Deep and Wide: The Lenten Cup

Sunday was a momentous day for our congregation as we ordained and installed new officers for our church leadership. Mark Lund, Cathy Lile, and Jake Bolen were ordained and installed as deacons; Bob Gaskins and Dylan Cormican were ordained and installed as Elders.

You may be asking what our “Lenten Cup” has to do with Ordination. Well — here’s how I see it.  Sunday I told the stories of several lovely tea cups, coffee mugs, and basic, utilitarian glasses that I had brought from home. By telling the stories of the cups, you all came to understand why each one was special to me. I think the most telling one may have been the coffee cup from my mother’s china set. She was married in 1964, and I recall using that china only one time — for one of my parent’s milestone anniversaries. The cup I shared on Sunday morning still had the German manufacturing sticker on the bottom; my mother had always said she was saving it for something “special.”  Unfortunately, Dad died in 1992 and we never used it after that. Mom died in 2012 and was perhaps still waiting for something special.

“Okay, Paula” you might be thinking. “Enough about the cups — what do they have to do with my faith?”  Just follow me. . . I’m getting there (I promise)!

Cups are essential to our life, as we cannot live without water and fluids. So even if we fashion a cup out of our hands at a crystal-clear mountain stream, we can still see those hands as a cup and they share the same basic characteristics of any cup: they have the capacity to be filled; they have a limit to how much goes in; every one of them is different.

But why cups?  The roots of the Presbyterian denomination are post-reformation Scotland, and we have a strong connection to Celtic Spirituality. One aspect of Celtic spirituality is the understanding that there is no difference between the secular world and the spiritual world — any commonplace or ordinary object can point us to God:

It was a “holy worldliness” to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase where a holistic approach to life was expressed daily in the real incarnational ordinariness of life as it is. There was no false divide between the sacred and secular. Where an integrated life, of body and soul, work and worship, wonder and ordinariness; prayer and life are the norm. A sacramental outlook that because it sees God in everything, encourages a reverence for God’s creation and a respect for the care of his world. An everyday spirituality of ordinariness accessible to all. Never anti –intellectual it was an earthed spirituality that met people where they were. People did not have to climb ecclesiastical walls or learn ‘holy God speak’ to encounter ‘a thin place.’

Esther De Waal puts it well; ‘The Celtic approach to God opens up a world in which nothing is too common to be exalted and nothing is so exalted that it cannot be made common.’ They believed that the presence of God infused daily life and thus transforms it, so that at any moment, any object, any job of work, can become a place for encounter with God. (click here to read more about Celtic Spirituality).

The features of an ordinary cup that teach us so much about our own life and our faith is several fold. Like the stories I told about each cup on our Communion table last week, we each have stories of our own that make us unique, special, and treasured.  Like the cups on the table, we each have the capacity to hold something — good stuff or yucky stuff. And like the cups on the table, we each can be filled with only so much (which makes what we fill our cup with all the more important).

Jesus often used ordinary objects to teach us about life. Whether it was a fig tree, a coin, a sheep, or a cup, the metaphor was rarely lost on Jesus’ first century listeners nor on us.  Consider this teaching of Jesus near the end of his ministry on earth:

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.” Matthew 23:25-26  

See? Jesus says it like it is. . . the pharisees and lawyers of his day were so wrapped up in “appearing” holy and righteous, that they rarely worked on the inside to become truly clean. I think too often we get pretty wrapped up with our appearance as well.  But there is, of course, hope:

“Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.”   2 Tim. 2:21 CEV

So — that’s what we’re doing. We will first clean the yucky stuff out of our cup and then work on what it is that we put inside. And as a special charge to our newly ordained officers, I reminded them that we have many assorted and unique cups in our church family, and it is their calling to minister to all of them, regardless of what the outside looks like; and encourage them to look compassionately at what is on the inside.

I pray that this Lenten season offers you many opportunities to experience the “Holy” in the “Ordinary” and that you will begin to fill your cup with the good stuff, so that if you ever begin to spill over, it’s only beautiful, loving things that are flowing out rather than the yucky, sinful and selfish things we become so filled with over time.

 

In Christ,

Rev. P