Inheritance, Week 5: Study

Today is the fifth Sunday in the season of Lent, this traditional period of spiritual preparation for Easter. Lent is normally thought of as a time of self-denial. People talk about giving things up for Lent, or taking on a new practice that’s hard to do, and those things can have real spiritual benefits. But self-denial is not really the point of Lent. Self-denial is just a tool. What we’re trying to do in giving things up is find our attachments, to find thosd things that stand between us and God, and then slowly and patiently try to release those attachments so that we can connect to God more deeply. And in Christianity, we have a rich inheritance of spiritual practices that are intended to help us in that process. 

So at the beginning of this series, I talked about worship as a spiritual practice that helps us grow closer to God. After that, I talked about prayer; how prayer is just time consciously spent in God’s presence. There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to pray, and the intent of all of them is to deepen our awareness of God’s presence and our responsiveness to God’s Spirit. The third Sunday I talked about fasting, how fasting can be more than going without food. We fast from things we think we depend on, so that we can learn to depend more fully on God. And last Sunday, I talked about the spiritual discipline of service: how in serving others we very often find ourselves meeting Christ – and that’s not surprising, because he told us “whatever you do for the least you do for me.” And sometimes when we release our attachment to the pride that says we’re never supposed to need anything and we allow ourselves to be served, sometimes then too we meet Christ, who tells us he comes among us as one who serves.  

Today, I want to talk about study as a spiritual practice. I think most of us probably don’t envision study in the same way as prayer or meditation because for better and for worse, we live in a very pragmatic culture. I've been privileged to teach at a Community College and a four year college and a little bit at the Iliff School of Theology across the street, which is a Graduate School. And in the classes I taught, almost all the students were there because they needed the class for some reason. There were some very bright high school seniors, for example, who were getting college credit before they actually started college. There were working adults and conventional undergraduate students getting a bachelor's degree so they could move forward in some career. There were people who needed continuing education for work. And of course at Iliff we had people preparing for ministry and taking this church leadership course I taught. (And by the way, if you’re wondering why I was teaching a course on church leadership, I’m pretty sure the students were just as confused as you are. Let’s just say they haven’t asked me back in a few years.)  

Every now and again at the Community College, there were retired people in my classes who had never been to college and were just curious. They just wanted to learn. I always appreciated them, because they brought experience and perspective that enriched the class for everybody, including me. But I think the spiritual practice of study goes even beyond the idea of learning for the sake of learning. Study as a spiritual practice is not studying for information. It’s studying for transformation. We’re studying so our hearts can be open to God. 

One of my faith heroes is the African saint Augustine of Hippo. (Sometimes he’s called “Aw-gus teen.”) Augustine was born in the year 354, and died in 430 – so he saw the end of the ancient Roman world and the beginning of what we now call the Middle Ages. Augustine was converted to Christianity and eventually baptized by the Bishop of Milan, whose name was Ambrose. To say that Augustine respected Ambrose is an understatement. It was more like reverence.  Augustine describes Ambrose’s heart as “God’s Holy Oracle,” and he would go to Ambrose with questions about Christianity. Writing about him, Augustine says, “He did not restrict access to anyone, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced.” So I guess people could just walk in on the Bishop anytime.  

But even though Ambrose didn’t turn people away, it does seem like they had to kind of take their chances on whether they were going to get to talk to him. Augustine writes, “…very often when we were there, we saw him reading silently. After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration) we used to go away.” 

There are two things I love about that story. The first is I just think it’s funny. Augustine is kind of modest about it in this part of the book, but by that time in his life he was getting to be a pretty big deal. He was a teacher of classical rhetoric who had just been invited to teach in a famous school in Milan. He was a well-known follower of a philosophy called Manicheanism, which he eventually left for Christianity. But he was building a reputation as a kind of brilliant up and comer in philosophy, rhetoric, and religion. So he goes to Bishop Ambrose with questions about Christian theology, and Ambrose is sitting in silence, reading. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t say anything or acknowledge Augustine or his friends at all. He just sits there and reads. And eventually, Augustine just sort of shrugs and takes the hint and leaves.  

