"Leaving the Beaten Path"

Every Tuesday morning for the last four years, a group of women have come together in the parish hall here to study and discuss a wide variety of faith-related books and videos.

The book we are reading now is An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest in this diocese. The premise of the book is that you don’t have to go to exotic places or engage in rigorous spiritual disciplines to experience God – that God is all around us if we only pay attention to our lives.

As Taylor puts its, “The last place most people look (for God) is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives.

“What possible spiritual significance could a trip to the grocery store have? How could something as common as a toothache be a door to greater life?”

To help us learn to pay attention to our lives, Taylor offers several different spiritual practices. The two we discussed last week were the practice of getting lost, and the practice of encountering others.

Getting lost soon may be a lost art in this country. With map quest on our computers and global positioning systems in many of our cars, directions are always available.

I think the popularity of these directional systems is that they give us a sense of control. Most of us, if we admit it, often begin to feel slightly uneasy when we don’t know where we are.

If it’s late at night, or in a deserted area, or a neighborhood where people don’t look like us, that slight unease can rapidly escalate into full-fledged panic as we suddenly realize just how vulnerable we are.

Taylor suggests we get into the habit of getting lost in benign ways, by taking roads that we haven’t taken before instead of sticking to the paths we know so well that we don’t have to pay attention to what is around us.

Even this benign way of being lost can force us to cultivate the skills that will help us when we are truly lost in life – to manage our panic, marshal our resources, take a good look around to see where we are and what this unexpected development might have to offer us.

And, she reminds us, that God does some of God’s best work with people who are seriously, truly lost – like Abraham and Sarah, and the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness for 40 years.

Being lost forces us to pay attention, to admit that we are not in control, and opens us to new possibilities, to things we may never have seen if we remained on the beaten paths and well-worn ruts of our lives.

The practice of encountering others may be as difficult as the practice of being lost. I think about how many people I come into contact with in a day, and to how many of them I truly pay attention.

When Taylor posed the question of the spiritual significance of a trip to the grocery store I thought about encountering the other. And I have to admit that on most days, as I dash into Kroger’s on the way home from work I am often in no mood to encounter anyone.

At my most uncharitable, I secretly resent having to be polite to the nice old man who is paid to smile and greet me when I enter the store. I don’t want to hear about the check out clerk’s plans for the weekend. I just want to get my things as quickly as possible and go home.

But when I find myself in that kind of mood, I remember the line from scripture that says those who show hospitality to strangers are welcoming God; that God most often shows up in the face of the other, the stranger.

And if that is true, it’s entirely likely that God is hanging out at the grocery store, waiting for me to notice the divine in the stranger I ignore or rush by.

Of course, we don’t encounter the other only in strangers, every person we meet, even those we love the most, are other to us. And even in those people, maybe especially in them, it can be difficult to truly see the other, and not just impose our selves on those we love.

Some times encountering the other requires what spiritual writer XXXX calls a “strategic withdrawal,” which he defines as “any act you can devise, any psychological spiritual act at all, that embodies a willingness to wait for the (other) to disclose his or her self to you, rather than to disclose yourself, your altruism, your creativity, skills, energy, ideas, and, let’s face it, agenda, myopia, delusions, and preconceptions.

Truly encountering the other, truly being open to receive the other, truly recognizing in even the most casual encounter that the other embodies God is enormously difficult.

In today’s reading from the Book of Acts, we see Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples, practicing both of these spiritual disciplines.

First, Philip is willing to go off the beaten path. The story says that an angel tells Philip to “go toward the south to the road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza.”

We assume that there were more direct routes from Jerusalem to Gaza because scripture tells us that the road the angel tells Philip to take is “a wilderness road.”

It is on this wilderness road, far off the beaten path, that Philip encounters the other, an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official for the queen of Ethiopia.

Nudged again by the Spirit, Philip doesn’t rush by or ignore the stranger, but joins him. The Ethiopian is in his chariot, reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah. Philip approaches and asks the man if he understands what he is reading.

The Ethiopian invites Philip to explain it to him. The passage is a prophecy about the messiah, and Philip explains how his teacher Jesus fulfilled this prophecy, then tells him more about the good news of the risen Christ.

Philip must have been compelling because when the chariot passes water, the Ethiopian demands that they stop and that Philip baptize him. And after he is baptized he goes on his way rejoicing.

Most of the commentaries on this story focus on the Ethiopian, on the significance of his conversion and what it says about the expansiveness of God’s love, and the broadness of Christianity.

But what strikes me as equally remarkable in this exchange is Philip.

First, he is willing to be lost, to go on a road he has not traveled before, to follow the nudging of the Spirit even when he is not sure where it will lead.

Second, Philip encounters the other, the Ethiopian eunuch, with respect. He asks questions and truly listens to what the man says. Philip allows himself to be guided by the Ethiopian’s questions and responses, taking his lead from the stranger.

When the Ethiopian asks for Philip’s interpretation of scripture, he is happy to give it. When he asks to be baptized, Philip joyfully responds.

Notice that Philip does not tell the man what to do, or assume he knows what is best for this stranger. He just shares as he is asked.

What Philip does in this story is described in our baptismal covenant as “respecting the dignity of every human being,” one of the primary duties of every baptized Christian.

Another way of saying it is that he truly encountered the other without placing his own agenda or needs on the Ethiopian.

The practice of getting lost, the practice of encountering the other – spiritual practices that don’t require years of study, specialized talents, or travel to exotic places; practices that might show us that God is right in front of us all the time.

XXXX gives us this prayer to aid in our practice.

Amen

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Readings

Deuteronomy 4:32-40~

Ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him. From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire. And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession, as it is still today. So acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time.

Acts 8:26-40

An angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

John 15:1-8

Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

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