You Are Accepted 7-21-13

Holy and most gracious God:  You call us to open our hearts so that you may work in and through us.  Lead us to celebrate all that you call us to be.  May my words be inspired by you and our thoughts permeated by your spirit of peace.  Empower us to find our sacred path to you.  Amen

         I will admit it:  I borrowed the title of this sermon from the most famous sermon by Paul Tillich, great theologian, now deceased.  Paul Tillich wrote one of the most comprehensive of comprehensive Systematic Theologies and I recall having to read all three volumes when in seminary.  I remember that it pushed me to think in new ways.  I no longer recall what those ways were, but Paul Tillich was among the first religious writers to challenge my fairly simplistic understanding of faith and grace.  While I do not remember the words, I do remember the feeling of my heart bursting through some well-worn walls of resistance and fear.  I want to share with you the words of Tillich that come immediately after the passage which was our Middle Reading today.  Tillich says, “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

         My sermon today is about that acceptance—that acceptance by that which is greater than we are—which some of us call God or one of the many names for God.  I looked hard for the exact meaning  of the word ‘acceptance’ and really couldn’t find it.  So, I began to look for what others had to say about acceptance.  My favorite thought came from Margery Williams in the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit.  “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand”.  Aha, I thought—to be accepted is to be ‘real’.  But, it may also mean that not everyone with whom we come in contact will understand.  Healer, Maggie Erotokritou, expands on this thought, “Those who dance”, she says, “are thought to be quite insane by those who cannot hear the music”.  As a seeker and lover of God, I long to be thought insane by those who cannot hear the music.

         So, how to find and greet this acceptance?   Persian Poet, Rumi, gives us an idea that is worth our attention, “Your task:, he writes,  “is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”  This, then, is a start.  When we welcome God’s presence or when we acknowledge the sacred spirit of love that is all around us, we usually miss most of the depth altogether.  Sometimes, we miss it because we are pre-occupied with thoughts of our daily lives which distract us from those small, almost silent, calls to enter a state of ‘love’.  But, more often than not, we miss it because we are not open to it.  Can we seek and find all of the barriers that we have built against love; understand them and then set them aside long enough to catch a glimpse of the divine love that longs to inhabit our very bodies, minds, and spirits so that we may receive all the gifts that God, source of all gifts, has for us? 

         Paul tells the Christians in Rome to “offer [their] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”  “This”, he says, “is [our] Spiritual Act of worship.”  He tells us to not be a prisoner to the expectations of this age; instead, he calls us to “be transformed by the renewal of [our] minds” so that we can understand God and all that is good and pleasing.  I don’t know about you, but it is a constant struggle for me to ignore what the world and many of the people in it are telling me I ought to be.  It takes strength and ongoing commitment to the truth that has been given to you by God.  And, while, we live, serve, and worship in community, we must find a way to engage with God personally and individually while, at the same time, participating in the spiritual growth of the community.  We live as communal beings who must simultaneously develop and live out our own sacred selves.

         Returning to Maggie Erotokritou’s thought—how do we find others who also hear the music and long to dance with us.  It is here, where acceptance is celebrated—where people’s spiritual journey is valued whether it looks like ours, or not—it is here that we can experience, live in to, and speak about our own exploration and celebration of the welcoming of God’s sacred acceptance of us.  If one yearns to walk a spiritual journey, then, realizing and soaking in this sacred acceptance is not optional.  Think of what Jesus said in our Gospel this morning.  He calls us to lay down our heavy burdens—the labor of trying to work it all out for ourselves—and find sacred rest.  This sacred rest comes with the acceptance that God not only desires to know us and to love us; God wants us to accept the sacred, divine love that is unconditional and universal—all we have to do is open our hearts to feel the holy peace and rest that comes when acceptance of all that is offered occurs.  Jesus says that in this laying down of burdens and setting down all that keeps us from God, we will find “rest for [our] souls”.  It’s not hard, once you surrender to the rest—but that is an adventure into the unknown for most of us. 

         Famed author, M. Scott Peck, tells us about the nature of an adventure.  He says, “An adventure is going into the unknown. If you know exactly where you are going, exactly how you will get there, and exactly what you will see along the way, it is not an adventure… Because they involve the unknown, adventures are inherently dangerous to a greater or lesser degree. Yet it is also only from adventures and their newness that we learn. If we know exactly where we’re going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we’ll see along the way, we won’t learn anything”.  And, so, we—and I—walk this unknown journey together.  This is spiritual growth, spiritual understanding, and if, true and real, will lead to a community that is so full of the knowledge of divine acceptance that it will spill out and over these walls, over and under the fence at the campus; and, our lives will be so full that our living in the acceptance of God will become infectious—lovingly, warmly infectious.

         I want to talk for a moment about “radical hospitality”—the idea that we push our notions of hospitality far beyond our comfort zone and reach out to all those who need to hear of this sacred unconditional acceptance of who we are by the Source of all that is.  I think we are beginning to understand that notion.  This is what I think we do not understand and practice.  We must, if we are to be such a congregation, offer this radical hospitality to ourselves.  We, you and I, must welcome all of ourselves into this place, this conversation, this journey.  And that is where it gets more than a little hard for me.  We may want to welcome all but certain things into this divine acceptance.  We may hold on to little parts of ourselves that, secretly, we think are unworthy of God’s acceptance; and, by doing so, we fail to fully enter into the adventurous journey with God, with ourselves, and with each other.  And, this morning, I am standing in front of you saying, with absolute confidence, we cannot become a ‘radically inclusive faith community’ if we do not radically include all of ourselves into this sacred place.  I want to ask us today—are we ready to seek and find all the barriers against love that we have built?  This question is not a rhetorical question and applies just as much to me as it may apply to some of you.  How do we do this?  This is not a short journey for most of us—it is a healing journey—no matter how long or short.  We’re going to be talking about healing for the next few weeks.  Whether or not you consider yourself a ‘wounded person’—there are more than likely a few wounds left in most of us.  And when we try our best to hide our wounds from God, the entering into divine rest and acceptance is delayed.  Jeanne Achtenberg, who has written numerous books about healing tells us this, "Healing is embracing what is most feared; healing is opening what has been closed; softening what has been hardened into obstruction…" 

         Can and will you join me in an exploration of God’s unconditional acceptance and peace?  Some call it ‘grace’, some ‘enlightenment’, some ‘heaven on earth’.  Whatever you call it matters not, what matters is that you are on your way.  Come, soften your heart.  Come, break down the walls.  Come, heal and be healed.  Amen and amen.