Acts 5:27-32
In 2019, less than a year before the COVID pandemic hit, Viola and I took the big trip we had talked about for years: we took ten days off and traveled to Great Britain, just the two of us. The only reservations we made ahead of time were in Scotland, on a small island known as Iona. It’s the site of an ancient Christian abbey that has been rebuilt as a center of something known as Celtic spirituality. The abbey existed at least as far back as the sixth century after Christ. The monks who lived there were courageous because Vikings came through from time to time, killing the monks and looting the abbey. But the monks persisted for centuries. That took courage.
When I read our passage from Acts this morning, I’m impressed by the courage of Peter and John in standing up to the high priest so soon after Peter had denied Jesus three times. The day of Pentecost, which we’ll celebrate before too much longer, marked the coming of the Holy Spirit in a novel and powerful way. Peter and John had learned to follow the Spirit rather than fear religious and civil authority. That takes courage.
It’s easy to let authority tell us what truth is supposed to be, rather than struggle with it ourselves. That’s even true in science, though theoretically, experimentation, not authority, is supposed to determine truth in the scientific method. Scientists are as human as the rest of us, though; if the scientific establishment believes something to be true, a challenger has to amass an awful lot of clear evidence to begin to persuade them to take a second look. And that’s as it should be.
Challenging religious authority is probably much harder. When Copernicus showed that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around, religious authorities opposed him – not only the Catholic Church but Protestant stalwarts like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther said that he didn’t believe Copernicus because in the Bible, “Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.” Therefore, Luther reasoned that it’s the sun that moves, and not the earth. His reasoning would not be regarded today as sound theological methodology.
It strikes me that a lot of people have been standing up to religious authorities during my lifetime. Or maybe a better metaphor would be that people have simply been walking away. It wasn’t that it took a lot of courage to leave the Church. A lot of people just haven’t seen the point anymore. Too often, churches haven’t been able to give them any compelling reason to stay.
What that says to me is that the Church has often fallen into spiritual irrelevance. Whatever else churches are for, they must help us deal with real life! But in our efforts to attract more people, we’ve often made religion so simple that it’s unattached to the struggles of real life. The very idea of salvation is often presented as something easy and convenient, unconnected to biblical issues like justice and peace for all, or even simple compassion for others. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing during WWII, called it “cheap grace.”
I went to seminary to look for a sense of spirituality that mattered. It began to sink in, but then my former denomination’s politics spun out of control. I left the seminary and church employment in 1990, angry and frustrated. I still wanted to find meaningful spirituality, but though I continued to work in volunteer roles, I just didn’t see what I was looking for. I eventually had something of a midlife crisis, sitting in church and getting angrier by the week for no reason I could think of. If you had asked me to preach a sermon then, I’d have shaken my head and said, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
At that point, a good Cajun friend introduced me to a little book called Everything Belongs by a Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. He invited me to take part in a men’s group that discussed books like that one and went on prayer retreats together. That book and that group changed my life. They led me to a spirituality that became part of my real and very imperfect life.
Eventually the group studied a book by John Phillip Newell called Christ of the Celts. It was pretty good, so I started exploring Celtic Christianity. The word “Celtic” is frankly kind of problematic in an ethnological sense; a lot of different groups can get subsumed under that title. In common use today, though, it refers generally to the people of Ireland and Scotland.
The Roman Empire conquered what we now call England, but it never managed to conquer Ireland or Scotland. The Romans finally just gave up and built an incredibly long defensive wall along the entire border separating England (Britannia) from Scotland (Caledonia). Ireland and Scotland were Christianized by lone missionaries in the early centuries of the Church, but the Roman Church couldn’t control its far-flung Celtic outposts any more than the Roman Empire could.
Celtic Christianity thus developed somewhat independently of the Church in western Europe. It was relatively free to build on its earlier pre-Christian roots. That gave it a different emphasis on things, and even after the Roman Catholic church eventually established firmer control of its Celtic churches, those emphases continued.
I thought today that I’d give a very brief synopsis of what I find so helpful about Celtic spirituality and what drew me to Iona in the first place. It’s a beautiful island about three miles long, and people do go there just for that reason, quite apart from any religious appeal. You don’t go there by accident; it took a day’s travel from Edinburgh by train, bus, and two ferries. But it was the highlight of our trip, and I thought I’d share some of the reasons why.
Perhaps the base of Celtic spirituality is its appreciation for God’s creation. Human beings are part of that creation, made in God’s own image, and all creation is seen as very good, just like it says in Genesis. Christianity in continental Europe – and later in the Protestant Reformation – often tended to see the natural world in a negative light; they often saw the body as nothing but a source of sensual temptation.
