Seminar | V. “Consecrated for the World” | Bill Haley

On the first Sunday of the past five months, we have shared a series of talks Rev. Bill Haley offered Christ Church Austin during a retreat they hosted entitled “Spiritual Formation for Kingdom Action.” Taken together, these talks offer a powerful invitation into an integrated and transformed Christian life.

In this final talk, Bill reflects on the biggest takeaways from the retreat and offers a powerful reflection on how our ordinary lives are meant to be consecrated like the bread broken and the wine poured out.

Explore Previous Keynotes:

I. Contemplatives in the Heart of the World

II. The Kingdom of God & Shalom

III. Formation Towards Spiritual Maturity

IV. Creating Space for God

inthecoracle.org  |  @inthecoracle

Transcript

Drew Masterson: 0:16

Hello and welcome to For the Journey, a podcast offering formation and inspiration to Christians longing for more of God in their lives and in the world. For the Journey is presented by Coracle, a ministry committed to inspiring and enabling people to be the presence of God and the brokenness of the world through spiritual formation for kingdom action. We want to help you grow deeper in your relationship with God so that you can go further into the world with God's loving, healing, redeeming power. For the journey is a space where each week we hope to help you encounter God and live a more integrated life of faith in the world by offering a regular rhythm of reflections, guided spiritual practices, thoughtful conversations, and more. On the first Sunday of the past five months, we have shared a series of talks Reverend Bill Haley offered Christ Church Austin during a retreat they hosted entitled Spiritual Formation for Kingdom Action. Taken together, these talks offer a powerful invitation into an integrated and transformed Christian life. You can find links to Bill's previous four keynotes in the show notes. In his final talk, Bill reflects on the biggest takeaways from the retreat and offers a powerful reflection on how our ordinary lives are meant to be consecrated, like the bread broken and the wine poured out. Here's Bill.

