The Gold Standard
The Second Sunday of Easter – March 30, 2008
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[1 Peter 1:3-9/John 20:19-31]

“The Gold Standard.” It’s an expression that, to most of us, means that something is being done to the best or highest standard. In medical science, for example, the gold standard test or procedure is the one that has been scientifically demonstrated to be the most reliable and to produce the best results. Given the situation of the economy of late and the rapidly rising price of gold, the phrase also hearkens back to the system where currency is backed by gold reserves alone; where all scrip, paper money, is redeemable for the equivalent amount of gold; or in a bi-metal system silver. When I use the phrase I’m referring to the first meaning. I want to talk about the gold standard in developing our relationship with God.

Our Gospel lesson today draws us back to the day of Resurrection – eight days ago. Just a liturgical aside, the term for this period is an octave; which in the mind of the church was one long day in which one continued the celebration. The stress on the “first day of the week” is meant to remind us of God’s creative work in Genesis one. On the first day God starts everything moving and on this “first day” it is no different. A whole new creative process is launched by the Resurrection. “On this day the Lord has acted,” the Psalmist says, and God again overcomes the formless void, the chaos, now of human existence, to bring forth a new creation. The new creation is one of the reasons that the Psalmist’s words, “this is the day the Lord has made” were picked up by the early Church and tied to the Easter event. The Resurrection does precisely what the Psalmist says and initiates a new day of rejoicing and gladness for all of us.

On that new day Jesus stood in the midst of their chaos and confusion, their fear and their loneliness and spoke a creative word, just as the Creator had done to begin the world. The Word-made-flesh, now risen from the dead stands among them and says “peace.” “Peace be with you.” The peace he bids them isn’t like that of the world. This is the gold standard of peace. It is not a peace that comes from the absence of conflict. It is not peace that is conditional – more truce than peace – that waits suspiciously for hostilities to break out again. It is not a peace that is temporary or passing. No, Jesus says “peace be with you” and bids them, and us, a peace that comes from within the heart and life of the believer. Jesus bids a peace that abides and is present because heart and mind and life are brought into alignment with the very heart and mind and life of God; living as God proposes and according to God’s purposes.

As the Resurrection remakes the world it awakens within us the consciousness, the awareness that we are as much or more spiritual beings as we are physical/fleshly beings. This is the living hope talked about in 1 Peter that is more precious than gold. What God does in the Resurrection is to renew God’s trust in Creation, in us, and in so doing challenges us to respond and to become the people God made us to be and intends us to be – God’s very image and likeness. The Resurrection, then, isn’t about endings, but about beginnings. What God is doing in the Risen Lord is inviting us to new experience, new life and new growth – with almost unlimited possibilities. I like what Matthew Fox has to say in his book Original Blessing:

The psycho-spiritual expansion is so great that Meister Eckhart can say that a person – even a saint – who lived a thousand years would know more about love in the last hour of the thousandth year than at any previous time. Our expansion has no limit – God is the limit! We are as big as we allow ourselves to be. Julian of Norwich experienced this same sense of our bigness, indeed of our divinity. “We are of God. That is what we are. I saw no difference between God and our Substance but as if it were all God.” A blessing theology is necessarily a spirituality of maturation, of growth, or expansion, for this is the manner in which all of nature’s processes operate. We grow from seed and egg to flowers to fruits, and then we are transformed by our many deaths into new life of many kinds. This reverence for growth and the cycles it leads us into mirrors the psychology of the Jewish people. As Claude Tresmontant puts it, “The Hebrews showed a passionate attention to the process of fecundity, the maturing process.” We ought to invest our passion not in keeping things the way they are but into our growing and expanding. Thus Meister Eckhart calls us to our ultimate growth, our growth into divinity, “A seed of God is in us. Now a seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree; a hazel seed into a hazel tree. A seed of God grows into God.” [p. 84-85]

It is important for us, then, to look inward and see what may be keeping us from this growth and experience of peace we’re offered in the Risen lord. If we look closely, we’ll see that at the core are doubts – yes, just like Thomas had – and these doubts come as a result of various experiences we’ve had. We may doubt because we lack trust, trust in our selves, trust in others, and trust in God – all because we’ve been through something that’s made us wary of taking the risk of trust. Doubt can also be born of fear, or come out of memories of hurt, or out of an unwillingness to forgive, to seek reconciliation and to then let our lives move on. Unwillingness to forgive often comes from disputes that are unhealed and grudges that have been carefully nurtured, because it seems easier, more satisfying to do this than to again risk reconciliation. At the root all these things – and I’m sure given time we could come up with even more – cause us to turn inward in the wrong way and distract us from keeping our eyes focused on the God who is right here with us and right here within us.

