told them to do), or in the way we think they should, that they are not destined for Central Prison and we are not failing at parenthood. I Today is the sixth and final sermon in the series I have called The Radical Center. In these weeks we have explored the radical center of Emotional verses reasonable faith, The clash of science and faith, The ethics behind What would Jesus do? The problem with being right rather than having a Christ-like humility that sees everyone as equal, compelling us to listen and understand, And how we see Jesus as a either a liberal or conservative. It has been fun and challenging. I started this because of my anguish of living in a polarized culture that seems only to hear from the extreme voices of left and right on almost every issue. So I want to know what our faith has to say about a radical center. I call the center radical, because more and more it seems radical to speak from the center. I am not looking for a centrist position on issues. What I am seeking is a radical center defined by the humility we see in Christ, a humility that seeks to listen and understand those with whom we disagree and those who believe differently. If we, the followers of Jesus, are to have anything authentic to say to a polarized world, then we start with ourselves, and model the radical center shaped by the humility of Christ. This leads me to this final topic: spiritual maturity. II There are some important developmental theories about how and why we change and in the last thirty years, a number of people have studied and formed theories about faith change and spiritual development. I have read a number of these and though they don t all agree, there are some similarities among them. The most important is the recognition that our faith does change, grow and develop over time though some people seem to get stuck in a spiritual place. And, the theories differ on how and why these changes occur. Think about how your faith has changed over your lifetime. How have your beliefs shifted and how has your practice of faith changed? For me, I can say that the greatest influences on my changing faith are My relationship and marriage to my wife, Cathy,
3 Being a parent to my daughters Meredith and Emily, Being the pastor of five congregations over thirty years. Cathy has shaped me and my understanding of relationships so important for understanding the gospel. Being a father has given me a glimpse of the heart of God the Father because of the loving heart a parent has for his/her children. And being the pastor has shaped me when terrible things happen among parishioners: suicide, teen-age death, messy divorces, drug-alcohol addictions, embezzled convictions, suffering illnesses, a poorly built church building costing millions to repair. And I have been influenced by wonderful things such as people having the switch flipped as they begin to see God moving in their lives, or people being diagnosed with whatever and then, miraculously, they live thirty more years, or seeing the power of God in broken relationships and broken marriages finding redemption and joy, the generosity of fourteen million dollars given for the future of the church, seeing agnostics become followers of Jesus, or seeing a congregation make a philosophical outward turn. That and a hundred other stories from being a pastor shapes how I see and understand God, the church, and scripture, which has changed me. What are the influences that have shaped a change in your faith? Now what these experiences do, at their best, is lead us to spiritual maturity. III The biblical writers often write about the importance of a faith growing into spiritual maturity. This morning we heard the writer of Hebrews tell his listeners that the ingredients of the spiritual journey can be likened to milk and solid food. A baby begins with milk but as he or she grows, solid food is needed for development and strength. What he is trying to say, I think, is that he is observing some Christians who are still babies in their faith, infants in their journey, who are not progressing to spiritual maturity. He writes, Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God s ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong. (The Message) Then Paul says to the Philippians that he has not reached the spiritual goal he desires but he presses on toward the goal. Then he says, Let those who are mature be of the same mind. The radical center requires a certain spiritual maturity. The radical center listens with humility to the left and the right, and seeks to understand those who think or believe differently from us without dismissing them or demonizing them. That requires spiritual maturity. Paul demonstrated this spiritual maturity when he was dealing with a particular circumstance among believers in the Corinthian congregation. He wrote to them: All things are lawful but not all things are beneficial. Those are important words for spiritual maturity. Paul was in a
4 circumstance where some new Christians were having trouble with the idea of eating meat sold in the market place that had been used in pagan rituals. You go to the Fresh Market meat counter and there is a steak you like, but, it comes from an animal that has been part of a cult ritual. You think there is something sinful about eating this meat or it somehow feels like you are compromising your new Christian faith. Some Christians saw no problem with it nor did Paul; because Paul understood what we eat does not make us righteous or unrighteous. Yet, he counseled that if you were at a dinner and this pagan meat was on the menu, and a new brother or sister in faith believed eating it was faith-compromising, Paul would say, Don t eat it. Why? Not because it is wrong or sinful to eat it but out of concern and respect for your brother or sister in faith who may not be where you are on the spiritual journey. That takes spiritual maturity. And it takes a certain spiritual maturity not to have to prove your point to the one you disagree with; it takes spiritual maturity not to draw a line in the sand, stand on principle, over things that are not core essentials. Remember words from Augustine in the fourth century church that I quoted in another sermon in this series? In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty, in all things love. The radical center has a spiritual maturity that allows you and me to accept other fellow Christians who may not believe as we do or practice faith as we do, or worship as we do. Fundamentalism on the left or the right lacks spiritual maturity. One place where we get tested on our spiritual maturity is when it comes to the communion table. Some traditions exclude fellow Christians from the table if they don t share the same theology about the table, and sometimes exclude Christians who have a different interpretation about the practice of faith. Recently, several United States Catholic Bishops wrote a pastoral letter to their parishioners saying that those who supported gay marriage should not take communion. IV
5 And one of the great tragedies within the Christian church, including Protestant churches, has been our division and fights about how we interpret what happens at the Lord s Supper. Ideas like transubstantiation, consubstantiation, real presence, spiritual presence, outward and visible signs, a memorial and other ideas have tried to define and understand what happens at the Lord s Supper. This disagreement has led to conflict and disunity. Somehow I cannot imagine Jesus is happy with this. It takes spiritual maturity to say The Lord s Supper is a mystery with many meanings and we don t have to agree on its meaning for its power to resonate in our lives and in the lives of other Christians. The radical center challenges me not to demonize those who have a different theology of the table, and even those who use the table in a way that I believe is ungraceful in this powerful sacrament of grace. V In a polarized culture, you and I seek a Christian voice that comes from the radical center, a center defined by the humility we see in Christ. It requires spiritual maturity and God knows the world needs our voice and our practice of a radical center. i i Sources Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White by Adam Hamilton, Abingdon Press, 2008, chapters 4 & 23, Stages of Faith by James Fowler, Harper, 1981 A Different Drum by Scott Peck, 1981 Stages of Faith: A Map for the Christian Journey, by Richard J Vincent, @www.theocentric.com