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Finding Your Mountain Week 5: Rituals of Grace
Colossians 1:15-20
We’re back for our final week of our series “Finding Your Mountain” where we are exploring some of the themes and lessons that our St. Luke’s Senior Pastor, Rob Fuquay, brought back from his time on sabbatical this summer.
And as Rob and Susan climbed to Everest Base camp during this time away, one of the cultural things that they encountered in Nepal was this tie between karma, prayer, and rituals.
And it might seem, on the surface, a little different to be framing our last sermon in this series around a concept from another faith tradition. And I’ll just put a couple of disclaimers out there—this is not a class on world religions, like we’re not doing a super deep dive of Dharmic traditions, which is where Karma comes from. We’re also not here to critique another religious tradition. But what we are going to do is hold up the example of what Rob and Susan observed in their time in Nepal and see what we might learn about our own faith and faith practices in light of the diversity of how faith is practiced around the world. That is the beautiful thing about how God works is that we can learn from each other and see goodness and wisdom in things that we might not be as familiar with. 2
And while we might not in our western, and in this case Christian, context necessarily think about the idea of Karma as explicitly as some other faiths do, I do think we see the general ideas of Karma come up a lot in our world. These concepts are pretty baked into both our culture and our faith, whether we realize it or not.
I mean, think about when you’ve heard phrases like this:
- They got what they deserved.
- What goes around comes around.
- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Or maybe when you hear the word Karma, you start thinking about a certain Taylor Swift song and who describes it like this:
Karma's on your scent like a bounty hunter Karma's gonna track you down Step by step from town to town Sweet like justice, karma is a queen
That is either really encouraging or kind of terrifying, depending on what you’ve done and where you’ve been!
But at its core, with Karma there's this idea that what you put out into the world is what you're going to get back. There's this idea that the energy and the universe around us is impacted by what we do and that what we do matters. 3
There’s the strong belief that we, as humans, have personal agency and we need to use our agency to do good and not evil. And finally, there’s the end goal to achieve a state of being that is free of suffering.
In some ways, this isn’t that different than a lot of what we believe as Christians...we believe that we have free will, we believe that we have personal responsibility to do good and not do harm. We believe that even though we might be just one person in this great big world...our actions have consequences. Consequences that can be positive or negative or somewhere in between. And I would say most of us, maybe all of us, long for a time when there will be no more suffering and that the world will be made right.
So I see similar streams flowing between these different ways to relate to God and practice faith. And I also see some key differences in how we get to those things. But I think a lot of these concepts, whether we’re talking about Karma or Christianity, really any faith practice at all, it all points to the fact that we’re all trying to make meaning of how our individual lives connect to this great big universe that we are part of. We’re trying to figure out how we connect to God and how we impact the world around us. We’re trying to figure why and how things happen and if people REALLY get what they deserve...or if life is just kind of chaotic and random. 4
And what’s hard about this is that so much of our faith, so much of how we relate to God is intangible. We pray, we worship, we create rituals and rhythms that connect us to this God...but it’s not like we can see God. It’s not like God meets us at Starbucks for a quick consult when we’re trying to make a hard decision. We have ideas about who God is, we have a sense of when the Spirit is moving—we can probably all name a time when we’ve felt that feeling even if it’s hard to describe—but most of our faith life is just that...it’s faith. It’s abstract. (SLIDE) A lot of our faith is us holding on to something very unknown and mysterious.
That’s what I love about this passage in Colossians is that it speaks to this piece of our faith, this mystery, and it points us to who Jesus is in the midst of all of our questions and everything we can’t quite know. And it describes Jesus as being (SLIDE) “the image of the invisible God”.
Think about what this means. For all that we can't see, for all that we can’t be sure of, there was this person in Jesus who showed up and showed the world what God is like. There was this person in Jesus who gave a clearer picture of the mystery of who God is and how God works in the world. There was this person in Jesus who showed up and loved people in a way that didn’t always make sense, that didn’t fit the rules and criteria of the time, but that was a beautiful 5
and powerful reflection of how God’s love exists in our world and is for every single person.
When we consider who Jesus is, and how Jesus lived, it doesn’t take that mystery away, it doesn’t answer all of the abstract questions, but it does give some more shape to how we picture God and who we know God to be. It brings some elements into greater focus and helps us see God in a different way.
It kind of makes me think of one of those magic eye posters. Maybe I’m dating myself here. Does anyone remember these? My grandparents had two, one in our hallway and one in our garage, and I remember just standing in the garage staring at this poster. It was a BLUR until you kind of let your eyes cross a little and THEN there was this big airplane you could see.
Here’s one...do you see it?
Try it (SLIDE)
It’s apparently a mermaid petting a dolphin...I used to be awesome at these and I could not see that one! Zack saw it immediately and I was humbled.
