+Practice-Based Faith - "Metanoia! as Shape of Our Practice"
Sunday 26 January 2020
South Wedge Mission
Rochester, NY

Texts: Matthew 4.12-23, Romans 12.1-2


The following is a reconstruction of the homily from notes and recordings.

If the goal of Pracice-Based Faith is the call “shema!” - a call for a new heart capable of more love for God, neighbor and creation - then the shape that path PBF takes is named by the inaugural call of Jesus’ first ministry: “repent!” 

In the first of his 95 Theses, Martin Luther declared “the whole of the life of a Christian is one of repentance.”  Because of the ways repentance has been used to shame, scare and separate people, its developed a deservedly bad reputation.  But the Greek word Jesus actually uses - “metanoia” - does not mean “scour your life and moral resumes of all impurities and peccadillos.”  Rather, as Cynthia Bourgeult points out, the word literally means “go beyond your mind,” or “into a larger mind.”  

St. Paul says as much in Romans 12.1 when he calls Christians to “be not conformed to the spirit of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Seeing our mind as part of the greater whole, our heart, metanoia becomes a call to examine the ways in which we are allowing ourselves to remain closed off to God and limited in our imaginations.  It is a call to see God in new ways, in unexpected places, in “unworthy” people, and in the beauties and failures of our own lives.  

We will never regret striving for a new way of seeing God - a bigger way of seeing God, a more inclusive, integrated, imaginative way.  If we regret it, its probably not God, but the limit of our old perspective.

This week’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ calling of his first disciples, can be read as providing a glimpse at the process of metanoia-in-action.  Many thinkers, such as Brian McLaren and Ken Wilber, have presented schema for looking at spiritual growth paradigms.  The following is my own take.  But it should be said up front, following McLaren: metanoia and spiritual growth are never to be seen as a ladder by which we somehow ascend in order to be holier than others.  Rather, metanoia is more like the rings on a tree.  As we journey through life, we will grow, acquiring depth, strength and experience.  As Wilber is fond of saying, we “transcend and include.”  It is a process, not a placement system.

My suggested paradigm uses three cyclical stages: Immersion, Interruption and Integration.  I’ll unpack each briefly using the Gospel text.

1.Immersion - “tending their nets.”  This is where most of us encounter the holy, in the midst of everyday life.  In many ways, deep spiritual immersion into the midst of things is one of the main hopes of spiritual practice.  We want to be “int he flow” of life, able to see the holiness of chores as well as choirs, living fully into the delights and challenges of the life we have been given.  This is where we live in community, create works of science and art, enjoy creation, and use our particular gifts to be a part of the renewal of creation.  

2.Interruption - “Come follow me!”  Many of us are pursing a practice because, in the midst of living, we felt something calling to us, interrupting the flow.  For some, its a desire for community, others, a sense of wonder and amazement; for others, its a sense that things are not as they should be, an encounter with injustice or death.  For the Israelites, the call of “Shema!” drew them out of slavery and into freedom and a new practice.  For the disciples, Jesus’ call interrupted their vocations and drew them into liminal space - a place of not knowing and of newness, an invitation to step out of the everyday and to explore a new level of consciousness and engagement.

While this call can often be construed as an “invitation,” very often, it will also disrupt our previous sense of “Immersion.”  Tasting the freedom Jesus has to offer, perhaps the disciples became aware for the first time of who dehumanizing their labor as fishermen had been, in the same way that many today are awakening to the limits and costs of late-stage capitalism and white-body supremacy.  

For some of us, at some times in our lives, this invitation to freedom is too terrifying to pursue.  Rather than “leaving our nets” - the things that had once imprisoned us in a dualistic, adversarial, dehumanizing system - we choose to “mend our nets,” as some disciples are doing when Jesus arrives.  We become aware, but double down on our old paradigm.  Witness the almost continual failures of Jesus’ disciples throughout the Gospels to live differently.  This is not a judgement - we have all done it - but we must be aware of the challenge of responding to an Interruption.  We need community to help us take the risk with courage and to see it through.

3.Integration: “Fishers of People” - If we stick with the invitation of the interruption and take the risk of stepping out of our nets, into a new way of life, we will find that, following Wilbur, we “transcend and include” the best of who we once were.  While we spend some time deconstructing and critiquing our old selves, if we are truly following Jesus, we will take a step forward into non-dual consciousness, a worldview where we can see more of God in more of God’s creation and in more of God’s children then we did before.  We will see more of God in more of our life as well.  

The disciples never cease to be fishermen.  But now they operate without nets, as “fishers of people.”  Their old lives are not discarded, but their life itself becomes the means by which they will feed other people with the gift of the gift that was given them.  Merely by having suffered and undergone conversion themselves, they will naturally attract others into a similar journey of conversion.  

As with Interruption, there is a danger of regression here.  Integrating old binaries can be difficult.  Many of us choose to remain eternal critics, eager to expose for others the hypocrisies and limitations of the old view that used to serve us.  See Facebook and Twitter.  We can deconstruct the abuses and hypocrisies of the church or of politics, but instead of seeking to integrate into creative new solutions and communities, we remain locked into binaries and oppositions.  Again, we have all been here, necessarily need to go through this phase.  But if we wish to be free, we cannot stay here.  Witness the debate between Peter and Paul about the inclusion of non-Jewish Christians into the church.  

4.Back to Immersion: if we allow grace to help us grow, we will find ourselves once again at Immersion, back in every day life, back in the midst of things.  The temptation of a new paradigm is that of the disciples at the Transfiguration - to stay on retreat, enjoying the mountain top experience.  But we are called back to the Goodness of Things.  The disciples use their fishing skills to manage crowds, facilitate Jesus’ speaking, feed Jesus’ followers, and eventually, to travel the world.  Their stories - of uneducated, lower class laborers whose lives were transformed by an encounter with God - continue to inspire.  Surely, they were able to relate to everyday people in a way that scholars and theologians would find difficult

And that’s the promise of “metanoia.”  Not that we will be saved out of this world into a heaven by and by.  But that, by pursuing the path of following Jesus, of metanoia, we would become more a part of this world.  That we would become agents of what Jesus calls “the kingdom, or kin-dom, of God.”  That in opening our minds and hearts to the flow of God’s love, seeing God in more and more of God’s good creation, we become agents of the world’s mending.  Conversion changes us - it changes how we see the world - it also changes the world around us.  

Each of us may identify with different stages at different times.  We may be in a place of growth or regression; of courage or fear; of immersion or avoidance.  And that’s good.  That is life.  Wherever you are at, listen for the call, ask what the next stage of growth might look like for you, and see what happens when you practice your way in its direction.

And know that the God who calls you is not looking to shame or punish you, but desires to draw you into a bigger world, a bigger love, and a bigger God.  God needs your life, and longs to give to the world.   Be transformed by the renewing of your mind; you’ll never regret it.