The new book by Barbara Brown Taylor that I’m reading gives good advice to our confirmands and to all believers who don’t think they know everything yet (and I include myself in this august company.) The title is An Altar in the World. Many of you know that I think very highly of Professor Taylor, who was an Episcopal priest for many years. So it pained me to feel some disagreement with her at the beginning of this book.

Since she has left the ministry, she has cooled a bit on organized religion and as I read I realized how much I have warmed to organized religion and enjoyed this year at Saint Nicholas. This second trip through the lectionary has pushed me toward deeper explorations of scripture. We had Safe Nights and Relay for Life to open us to the community around us. We’ve gone some distance on the journey of becoming a discipleship church. We are building the North Wing and doing it well and lots of people are involved in the doing and deciding. We had what I thought was the best Soup and Study I’ve been a part of, challenging and inspiring at the same time. We took some risks to try new ways of worship during Holy Week and they seemed to work very well, again with lots of involvement. Our new member classes are full of bright and interesting and committed people. All confirmation classes are wonderful but this one just seemed to continue to unfold and grow and be a blessing to all of us. All of these experiences were made possible by the community here at Saint Nicholas and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of them.

But as I read further, I realized that I was doing Professor Taylor a bit of a disservice. Her point was not so much that organized religion is a failure, but rather that God is not to be found only in the church or only in our heads. God is to be found in church and out of it, in our heads but also in our hearts when we love, and in our feet when we walk, in our hands when we work, in our throats when we speak or sing or pronounce a blessing. God promises to be among us when two or more are gathered. But that size requirement does not exhaust the possibilities for God’s involvement in the world. And most importantly, God is more interested in how we live than what we believe.

As I think about this confirmation class (always with a smile!), so many of them are so very bright, such excellent students, so thoughtful and dedicated. I love this about them – they are as intelligent and as hard-working as any group of young people I’ve met, and I wouldn’t ever want this to change! But I also think that Professor Taylor has her finger on something as well – that spirituality is only partly about what you know and what you believe but is also and even more about meeting and enjoying and loving this God who is loose in the world in all sorts of ways and guises. The body learns and the body knows how to recognize God in the slow rhythms of the seasons and the smell of pine trees and the feel of grass against our feet. We never want to lose these experiences of God. To live only in the mind cuts off too much of how we need to live in the world – to restrict our spirituality to our intellect makes for a thin and meager soul.

Join me in saluting this delightful confirmation class, this class of 2009, a group of young people rich with promise, bright and accomplished, fun and full of spirit. Join them and us as we all grow in wisdom and grace, mind and body and fully embodied Spirit.

Pastor Greg