I can tell you, from experience, that anger, frustration, unhealed hurtful memories can indeed distract us and keep us from knowing peace. I know because I’ve experienced it and have then become angry and frustrated with myself because I know better. Well, the truth is, it’s not about knowing better, it’s about knowing where to turn. We have to step back and go inward to the abiding presence of God – not what we think, or want, but looking to what God wants and how God is directing us into the pathways of peace and growth.

Trying to fix ourselves, trying to develop the peace the world cannot give on our own doesn’t work. It is when we turn to God and open ourselves to God that well enter into a circle of trust that will draw us into God’s peace that, as Paul says, “passes human understanding.” The great spiritual teachers of the Church tell us what we have to do – and here, again, is the gold standard – is to learn to habitually practice the presence of God. It’s a simple and as complex as that – we have to learn to be consciously and unconsciously aware of God’s presence with us at all times.

We all have habits – the word, by the way, comes from the Latin word for dwelling or house – because these habits are where we live. We seek to develop good habits – like bathing regularly, brushing our teeth, and living in a truthful way – because these good habits make for a good life. Well, it’s no different for our spiritual lives. We need to develop habits that remind us of God’s presence and how we are to live in that presence. Orthodox Jews, for example, wear phylacteries, little leather-covered boxes with a verse from the Torah inside to physically remind them to “put on” God’s law and thus to live it. Many Jewish homes also have what is called a mezuzah, a little box affixed to the doorframe that they touch as they leave their homes. It, too, has a verse from the Torah reminding them that whether they go in or out, sit or stand, no matter what they do, they are the Lord’s people and are to be mindful of the Lord. To be honest, that’s one purpose that religious art can serve for us, to be a visual reminder that we are living and moving in the presence of the living God.

We can develop good spiritual habits. Taking time to pray each day – even if it’s only five minutes, perhaps using one of the devotions from The Upper Room – is an important spiritual habit, practice or discipline to develop. Maybe pulling out our church covenant – if you can’t find your covenant card, we have more – and using it as a guide for the examination of our conscience at the close of the day. Asking ourselves how we’ve done today in living as we have told God and others that we would live. There are copies of The Southwell Litany available, too, that can also help us to focus our prayer or to examine our conscience. I would also stress that we should take some time each day to read the Bible – which is how we believe that God continues to speak to us – and read it in such a way as to listen for God. I will happily take some time and do a session on how to read the Bible using the technique called lectio divina or holy reading – having a how-to can help and that’s why we’re here.

I would also suggest that even our ordinary, daily work can be a means of experiencing God. The English poet and mystic George Herbert wrote about how constructive work can be in his poem “The Elixir.” Let me share it with you.

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for thee:
Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with this tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.
This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

[In Diogenes Allen Spiritual Theology, p. 84-85]

It all begins to make sense when we seek God’s leading and instruction – then we find “the famous stone that turneth all to gold.”

Diogenes Allen also reminds us that Herbert’s line, “not rudely, as a beast, to run into an action” suggests that we’re to grow in spiritual maturity – which we’ve talked about. It means that when we do something we know the reason for what we’re doing. When we pray, when we read Scripture, when we behave in our homes, businesses, wherever in a manner consistent with being a follower of Jesus Christ we know why we’re doing it – it isn’t just rote. We must always be turning to be taught by “our God and King,” so that we may truly become the Lord’s free people.

The gold standard of Christian living begins when we open ourselves to hear Jesus, the Risen One, say to us, “peace be with you.” As we seek to live in God’s peace and act out of God’s peace, the peace that comes from within and not from mere externals, we’ll learn to forgive ourselves and to forgive others, to establish circles and communities of loving trust that make a difference, that offer radical hospitality and change lives. It has to begin somewhere and it always has to begin with us and with the desire to live that gold standard.

So, I challenge all of us gathered here on this first day of the week to be open, to listen for the voice of the Risen One, who stands in our midst and says as really today as he did long ago, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” He speaks those words to us, calls us to be agents of reconciliation in a broken and hurting world. He does this, as Peter reminds us, “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” The gold standard calls us to walk by faith, not by sight and to make the Lord present through our lives and actions. That’s the challenge we have before us both as individual believers and as a church – to live, and in so living to become the gold standard.