When it comes to spiritual practices, these days there’s a whole marketplace. Our culture seems to have a way of turning anything into a situation where you can just scroll through options and pick and pay for what promises something you find attractive. This is what seems to be happening with religious and spiritual practices, for better and for worse. Now, the ways this plays out in a world where you can have an app on your phone in your pocket that talks at you and chirps and chimes and measures your metrics 24/7, this is unprecedented in history. There are apps for prayers and meditations and scripture studies and spiritual teachings and medium readings and what have you. Through the internet, through books, we have the global diversity of religious and spiritual traditions at our fingertips. 

Now, as unprecedented as the volume of all this is, it’s not in fact unique in history to be in a cosmopolitan situation – there are countless times and places throughout history where you have diverse religious traditions rubbing shoulders, sometimes jostling for elbow room, or competing for converts, sometimes brawling; other times walking side by side, or embracing, sometimes intermarrying and creating something new – but all the time influencing each other. That’s been true in lots and lots of times and places throughout the human experience. 

What we call Christianity was born in such a cosmopolitan situation, around the Mediterranean, the Near East, North Africa, Southern Europe, in a crucible of multiple religions and philosophies, cultures and traditions. And from the crucible, what we call Christianity was born from the overwhelming experience through Christ that in the midst of all that human life together brings, the God of all creation is a God of love and grace. The early Jesus people found that they can live lives centered around that God of love and grace when they follow Jesus in practicing that love and grace. 

And it does take practice. 

That’s where spiritual and religious practices can help us. 

Now, the love and grace of God as manifest through Christ is so deep and so wide and so thorough that it’s not like we need spiritual practices to earn it or achieve it. This is important. The love of God is a free gift, extravagantly bestowed on all the world by divine grace. Spiritual practices for us then are ways of staying centered on that love and grace, returning to it when we’ve been pulled away, and allowing it to help us grow in sharing that love and grace. 

So, when it comes to spiritual practices that can enrich our lives as individuals and as a community of faith as open-minded, open-hearted followers of Jesus, I propose a litmus test to help us discern:

Does this practice help us to grow in divine love and grace?

This means that a spiritual practice in the Way of Jesus is not about looking all serene and attractive on Instagram; it’s not about sharpening your focus to be more productive and get an edge on the competition; it’s not about earning merit badges to show off. It needs to be about our need, or desperate need, to grow in divine love and grace.

This takes toughness and courage; it’s not just sentimental and feel-good.

We grow in divine love and grace through its challenge to us, as well as its support of us to get real about the parts of ourselves and of our socialization that would deny love and grace. So I want to add to the litmus test for spiritual practices that help us to follow the way of Jesus: 

Our spiritual practices must help us to own our own shadows as we grow in our belovedness before God. The parts of ourselves and of our society that we’d rather keep out of sight, that we’d rather not take responsibility for, that may not live up to the good game we like to talk, Jesus was all about challenging folks to own it, for the sake of growing in God’s love and grace. 

To help us own our own shadows, healthy spiritual and religious practices help us to cultivate both dignity and humility in light of our unconditional belovedness in the embrace of our Creator. This helps us to be mature enough to see our own shadows and moral blind spots without denying it or freaking out or going off on a guilt trip. This is necessary for the change of heart that comes in following the way of Jesus, the “metanoia” – often translated as “repentance” but which means a fundamental shift in our understanding, in our orientation of being away from a limited, constricted, petty obsession with ourselves, and towards the universal reality of God that compels us into greater love and grace, with toughness and courage.

Religious practices, spiritual practices are simply tools. As tools they can be used to serve different ends, for better and for worse. So, we have to be discerning.  

The Prophet Isaiah in our scripture passage for today uses this kind of test to expose how the religious practice of fasting among of his people at the time had become self-absorbed and self-serving, out of alignment with the reality of God’s universal love. So, Isaiah calls on his people to use the practice of fasting instead as a way to own up to what all they’re keeping in the shadows of their society: the neglect, the violence, the injustice. He says that the kind of fast that will actually help them grow – help us grow – by the light of God’s love, requires us to wake up to our shadows and have the humility and maturity and dignity to turn away from the ways we oppress others and exploit and neglect, and to actively practice the opposite. 

Isaiah is very specific about what this means: bring food to the hungry, give clothes to the naked, shelter the homeless, be generous and merciful and peaceful in our ways with others. 

This is an opportunity for us to ask:

In what ways have religious and spiritual practices in our society become self-absorbed and self-serving, and made it easier to deny the stuff we keep in the shadows? 

For example, today is the celebration of Junteenth, when the unspeakably brutal practice of slavery in our country was finally abolished, and the folks who had been enslaved were freed. The violence of racism is on the shadow side of our country that vaunts the values of freedom and liberty and justice for all. 

The religious practices of Christianity in our country have been used on both sides of this struggle. For white abolitionists and for African American folks who were enslaved, their practice of Christianity helped them to own up to the shadow of racism in our country, and to have the courage and dignity for struggle of liberation, for the sake of God’s love and grace for all. For most of the people who enslaved others or who benefitted from racism, their practicee of Christianity was used to deny the shadow and to justify sin as somehow divinely ordained. 

It continues to be true that Christianity is being used to deny the reality of the sin of racism in our society and in ourselves; and it is being used to have the humility and dignity to own up in a mature way to our shadow side, and seek to grow by the love and grace of our Creator. 

So I encourage us as we share and explore the spiritual practices that can deepen our walk with Jesus, that we be very discerning that these practices indeed support us and challenge us to own our shadows as we grow in love and grace. 

For this rich array of practices available to us to live out the Jesus, and for that unconditional love and grace of our Creator, and for the belovedness of each of you in this journey of faith together, I give thanks to God. 

Thanks be to God. 

(Delivered June 19, 2022, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)