I think this could be a bold new strategy in pastoral care. See, I love to read, and I think study is an important part of my responsibility as a Pastor. So I’ve decided to adopt the Ambrose method. If you walk into my office during the week and I’m reading, I’m just going to ignore you and pretend you’re not there. We’ll see how long I get to keep my job.  

But even putting aside the weirdness of that story, the other thing I love about it is how both Ambrose and Augustine seem to take study seriously as a spiritual discipline. Ambrose himself wrote, “he who reads much and understands much receives his fill. And the one who is full refreshes others.” So Ambrose believes he needs study to carry out his ministry, to refresh others. And Augustine never questions the idea that Ambrose would want to spend time reading. It’s just part of what he does, and when he does, Augustine and his other visitors leave him alone. 

Now, Augustine was anything but stupid. He knew perfectly well that study does not automatically lead to God. No spiritual discipline does. If we pray by asking God to cause suffering or to validate our hatreds, we will not become closer to God. Fasting doesn’t lead to God if we’re prideful about it; worship doesn’t lead to God if we think worship makes us better than those who aren’t present. Service doesn’t lead us to God if our service reinforces our ego and makes us think we’re more virtuous than others. And I think study is kind of like that too: it doesn’t necessarily lead us to deeper relationship with God. There are plenty of atheists who are always learning but never grow closer to God. I mean, why would they, right? They’re not interested.  

But here too, I go back to Augustine. He wrote about the relationship between reason and faith, or knowledge and faith. We’ve all heard the phrase “Seeing is believing.” But Augustine recognized that it was almost the opposite. Believing is seeing: if we start from a position of faith, trusting that God is present to us, our study can help us see how that is true. If we don’t, we’ll miss God, even when God is right in front of us. 

The Psalm we heard this morning divides into three parts. It begins by talking about how we see God’s glory in the natural world. When this Psalm was written, there was a widespread belief that God’s wisdom was woven into creation and held things together; and that we could understand God’s wisdom by understanding the order of the natural world. The Psalmist writes, “the heavens are telling the glory of God and the earth proclaims God’s handiwork.” Then in the second part, it focuses on what the author calls God’s law, which is both the rules by which things are put together and the way of life that we can practice based on our understanding of God. So the Psalmist writes, “the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.” And the third section focuses on inner life, where God’s image and spirit reside: “may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight.” I think the author of this Psalm is saying something important about how our study of the world around us, our study of our faith tradition and history, our study of our inner life, all these things can combine to lead us to God. We see God’s glory outside us because we recognize God’s presence inside us. Believing is seeing. The idea that all truth is God’s truth: that is a statement of faith about God, and about how we come to know God more deeply. 

Ten years ago, I got a call from the wife of a man who’d been very active in a church I used to serve. He had lived a long and full life; he’d been an Olympic athlete, did well for himself financially. He sang beautifully and was a man of devout faith. A few nights before he died, his wife called me. She told me he probably wouldn’t be with us much longer. She held the phone up to his ear so he and I could talk. His voice was very weak; his breathing was labored. But he said that as his health declined, he’d been reading as much as he could about recent discoveries in cosmology and physics. He talked about the improbability of not just human life, but the utter improbability of existence itself. He said, “This existence is amazing. If any one of a thousand variables had been off by the tiniest amount, the universe wouldn’t be here. Nothing would be here. But here we are. Isn’t it miraculous? Isn’t God astounding?”  

My friend had learned something that many physicists today seem to agree on: the universe is somehow “fine tuned” to exist and support life. It’s radically unlikely that there is anything at all, rather than just nothing. What people who study this stuff don’t agree on is what that means. For some, it’s evidence of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, the idea that we live in a multiverse. Others disagree and have other ideas. But my friend had his own take on it. For him, the heavens were telling the glory of God, and the earth proclaimed God’s handiwork. His faith led him to study; his study led him outside himself and into his faith tradition and then within himself. It led him to God. I hope that all of our study – whatever we may be studying – will lead us to God and to lives that praise God and praise God’s wisdom.