Acts 5:28-32, 40-41; Revelations 5:11-14; John 21:1-19; Psalm 30
May 5, 2019
Lloyd Penner
Spiritual Drought Pt. 1
You feel empty inside. God seems far away. You don’t feel like praying, reading the Bible or perhaps even coming to worship. You are in a desert spiritually. I have been there and I suspect so have all of us at times. The theme of this homily is the symptoms, causes and impact of spiritual drought. Next Sunday the focus will be spiritual recovery although I will say a few things about that in this homily as well.
I am drawing on my experiences, various scriptures and Brian McLaren’s remarkable book, Naked Spirituality. McLaren says there are four stages in our spiritual life as Christians. In the first stage, which he calls “Simplicity”, we come to faith and are very excited about following Jesus. We want to worship with other Christians. The Bible is alive and we feel really close to God. This is the period of “first love” as the writer of the book of Revelation put it which we heard read a few minutes ago. In this stage we do not doubt our faith. In the second stage, which McLaren calls, “Perplexity”, we start asking questions about our faith. Things are not as straight forward as they were but we still feel close to God.
Then comes Stage Three, “Perplexity” where we feel spiritually empty which is often accompanied by serious doubts about various aspects of our faith. (Here I read extensively from McLaren’s book in which he describes his personal journey into the “dark night of the soul” to quote St. John of the Cross. Everything felt dark spiritually and he felt like “ditching his faith” and he questioned the faith of other Christians.)
The Bible is full of stories of people questioning God. In Psalm 13, David says, “How long Lord will you hide your face from me. How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart” Or Psalm 32, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me? (Words that Jesus used cried out on the cross-even Jesus felt abandoned by God.) The Psalmist continues, “My God, I cry out by day but you do not answer, by night but I find no rest.”
And then there is the classic story of Job who feels abandoned by everybody: his wife, his so-called friends and God. He is so spiritually distraught that he curses the day he was born. In the book of Lamentations the author has a lost list of grievances against God which end with the words. “God has filled me with bitterness and my soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is” The author has hit “rock bottom” spiritually. We know from many other Biblical passages that God does not “fill us with bitterness” but these Biblical writers are simply sharing honestly how they feel.
But what are the causes of spiritual dryness? We have time to explore just a few. One is the loss of our first love for God and for others which had happened to the church at Ephesus. When you first fall in love with your partner your love is all consuming but then over time it can diminish. A strong spiritual life is much more than feelings but feelings are involved. We need to keep the spark of love alive for a relationship to last and that includes love for God. From time to time it is important to inject emotion and passion into our spiritual life. McLaren says he often feels closest to God when worshipping in a Black church or Pentecostal service where emotional worship is encouraged. Yesterday I listened online to Keith Green (who died tragically 35 years ago in a plane crash) singing his great song, “There is a Redeemer”. His passionate love for Jesus Christ so evident in this song sent shivers down my spine and I felt renewed spiritually.
We also heard the Revelation passage describing the church at Laodicea. Here the problem was different. Laodicea was a very rich city and materialism had infected the church which had created a kind of “spiritual stupor” (lukewarmness is the word the writer of Revelation uses). I quote, “You say I am rich, I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing. But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” In other words, their spirituality was a fraud. Materialism had drained the life out of the church. Anything that takes over our lives can undermine our spiritual life and love for God. The Bible calls these things idols or false gods. It’s necessary from time to time to ask ourselves, “What are my priorities?” Jesus asks us to “seek first the kingdom of God”.
This brings us to the issue of sin as a cause of spiritual dryness and decline. I find Rob Bell’s definition of sin very helpful. “Sin is anything that disrupts shalom (harmony). Anything that separates us from ourselves, other people, from the earth and from God.” If we are to renew our spiritual life we must be completely honest. Are my thoughts, actions and what I say promoting harmony or disharmony, unity or separation. Later in the service when we have our Confession time just before communion will be a good time to ask ourselves these hard questions.
Intellectual doubts can also sap the energy out of our spiritual life. It’s normal and indeed necessary to ask questions about our faith. The Bible is a hard book to fully understand. It was written thousands of years ago in a world very different from our own. To a large extent we are products of the Scientific Revolution. The Bible, which relies heavily on miracle stories to get sits meaning across, presents a challenge to modern people who have been schooled to apply reason and scientific methodology to all aspects of life. This can lead to serious doubts about some of the fundamentals of the Christian faith resulting in an erosion of one’s previously vibrant relationship with God.
Finally, spiritual dryness is often connected with other issues in our lives such as stress, job insecurity, conflicts in one’s family or at work and psychological conditions such as depression. It’s hard in those situations to know what the underlying cause of our spiritual dryness is.
But wait. There can be good news in the midst of spiritual crisis. It can be the springboard to spiritual recovery and an even deeper relationship with God. McLaren calls Stage 4 – the period of harmony and new insights into our faith. Remember the saying, “It’s always darkest just before the dawn.” In the words of a song we often sing, “Streams will flow in the dessert and wasteland will be a watered garden” More on this next Sunday.