Lean Into Life

Professor Mark Searle teaches about liturgy, or worship. He has said that our liturgical experience… our coming together week after week for liturgical worship… teaches us how to "lean into life." Hopefully, when we come to worship, it is an active experience, one that engages and affects us as we participate. Searle suggests that that participation, that engagement, helps to teach us how to lean into life. It’s a rich image.

As we think about what it means, consider first a general question. As you face the days or years or decades ahead of you, what is your posture? Do you lean forward in anticipation? Do you just slouch somewhat indifferently? Do you sit back and relax fully content in the moment? Do you dig in your heels and reach back for anything in the past to cling to? Do all of those postures sound familiar from some point or another in your life?

Part of what it means to lean into life is to look forward. Eagerly seeking more of life, deeper experiences of life, in the future. And when we come here in worship, our worship should help us practice that posture… the posture of leaning into life. God’s promise always lies ahead. God is certainly present in the present. And I hope that you have known God in your past. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that a richer experience of God, a growing fulfillment of God’s promise lies ahead. That is true for all of us. Always. God’s promise lies ahead.

Think about Abraham. Abraham left his home, packed up his family, left everything that was familiar and secure and set off on a journey to a place he had never seen before. "Not knowing where he was going" the author of Hebrews tells us. But he went because he trusted that God’s promise, God’s promise of an inheritance, God’s promise of offspring as numerous as the stars… that promise lay ahead. He leaned into life.

I’ve been in the Diocese of Indianapolis for the last three days at a training session for folks who mentor Education for Ministry Groups. As many of you know, we have an EFM group here. I didn’t really want to go. I had to board Abby; I just got home from vacation and didn’t want to pack up again; I didn’t know the trainer or any of the participants. But I had to go to maintain my own certification. I was in a group with eight other experienced mentors (all the others lay people), and it turned out to be very rewarding. As I reflect upon the experience, I think it worked so well because all of us in the group had known God’s transforming power in our lives and we all look to the future as a source of ongoing transformation. And the session itself was transforming as we shared, reflected, witnessed to God’s presence in our lives. We leaned into life as a group… leaning forward and deeper into God’s grace as we worked together.

It occurs to me that a big part of what EFM is about is leaning into life, about seeking ongoing transformation by God’s grace in the future, and as mentors that’s what we want to share with others. The core of EFM is the experience of theological reflection, a process of reflecting on the ways our own lives are shaped by our interaction with the various cultures in which we live, by the positions and biases that are so deep in our gut, we don’t know how they got there, by the Christian tradition as it comes to us in Scripture and in the teaching of the church. The underlying hope… conviction… of this process of theological reflection is that we are always being shaped by God. Everyday. Now and everyday into the future, God’s richer promise awaits us. Theological reflection helps us get better at recognizing God’s promise and leaning into it, so that we may be transformed.

Lean into God’s promise. It is there ahead for everyone, regardless of age or circumstances. Consider again Abraham. According to the author of Hebrews, Abraham was "as good as dead." That would seem to indicate that, by human standards, he didn’t have much of a future ahead of him. Specifically, what Scripture means is that he was beyond the years of biologically fathering children. But God said to Abraham, "If you lean forward, lean into life, and look up to the stars… So shall your descendents be." God’s promise to a man as good as dead.

One of the other mentors in my training group mentors an EFM group in a prison. It is her deep faith and conviction and also her experience that God’s promise lies ahead for those inmates in her group. Inside that prison, by God’s grace and with faith in God’s promise, together they lean into life. People who many might regard "as good as dead" being transformed by God’s grace into a new future.

Returning to the subject, the experience, of worship… Whether or not you’ve really thought about it, you are here today because you want to lean into life. At some level, you must believe that the Christian calling is a journey, a journey forward, a journey of transformation. We come together for worship over and over again because we need to. Because our faith is never perfect or complete. Because, no matter how good the past and present might have been (or not)… it is not enough. Because what we have already seen is not all that God promises to us. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, Hebrews says, the conviction of things not seen. Not yet seen. We worship over and over again because we have encountered God here in the past; God is here now; and we are absolutely certain that God will be here next Sunday. And hopefully, as we practice (in worship) this posture of leaning forward, of leaning into life, we will come to experience God’s promise more deeply throughout the experiences that lie ahead of us in life, not just in worship.

Lean into life. That means seeking and welcoming any opportunity to be in conversation, in relationship with God, to be shaped by God. Those opportunities lie ahead of us all as numerous as the stars in the sky. Seek and welcome all opportunities for worship. Not just the regular worship here, but look also for opportunities to worship in different ways and different places. In that occasional newness, there is often transformation. Seek and welcome all opportunities for study of the Scriptures and the Christian tradition. And seek and welcome opportunities for fellowship, especially fellowship that explicitly involves sharing the presence of God through prayer and story and reflection with others. Look for and lean into these opportunities.

Listen again to a portion of this morning’s reading from Hebrews. People of faith look into the future and see and greet the promises of God. We confess that we are always to some degree strangers and foreigners on this earth… people who are still seeking our true homeland. If we had been thinking only of what lay behind, we have the opportunity to return. But as it is, we desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called our God; indeed, God has prepared a city for us. It lies ahead.

The richness and fullness of God’s promise lie ahead. Lean into it.