Hello, my name is Vince, and last Saturday, I had the great honor of being ordained a priest in The Episcopal Church. Returning here to Epiphany to inaugurate my ministry as a priest is a joy and privilege, so thank you.
I’m going to tell a bit of this story, from unbaptized adult convert to where I am now, and how Paul’s illumination of the Spirit’s presence in prayer, in “sighs too deep for words,” provides, for the recent convert, a bridge from their spiritual life as it existed before to life in the Spirit of Christ, and for the established Christian, important spiritual nourishment.
My journey began in March of 2018, when I got on the internet and searched for a nearby Episcopal Church. I walked into the next service and was greeted with warmth at the door and true welcome in the pew. I was moved by the beautiful music and the feeling of my hesitant voice being carried and encouraged by many voices. When the preacher got up to the pulpit, he had something to say. The preacher–looked a lot like this guy over here–brought a word of comfort and encouragement in a difficult week. He brought a perspective infused with grace, with a clarity about the relationship between the happenings of the world, and something he kept coming back to called the Kingdom of God. I was intrigued. After the service, I met a few other people who were kind, yes, but who I also felt to be spiritually grounded.
The following week there was a newcomer’s welcome at the Conn’s house, where I learned about all that was happening at Epiphany. I got involved with: helping a little in the garden; the silent retreats on campus; the youth group; the adult forums, as a student and then teacher; Sacred Ground; online morning prayer during the pandemic; the first session of Relata; and cooking lunch for the Sages of this church. In each program I found many people, not just leadership, with whom I could laugh and share in life, and from whom I received inspiration and encouragement in my life as a Christian.
Then, on All Saints Day in 2019, to my great joy, friends and family joined me here for my baptism. I then served in the altar party, as a crucifer and eucharistic minister, verger, as well as an intercessor leading the prayers of the people.
Throughout this time, there was one small part of the service, in addition to the central liturgy, that meant a lot to me. Every Sunday it is said at the end of the announcements, and is printed on much of Epiphany’s media. Would you like to say it with me? (At the 11 o clock I’m going to say something playfully disparaging about the 8:45, if you’re half-hearted.) So, it is, of course, “Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, you have a place at Epiphany.”
Yes. This is a serious theological statement. That in a place of confident Christian worship, fellowship, and service, people of different spiritual backgrounds, and understandings, and inclinations are welcome to make this their spiritual home. It rests on a confidence in Epiphany’s identity, and a great trust in the working of the spirit, both of which then enable an open hospitality to welcome an other.
That other was me, so again, thank you.
I’d lived the first good chunk of my life as “spiritual but not religious,” reading Siddhartha in high school and the Stoics and many others in college; going on a long Buddhist silent meditation retreat, and becoming an organic farmer to be close to life and the Earth. I’d read the Bible in college, but I’d read a lot of things, and I freely picked and chose spiritual insights and practices as they inspired me.
But in 2018, by age 33, I longed for something more. And I needed a place that could take me as I was. I needed a place that could both embrace and challenge my beliefs and ways of being. Because I was not spiritually dead before arriving at Epiphany, as the spirit is alive and at work in all people, at all times. But to become Christian, there would have to be bridges from my spiritual life as it was, and a life with Christ.
Paul, in the section of his letter to the Romans we heard today, offers one such bridge.
“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
This is a bridge for anyone coming to a Christian faith, as I was, because it offers a vision of the Christian life that begins in your body, in your breath, in a long inhalation and deep exhalation. When I connect to this experience, to a sigh such as this, I feel a note of finality. I feel it as that exhalation when you’ve given your all and need to seek another way; or when you’re coming to terms, on an embodied level, with something difficult; or when you’re in the process of accepting the world as it is, and striving to call it blessed. I feel the sigh as the longing for another world.
This sigh is not unique to me, or unique to you, as particular as any of the experiences might be that prompt it.
Paul tells us, this sigh is the Holy Spirit, in you. And what is the Spirit doing? It is calling out, interceding on your behalf. And who is it calling out to? To God, the Searcher of Hearts, who “knows what is the mind of the Spirit.”
To believe what Paul is saying is to believe that God is always in communion with us, in our struggles through life, right there, especially there, in our weakness and longings that defy being put into words. The listening ears of God are keenly tuned to hear prayers of this kind. NT Wright wrote, “God hears and answers the prayer which we only know as painful groanings, the tossings and turnings of an unquiet spirit standing before its maker with the pains and puzzles of the world heavy on its heart.”
God does not require us to digest our pain into a doctrinally accurate and eloquent prayer; nor does God require us to endure suffering with the equanimity of a saint. No; in the raw stuff of emotion and the pre-rational longings in the dark, and tender, center of our hearts, the Spirit will move, interceding with sighs too deep for words.
In that telling we have crossed the bridge, leaving behind the label “spiritual but not religious,” and step into the life of the Church. But this of course is not the end of the journey, if you then remain in prayer, continue crossing bridges as they come up, maybe with the very support of a discernment group, there’s no telling where you might end up. You might become a priest! For the phrase is not “Wherever you are spiritually, we’ll join you there.” No, it’s, “you have a place at Epiphany,” and the unsaid part is that Epiphany is animated by the Holy Spirit, always on the move.
We join this journey with Christ, and tasting the first fruits of the Spirit, we long for more. God meets us in our longing, and propels us forward. We join our voices together in songs of worship, our hands in prayer and service, and our hearts in fellowship. Paul writes, slightly earlier than the portion of the chapter given, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” (Rom 8:11) This is the loving promise from which we will never be separated, the foundation of our hope. Paul will then affirm that no worldly pain or want or power or “anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:39) We are met in our prayer that began with weakness and unknowing, and offered the unbreakable promise of redemption.
This outstretched hand is offered to new converts, as well as to the long faithful, as we are all perpetually called, priest and lay, to grow in our faith. So if at times you, even you, feel distant from the perfect and ever-present communion of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of the Spirit in you calling out to meet the loving God, to bring you further into the life of Christ, I offer you one last encouragement, as you have so powerfully encouraged me.
My spiritual director begins every session with a prayer, and one of the things he always prays for is coherence. This isn’t, at first, a petitionary prayer—that the person across from him might for once be coherent—but a prayer of thanksgiving, that in my doubts and worries and anxieties, in my half-thoughts and contrary emotions, there is a coherence already present. It becomes petitionary, in a sense, as my heart joins him in asking for the grace to become more aware and more trusting in the communication between the center of me and that which is at the center of everything. Faith is that the coherence is there, ready to be discerned, even when I am not feeling all that coherent.
Similarly, when the “pains and puzzles of the world [are] heavy on your heart,” may you remember that just below the surface, there is a movement, of the Spirit moving in you and seeking God, and God seeking you, “to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that Jesus might be firstborn within a large family.” (Rom 8:29) This is just below the surface.
May you rest in prayer, with sighs too deep for words, into this divine reality, the Kingdom of God.