21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) – August 25, 2024

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Psalm 34:2-3, 16-21; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69

The Disciplined Pursuit of the Essentials

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been in this series called “Be Imitators of God.” And what I’ve been trying to focus our attention on—by talking about the Olympics and Olympic athletes, and how Paul uses the example of sports throughout his letters, “I can do all things,” “run so as to win”—in all of this, I’ve been trying to focus our attention on one simple thing. And that is this: now, in 2024, in these times which are much more similar to 33AD and the time of the Apostles than they are to 1950 and Dwight Eisenhower—now, in this new Apostolic Age, we have to take up St. Paul’s call to “run the race…to persevere…to go after the imperishable crown!” (c.f., 1 Corinthians 9 and 2 Timothy 4), as Paul urges we should learn from the dedication and sacrifices and single-mindedness of Olympic athletes, like the early Christians we should be dedicated and focused on our pursuit of what is most essential in our faith. In this new Apostolic Age, a disciplined pursuit of the essentials is key.

And why? Because we don’t live in a world where everyone is Christian, and more or less on the same page, and kids will grow up to love God and serve him—nope. “The days are evil,” Paul said last week. These days, just “going with the flow” of everyone else—well, that’s going to take you and you children somewhere you do not want to go. And we’ve seen it! We see it all the time. We’ve seen it in our own families, we’ve seen it in our own community. “Going with the flow”—well the “flow” isn’t going anywhere good.

And so what do we need to do? Make a real, intentional, concerted, determined effort to focus on and to pursue the essentials: personally, as couples, as families, and as a parish. And why? Because there at the beginning, with a little over a hundred people (c.f., Acts 1:15), focused on the essentials, we saw the faith explode into a world-wide, international phenomenon. In this new Apostolic age, we, us, here, just a little over a hundred people—if we focus on the essentials, we can watch the faith explode again.

Trust the Process

The question for today, though, is how? What does this look like? How do we do this? What does this “disciplined pursuit of the essentials” look like? So, to continue the Olympic theme we’ve been using, and athletes and the way they operate, I want to give you an example. One of the athletes that just won gold at the Olympics this year was born in 1994, in Cameroon, there in central Africa. And he grew up playing soccer and volleyball. But at 15 he started playing basketball. He was discovered at a basketball camp there in Cameroon by a formed NBA player, and he moved to the United States. Two years later, he committed to play basketball for one of the top college basketball programs in the country: the University of Kansas. He would only play one year before declaring for the NBA draft, but in that one year he was named the Big 12 defensive player of the year. A few months later he was selected number 3 overall in the draft. But then, because of injuries, he didn’t play for two years. After his first season, he was hurt again. But he never quit. And in his seasons with the NBA, he has been the scoring champion twice, and the league MVP once, and just won Olympic gold. And all throughout, Joel Embiid, a kid from Cameroon who never even touched a basketball until he was 15—Joel Embiid has had one simple phrase: trust the process. It’s even his nickname: Joel “The Process” Embiid.

And this is just it. When it comes to our faith and this disciplined pursuit of what is most essential, what is looks like and how we do this, it comes down to trusting the process. I mean, think of every other athlete ever, think about you when you got on a fitness kick: you committed yourself to a definite plan, a process, a diet, a workout regime, whatever—you committed yourself to a process in the pursuit of a goal. Now, did you stick with it? That’s another question. We heard in the Gospel today how many people left Jesus, in particular over his teaching on the essential practice of the Eucharist. Jesus said last week, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you…Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” But what happened? “As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” But the twelve, they stay, they remain. Why? “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” They decide to stick with Jesus, to trust even when they don’t totally understand, because they know that following him, trusting the process—that’s the path. It’s that famous line from Joshua in our first reading, “As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

A Vine Needs a Trellis

But again, the question is, “What does this look like? How do we do this?” There is another image that Jesus uses—a few chapters later in John 15, Jesus uses an image that the earliest Christians latched onto and that helped them. In John 15, Jesus gives that famous image where he says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me [if you remain in me—again, this is what he just heard about eating his flesh and drinking his blood: eating his flesh and drinking his blood allows us to abide in him, remain in him, be part of the “vine”]—if you abide in me you will bear much fruit.…By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:5, 8). This image of the vine, I think, is very useful.

I was out in Napa Valley in California last year for my little brother’s wedding (his wife is from there), and I was fascinated by wine country. Just vines and grapes everywhere! Row after row of green, each vine rooted in the earth, reaching up to the sun. But the essential part of growth for the vine is the trellis. You never see a vine growing wild on the ground; it always has a support structure with it. When Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches”—what’s the other part of that picture that’s implicit? The trellis! The trellis is what helps the vine to grow. It gets the vine up, off the ground, it guides the vine’s growth in the right direction toward light and life. Without the trellis, the vine could die, or just exist very vulnerable to disease and animals. The earliest Christians latched on to this image and developed what’s called a Rule of Life.