St. Augustine and John Calvin went so far as to call human beings “totally depraved,” containing nothing good at all. But Celtic Christians maintained their appreciation for humans as integral parts of Creation. Nature and nature’s beauty were sources of wonder, pathways to communing with God. The Apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 1:16-17 that “All things have been created through him and for him… in him all things hold together.” John’s gospel tells us that “In the beginning was the Word… All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” Unlike much of the rest of European Christianity, Celtic spirituality never lost sight of God’s presence in his Creation.
Celtic spirituality is in many ways much like Hebrew spirituality of the Old Testament, which continued to affirm a Creator God in the face of other religions that saw the physical world as either bad or irrelevant.
A Christian scholar named John Scotus Eriugena was born in Ireland in the ninth century. He wrote that “Every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany,” or a manifestation of God to us. One of the things I appreciate most about Celtic spirituality is their simple prayers. Here’s a seventh century Irish prayer known as the “Breastplate of Saint Patrick:”
For my shield this day I call:
Heaven’s might,
Sun’s brightness,
Moon’s whiteness,
Fire’s glory,
Lightning’s swiftness,
Wind’s wildness,
Ocean’s depth,
Earth’s solidity,
Rock’s immobility.
Every line of this prayer reflects the perception of nature as the gift and creation of God. Celtic prayer was bound up with everyday life. It dealt with small things. There was a prayer for lighting a fire in the hearth every morning. Here’s the English version of one prayer for going to bed:
I lie down with God; may he lie down with me.
I sleep with God; may he be present in my dreams.
I trust in God; may he protect me from all danger.
I rise up with God; may God rise up with me.
I walk with God; may he be always at my side.
I rely on God; may he strengthen me in my labor.
I eat with God; may God be in my bread.
I drink with God; may God be in my wine.
I live with God; may God live within me.
This next prayer spoke to me especially during my midlife crisis:
I am full of doubt, yet I trust in God. I cannot believe all I am taught.
The doctrines of the Church are complex; some I cannot understand.
Some seem to make no sense. Some make sense, but are implausible.
The priest may tell me I’m a sinner; he may inform me that good people believe,
that doubt is a sign of sin.
Yet I trust in God. His love makes sense. His love is confirmed by his blessings.
Like Peter and John, it took courage to affirm honest faith in the face of religious authorities who discouraged honest questions. I have never milked a cow, and I never hope to milk one, but I liked this prayer for milking cows:
Bless, O God, my little cow; bless, O God, my desire;
Bless Thou my partnership and the milking of my hands, O God.
Bless, O God, each teat; Bless, O God, each finger;
Bless Thou each drop that goes into my pitcher, O God.
That’s pretty down to earth. I guess that I’m attracted to Celtic spirituality in part because of the courage it shows. Much like Peter and John in front of the high priest, it’s not afraid to follow where the Spirit leads, rather than do whatever the religious authorities say. For that reason, curiously enough, it tends to honor the apostle John rather than Peter.
In the first couple of centuries after Jesus, bishops in several Mediterranean cities were on a more or less equal footing: the city of Alexandria in Egypt; Antioch in Syria; Constantinople in what is now Turkey; Jerusalem in Israel; and of course, Rome. After the Roman emperor adopted Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion in the fourth century, he naturally paid more attention to the claims of his own bishop in Rome, who was then able to take on more and more authority and power. Rome claimed that Peter had been the first pope, and so Peter stood in people’s minds for the authority of Rome.
The Bible speaks of John, on the other hand, as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John 13:23 tells us that John was reclining closely next to Jesus at the Last Supper; the KJV translates it as “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” The image of John leaning on Jesus’ bosom is an apt metaphor for the intimacy of Celtic prayer: prayer is listening for the heartbeat of God. It’s about the experience of union with God in real life; it’s not a matter of authority or doctrine.
Celtic writers often favored the writings of John because John writes so much about the love of God, rather than the authority of the Church. There’s the gospel of John, with the verse they drilled into us as kids (3:16): “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
The letters of John talk consistently about love. 1 John 4:7-8 says, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…” That’s a radical statement when you think about it. If you love, you already know something about God.
I believe that healthy spirituality is a vital part of a full life. I believe that a strong community is a vital part of a full life. It seems to me that there’s a real need for congregations who are connected spiritually to God as the ground of our being, and to each other in everyday life. There’s a place for congregations who together form a vital sense of community that reaches out and builds each other up.
I believe that’s what we aspire to, and I believe that we’ve begun to build something very special. I’d like to close with this prayer of a Celtic baker. Let’s pray:
As I knead the flour, I think of all the many grains that have been ground to make it.
Christ’s church is like flour, made up of many people of many races,
ground up to make a single dough.
As I watch the dough rise, I think of the yeast’s power,
raising up the weight of flour and water.
Prayer in Christ is like rising dough, drawing together every hope and fear
and lifting them up to God. Amen.
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