Fourth Sunday of Advent-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The 4th Sunday of Advent Year B
December 20, 2020
This week, I learned of a spiritual
construct that I’ve never heard of before.
I am now calling it Holy Indifference.
I was listening to a podcast with a
spiritual director and writer named Ruth Haley Barton, and she was talking
about this spiritual gift of indifference and the importance of indifference in
personal and communal discernment and in accepting God’s will for your life.
But
here’s the thing. Often when we talk
about indifference, we mean apathy; not being too hot or cold about particular issues. Indifference often has the suggestion of a
coldness or an uncaring. But Ruth Haley
Barton’s definition of indifference is not apathy; it’s actually very
different. She says, “In the language of spiritual formation [this holy
indifference] speaks to being indifferent [or not attached] to anything but the
will of God, so it means that we’re indifferent [or not attached] to matters of
our own comfort or safety; we’re not thinking so much about ego gratification;
we’re giving up appearances. We’re
indifferent to that. We’re indifferent
[or not attached] to our own pleasure, and we’re even indifferent [or not
attached] to what our own personal preferences are, and what it is we think we
want. It is a state of wide-openness to
God in which we are free from undue attachment to outcomes, and we have the
capacity to relinquish anything that might keep us from choosing for God and
God’s will and God’s loving plan. Outside of Jesus himself, Mary is the
clearest expression of this spiritual indifference.”[i]
So, let’s look at our readings for today
because they give us two different glimpses, one of someone who is not
practicing holy indifference and one who is.
First, we have King David in our Old
Testament reading for today. David has
this great idea that now that he is established as king in Israel, he is going
to build a house for the Lord. He gets
buy in for his plan from the prophet Nathan, but then God lets them know God’s
indifference to this plan in a lovely, playful way. “Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build
me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up
the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a
tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of
Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom
I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built
me a house of cedar?"
David’s plan is somewhat self-serving (but
cloaked in piety, which is a temptation we all face) because if he builds God a
house, then that will not only confer some status on the king who houses the
Lord, but it also means that David can always know exactly where to find God
when David gets in a pinch. But God
reminds David that up until this point, God has been at large, loose and wild and
free, working in the world. God does not
want to inhabit a temple or a building but rather God wants to inhabit a
people.
And we get this, don’t we? We who have had to struggle with not being
able to come into this space, this building, where we are accustomed to
connecting with God. But this is an
important reminder for all of us that God is not and will not be bound to this
building or any building.
One of my colleagues was talking about
this and about how she has grown and changed in her faith over the years. “For many years,” she said, “the church and
the liturgy were the container for my faith. It was like going to the gym. I would go to the gym to work out. I would go to church to pray and to work on
my faith.” Now, she quotes another
writer who says that “faith is in the mutable and messy processes of our lives.”[ii] My friend is learning to look for God in the
change, in the mess of her life, and that has shaped her faith in ways she
could not have imagined before.
And then there’s Mary. She offers the model of holy indifference for
us in her response to the angel’s perplexing news: “let it be unto me according
to your word.” In that one prayer of
indifference, Mary shows that she is willing to embrace the invitation of God,
even though it is going to completely blow up the plans that she and her
parents have for her life—marriage to a good man who will take care of
her. In embracing God’s invitation, in
living into that holy indifference, Mary sacrifices her own vision of her life
and gives it up with complete trust of God and God’s work in the world. In and through her indifference, she puts
herself completely at God’s mercy, and she seems completely composed about
that.
One of my other friends talked about how
normally this week, she would be preparing her guest room for her mom to come
and stay. But because her mom isn’t
traveling this year, her guestroom is full of so many things: her husband’s guitars, all of her supplies
for her knitting, so many other aspects of the detritus of their lives that
have accumulated in that room over the year.
She noticed that our collect for the day has us praying that God will
purify our consciences by God’s daily visitation so that when Christ comes, he
may find in us “a mansion prepared for himself…” and my friend confessed that she
would most frequently maybe invite Christ into the cluttered guest room of her
heart to stay when it was convenient but that she didn’t think that she had
made the room of a spacious and lovely mansion for him where he could stay
always.
And I resonate with that, too. For me, I think it is because I am nowhere
near where Mary was. Most of the time, I
do not practice holy indifference. I
struggle to hand my life over to God and to relinquish my attachment to my
preferences, my comfort, my ego, and
what I think I want. But fortunately,
Ruth Haley Barton reminded me in her podcast that coming to indifference isn’t
like flipping a switch. There is a process
to coming to indifference to anything but the will of God, and we are not alone
in that process; for Mary it was the angel who accompanied her; for us it is
the Holy Spirit and, I would say, the communion of the saints and all believers—the
Church that isn’t the building.
The first step in this process is to
pray the prayer for indifference; this means acknowledging our attachments, our
preferences, our commitment to keeping up appearances and our egos and asking
God to free us from all that. It has
been eye opening for me this week to realize that I really need to do that work
around Christmas and what that experience is going to be and feel like for us
this year.
So, your invitation this week is to join
me in praying the prayer for holy indifference, for an openness to God’s will
and the willingness to embrace God’s invitation. If you find that you have attained
indifference at some point, then your prayer may shift to a prayer of
indifference: “let it be unto me according
to your word.”
If
you are struggling with the connection of your faith with this building or in
gathering together, then I invite you to not only pray for holy indifference
but also to begin looking for God who will never be contained to this building
but who is found out loose and wild and at work in the world and in the “mutable
and messy process of our lives.”
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