A Rule of Life is a schedule and set of practices and relational rhythms that allow us to abide with Jesus, to remain with him, to bear fruit and be his disciple. It’s an intentional way to schedule our daily, weekly, monthly, annual life in order to align everything according to our goal, this “imperishable crown” Paul talks about, sharing in the life of Jesus Christ himself.

And I know: the word “rule” can be scary, though. But it’s ancient language, so yeah, it can sound strange or off-putting to us. But it’s “rule” of life, singular, not “rules” for life. The earliest Christians used the Latin word regula, from which we get the words “regular” and “regulation” and “ruler” and “rule.” It literally just means “a straight piece of wood.” And some scholars believe it was also word used in the ancient Mediterranean for a trellis in a vineyard. So the first Christians, the Christians in the first Apostolic Age latched on to this image of the vine and the image of a trellis, a regula, a Rule of Life, why? Because in order to her fruit, they needed a structure, a guide, a rule in order to pursue their goal. As one person wrote about this new Apostolic Age we live in, “Nurturing a growing spirituality with depth in [this new Apostolic Age] will require a thoughtful, conscious, intentional plan for our spiritual lives.”

Your Current Rule of Life

Now, one thing you’re probably thinking is how strange this sounds. But each and every single one of us is already living by a Rule of Life, I guarantee it! The question is: do you know what your “Rule” is right now? And do you know where your “trellis” is leading? How do I know each one of us has a rule? Because we all have a plan for the things we most value. Most of us have a plan for our money, or what we call a budget. We have a plan for our time, or what we call a schedule. Many of us have a plan for our career, or summer vacation, or diet or exercise. Why? Because these things are important! But do we have a plan for pursuing the “imperishable crown”? For following Jesus in this new Apostolic Age where we can’t just “go with the flow”? I’ve been around moms and dads with more of a plan about their kid’s path to a state championship than for their discipleship to Jesus Christ.

And so the question is, “What is my Rule of Life right now? Where is my ‘trellis’ leading me? And is the fruit I’m bearing the fruit of abiding with Jesus or abiding with something else?” Does that make sense? Is my Rule of Life based on the long-term desires of my heart or on short-term goals, instant gratification, and “crowns that perish”?Is my rule based on heavenly wisdom or foolish assumptions? Is my Rule guiding me toward becoming more and more a person of love, an imitator of God and image of Jesus Christ in the world or more anxious, bitter, angry, caught up in politics and the things of this world, sports? Each and every one of us has a Rule, a “trellis” that is leading and guiding us. But where is it leading us? What “fruit” is it helping us produce?

Many of us feel far from God, stuck in our spiritual growth, always in a hurry, still caught in patterns of sin, still just going through the motions. And the problem isn’t that our Rule of Life isn’t working—it’s that it is! You and I are being formed, for better or for worse, by the choice architecture of our lives; by all of the habits, relationships, choices, and environments that fill our days by our rule of life.

Crafting a Rule of Life

So how do we go about crafting this Rule of Life, the “process” we can follow? How do I figure out the daily, weekly, and monthly schedule and set of practices I need? Well, get a piece of paper, sit down, pray, and write it out. Maybe use a calendar. And I would say keep a few things. First, start small. Kind of like New Year’s resolutions, it’s easy to have a lot of big ideas and good intentions—and then crash and burn a few weeks later. So start small and intentionally. Second, focus on subtraction more than addition. When people hear about this, they immediately assume they need to start doing more and more—and so they quit because their lives are already too busy. And busy is usually the first problem! So we don’t need to begin by adding fifteen more rosaries a day, three days of fasting a week, no. Most of us need to begin by saying, “I’m too busy. And ‘busy’ is the biggest enemy to my spiritual life.” I see it every single day with families: they are too busy to eat dinner together, too busy to come to Mass together or to come at all, too busy for anything. And so to begin your Rule, focus first on subtraction. “What do I need to begin to say ‘no’ to?” Third, when you do add things, first add things that are joyful. For example, some people discover how incredible Adoration is; awesome, go for it! Fourth, focus on the essentials. It’s easy to go start looking for obscure traditions and practices. And it’s not that any of them are bad. But we need to have the essentials in place. As I harp on all the time, Reclaiming Sunday as the Lord’s Day is the basic and fundamental place to start. On our website we have all of the resources for reclaiming Sunday, and there are also hard copies to the left of the TV in the gathering space. This weekly rest, this weekly day that we give back to God—it’s going to involve saying a lot of “no’s.” But then, we can fill it with practices that lead us closer to God and those around us. The fifth thing, then, is exactly what we began with, from St. Paul: “Run so as to win.” The fifth thing is to just persevere, to keep going, and to “trust the process,” trust the trellis, the Rule.

As we come this Sunday once again to the most essential practice, the source and summit of the Christians life—as we come to eat his flesh and drink his blood, to abide and remain in him—and we begin this Sunday, reclaiming this Sunday here at the Mass—we recommit ourselves to living our lives for Him. He is the one goal, the one imperishable crow, the one thing necessary. And we come to abide in Him, confident that in imitation of him, we will bear much fruit as his disciples.