12 Step Eucharist January 8, 2020, New Year, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Arkansas
Baptism of our Lord, Second Sunday after Epiphany, Matthew 3:13-17.
Our new church year started over a month ago on the first day of December as we began the season of Advent. As you know, we have moved through Christmas and celebrated the Epiphany with the visit to Jesus of the wise men two days ago. This coming Sunday Jesus will be baptized as well as many others at our church, and we all will recite the covenant we made at our own baptism to follow “The Beloved.”
On the other hand, our secular world is just getting started as it only began a new year eight days ago. This gives you a little hint of how we are called to be out of sync with the secular world. We are to listen to the beat of a different drummer. This is always the paradox of our lives:/ how to live connected to the spiritual world we make promises to at our baptism,/ while we also live in this secular world where the only covenant may be how to get ahead.
However, we are not called to reject the secular world, for we know from the Christmas story that God has been born and is now among us in this world. We are called to be part of God’s own promise to make “all things new”1 in this world. But we are so often at a loss as to how we possibly can live into this promise to bring love to this world which seems so broken.
Bishop Steven Charleston in a recent Facebook message2 gives us a few clues when he first reminds us that this new year may be even an especially difficult roller coaster ride as we prepare for national elections, and most especially the election of a president. He reminds us that this is not a new norm, for presidential elections are always like this. I so appreciate his native American heritage as a role model for how to live in this secular world holding on to our connection to God. His challenge for us is to stay calm, a non-anxious presence in this new year. But, I know from my own experience that I have never been able to be a non-anxious presence. There is always some little question of anxiety nagging and gnawing at my soul. I do know that I may have a chance of being the least anxious presence at times this year. When I am in a group swarming with controversy, if I can only stay one step below the anxiety level, I am hoping to make a difference.
I also know that practicing the 11th step is going to be my best answer for accomplishing this. “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”3
Now this does not necessarily mean that we are to pray and meditate continuously for the next 365 days, even though that might be nice. We are still living in the world. We are called to follow a rule of life where we do meditate and pray at certain times during the day to try to keep our connection to God that is within us and around us and above us. From those prayers and meditations, we are called to action when we see wrong in ourselves and others. We are called to support those who also seem to voice concern for the needs of those in our world and especially those living around us. But we are called to stay as calm as possible and stay one degree less anxious than those around us. This is where we can make a real difference. As the least anxious person we are staying connected to the God of our understanding who really is in charge, and we are keeping God’s presence in the conversation. This is living out the covenant we make at our own baptism. It is the story of the incarnation. This is living with one foot in the secular world and one in the spiritual world,/ in essence helping to reconcile both worlds to become one.4
Joanna. Joannaseibert.com
1 Revelation 21:5
2 December 27, 2019
3 Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 59
4 Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 1997, 2016), 37, 178.