But here’s the point: there’s still all this stuff going on. Stuff that seems a little random, stuff that might have a particular order to it. Stuff we can’t fully process or understand. But 6
when we get closer to it, when we know how to look and what to look for...we can see something for us in the middle of all the mystery. When we look at Jesus, we see a clearer image in the blur. We can see the love of Jesus, we can see the working of the spirit. We can see God in the presence of each and every person we meet.
And maybe you can see that clearly. Maybe you are Zack in this illustration and could see it immediately. Maybe it makes total sense to you and you’re in a place where you have a deep understanding of how to live out your faith and how your life impacts the world around you. Or maybe you’re me, and you find yourself totally befuddled by the whole thing. You don’t know if there’s actually a mermaid and a dolphin or if you’re just being messed with! Either way, the truth is, (SLIDE) the goal isn’t so much that we understand everything about God...the goal is that we participate in the work God is doing.
And that is where things like prayer and rituals come into the conversation.
When Rob was in Nepal, they kept seeing these different religious symbols as they hiked. They saw prayer wheels, which you would spin to the right. They saw stupas, or Buddhist memorials, that the trails would circle around, again always moving clockwise. And they learned that this 7
type of movement, always moving clockwise, was being done to produce good karma. It was being done to make producing a positive energy part of the everyday fabric of life. This was a very tangible, active ritual that people were engaging in to do their part in participating in creating good energy in the universe.
What does it look like when we do our part? When we lean into that invitation to participate, fully, wherever we are and with whatever questions or doubts we might have?
I think a lot what we do with these questions revolves around how we come back to our center. And for us, in this conversation today, this is a key difference between talking about Karma and talking about Christian practice. Because when I talk to you about what our center should be, when we have that conversation in this place, we're going to always come back to Jesus. The rituals we do, practices of prayer and worship, of living in community together, those things aren’t just for us so that we feel good or get our social fix outside of work for the week. The reason we do those things is to bring us back to Jesus. To keep us deeply connect to God through Christ and to know that we’re not the center, but Jesus is.
This part of Colossians emphasizes this idea and it paints this picture of how the world works and it says basically that 8
(SLIDE) Jesus holds it all together. I don’t know about you, but I find so much comfort in that idea. Especially when the world feels chaotic, especially when there’s a lot of stuff that’s outside of my control to fix and make go the way that I would have it go, it is necessary for me to come back to this idea that Jesus is the center and that Jesus is holding this whole thing.
And I think there’s something really powerful when we both participate and we do all the good we possibly can do in this world to create something good for ourselves and for others, and when we also can hold on tightly to that truth that Jesus is holding us, Jesus is holding this world, Jesus is holding all the things we could ever be anxious about or need justice for or just the stuff we don’t know what to do with.
It’s this intersection of us at work, creating the world we want to see and the conditions we want to live in...it’s that intersecting with the grace and care of Jesus working its way into places that are beyond us. Creating better stories, creating better energy, creating better hope.
(SLIDE) Our actions and Jesus’ grace work together.
My son is what I call a fairly proficient swimmer. He keeps asking me if he can try the swim test at the pool so he can swim in the 12ft, but he’s not quite there yet. He’s strong 9
enough to do the waterslides and make it across the pool, but he still needs a little help to get where he’s going.
And it’s absolutely remarkable what a little bit of extra presence can do for him as he swims. When he grabs a kickboard, he becomes a FAST swimmer. He becomes more confident. When he knows that he is being held up by the floatation powers of a little 18x12 piece of foam...he can do more with what he has and he can be a better version of his swimming self.
When we let ourselves be held by Jesus and his grace, we can be a better version of who we want to be. We can act in ways that go farther than if it just depends on us. When we let what Jesus is doing be at the center, it changes what is possible. It changes what we put out into the world. It changes the way we engage our faith and let our faith drive our actions.
And what we get to do is create rituals that let us experience this grace as often as possible. To be reminded that Jesus is active and working and covering us with exactly what we need to make it.
And so when I think about things like prayer. When I think about things like reading Scripture. When I think about things like getting yourself out of bed on a Sunday and coming to this place to sing and connect and listen to me 10
talk...that’s what it comes back to. The regular experience of grace. The regular experience of coming back to Jesus as our center. The regular experience of bringing each other back to that center, because we can’t quite do it alone most of the time.
That’s why the faith rituals we do matter, and it’s why it matters that we do them with each other.
And today, as we come to the communion table, we get the best picture of that. We experience grace in a tangible way. We literally eat bread and drink juice. Our kids come up from their space downstairs, and we look them in the eye and say, “these things remind you that Jesus loves you.”
When we come to this table, we remember the truth that Jesus is always giving to us love and grace even when we fail to give those things ourselves. We don’t have to be perfect to come here. We don’t have to be feeling particularly proud of ourselves. We definitely don’t have to figure ourselves out and get it together.
We just get to receive. We just get to experience the goodness of the grace of Jesus Christ.
Transition to Communion...