Rev. Bill Haley: 1:48

Good morning. Good morning. Adrian, can we put that slide up there again? So this morning, um we're gonna finish up the morning with with sacraments, with baptism and Eucharist. And what you're gonna see at uh the Eucharist is you're gonna see some ordinary things. Um bread and wine become something extraordinary. And that is the body and blood of Jesus for us. They those ordinary things, those elements, will be consecrated. Consecrated. That is, something that is ordinary will be taken by God, filled with the Spirit to be made extraordinary. And so, did you see that word in the hymn that we just sang? And what that is inviting us to as well, take my life and let it be consecrated. Take my ordinary life, fill me with your Holy Spirit, set apart for your purposes, for the ministry of your people and the ministry of the world, take my life and let it become extraordinary. Not because of who I am in my own little self, but rather because of you, the extraordinary God, who has come to live inside of me and live through me. So this stanza pretty much sums up our whole weekend. So, as a, as a, now that we kind of have spent a little bit of time with it and realize what we're actually singing, what we're actually praying, this whole morning is going to be about, oh God, here I am. Oh Lord, use me. Oh God, fill me. Oh God, I want more of you. Oh God, here I am. Take my life and let it be consecrated. As holy as that bread and wine will become. So shall we sing this? A So, God, here we are. Here we are. Here we are. And here you are. Have us. Amen. Amen. So who here is young? Uh-huh. I see Bill Taylor raising his hands really hard. Yes, we have a lot of young people here. We've had a lot of young people here this weekend. Let me let me uh let me shade the question a little bit. Who here is under 20? There we are. Good. I'm so glad that you guys are here. I'm so glad that many of you have been able to be in these sessions all weekend. I'm sorry if I've been hard to understand, but I just thought it would be nice just to say, you know, of all of these things, what do I, of all of these things I've been talking about, what do I wish I would have really been able to hear when I was under 20? So let me just offer a few a few words. And here's the secret is that actually I'm saying this so that the adults actually get it. So, what do I wish I had heard of these things when I was in high school or when I was a teenager? I wish that I could have heard more clearly, sure, that Jesus came to save me from something, but more importantly, Jesus came to save me for something. Make sense? Yes, Jesus came to forgive me of my sins, but he came in order that I could grow into who he wanted me to be with his power in me. That much more than being saved only from something, I've been saved for something. And not just eternal life later, but actually eternal life now. That then just bleeds into later. Dallas Willard died a few months ago. He's a very famous author, a very wise man. I, gosh, he's one of those people that when you're in their presence, you feel like you're in the presence of God. And so he was preparing for his death last year, and uh and he said the strangest thing. He said, you know, um, he said, when I die, I think it might take some time before I realize it. In other words, in other words, there is a way of living now so much in the presence of God that when we our physical bodies die, that we will still be with him in ways that will feel very, very, very familiar. So, eternal life starting now. And I wish that I would have been more clear that Christianity, that being a Christian, wasn't only about following Jesus, but it was actually about being his presence in the world. That it wasn't so much about the things that I did for God, it was much more about the things that God would do through me. I wish that I would have known more clearly that um God loves me for who I am, not for who I'm not. I wish I perhaps would have um somebody would have told me, don't worry about being somebody else. Find out who God's made you and be that. So that I wouldn't have always tried to chase after being somebody who I admired, but rather figure out who's God made me and how can I just be that and let that be my offering. My sister Ruth put this so well a few months ago. I'd never heard her say it quite like this before. Um basically this she said, Who you are is who God wants you to be. Isn't that beautiful? Who you are is who God wants you to be. Now we're not talking about all of our sin, we're not talking about all of our junk. We're talking about that beautiful person that God has created us that gets covered up by sin and gets covered up by all the junk. And it's that person underneath that God wants us to be. Why? Because He's made us and He loves what He's made. And then I wish that perhaps I would have known or at least remembered that we, that people can do a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot when they are young. When they're trying to do God's work, when they're open to God to allow him to be in them in whatever way. Um doesn't never ceases to amaze me that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, uh, the great martyr during World War II, um, he was only 39 years old when he died. And um and in his teens and in his 20s and into his 30s, he had a great ministry the whole way, you know. Um but he was a very young man when he died. And when even when he was a younger man, he was already doing great things for God. God was already using him powerfully. Martin Luther King, he was 32 years old when he gave the I Have a Dream speech on the National Mall. Isn't that amazing? 32. And of course, he had already, even in his early 20s, was already uh was already a leader in the civil rights movement. You know, God doing amazing things through him. William Wilberforce, one of my heroes, he was um he was called by God in the early, in the mid-1700s to help lead the uh the movement to abolish the slave trade in England successfully. He was only 28 years old when he was very clear about what he felt like God was calling him to do and when he oriented his life around that to do it. You all might have heard three years ago, I imagine you probably did. Remember in August of 2010 when the whole world and the Christian world was shocked to hear about the murder of 10 Christian workers in Afghanistan? Do you remember this? Um, they were with a mission group called International Assistance Mission. And their presence in Afghanistan, it was it was neither recent, it was not hip. Um they had been there for over 30 years working with the Afghanis, uh, medical missions particularly. And it wasn't even naive that they were there, they knew the risks. Um, the leader of the team, as he had been for a long time, his name is Tom Little. Uh he's an eye doctor, and what he did was they would travel to the remote villages of Afghanistan, and and the doctor, the optometrist, ophthalmologist, would literally give sight to the blind. You know? Who else gave sight to the blind? You know, and so there's Tom Little just trying to do what Jesus was doing, you know? Um they had gone to care for the bodies of the Afghan people with these beautiful people with beautiful souls who God loves, and somehow, um, and somehow in their service to the Afghan people, this team led by Tom Little wanted to show with their hands and with their feet and with their eyes. They just wanted to show the Afghan people the love of God. And um, and in the midst of one of their trips, they were all shot, killed. One of them was a young man in his early 20s. His name is Glenn Lapp. And uh he wrote on his blog uh just before he was killed, along with all the others, and here's the quote on the screen. He said about why he was there. He said, I'm just trying to be a little bit of Christ in this part of the world. I'm just trying to be a little bit of Christ in this part of the world. Friends, God loves the world so much that he sent Jesus twice. Twice. The church is technically accurate. It is safe to say that the church is, in fact, the second coming of Christ, and we're actually waiting for his third coming. So, Oscar Romero, um, who another martyr, you might have noticed by now, I have a bad habit of quoting martyrs. Um if you have any any doubt about what I hope comes out of this weekend, I just I just told you. Um it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but actually that's very true, right? I do want us all to be martyrs. I do want us all to die to ourselves so that Christ himself can live powerfully through us. Oscar Romero in the 1970s in Latin America was an archbishop who is who was killed for his standing up for the poor. And this is what he said, also on the screen. Second coming of Christ. Christ founded the church so that he himself could go on being present in the history of humanity, precisely through the group of Christians who make up his church. The church is the flesh in which Christ makes present down the ages his own life and his own personal mission. And the church can be church only so long as it goes on being the body of Christ. Some folks are going to be baptized this morning. That's awesome. And uh and this church, this body of Christ, will in a very meaningful way receive new members to be exactly this. You know? And and this vision of our being the body of Christ in the world is not age-specific at all. It comes to us, it comes to us when Jesus comes into our life, it comes to us when we give him our life and say, I am yours, and I'm going to be baptized in order to demonstrate that I am yours. So, a modern day, a modern day leader, his name is Gary Haugen. He uh started and leads International Justice Mission. Some of you might be aware of that organization. It's it's fantastic. And this is how he puts it. He said, the great miracle and the mystery of what God of God is that he calls me and you to be a part of what he's doing in history. He could, of course, with no help from us, proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ with lifeless stones. He could feed the entire world with five loaves and two fish. He could heal the sick with the hem of his garment. He could release all the oppressed with his angels. But instead, God has chosen us: missionaries, agricultural workers, doctors, lawyers, lawmakers, diplomats, moms, dads, students, people with the checkout counter. And so Mother Teresa, who we've talked a lot about this weekend, said, Today God loves the world so much that he gives you. He gives me to love the world. To be his love, to be his compassion. And this is the journey of spiritual formation that we've been talking about. This is what Jesus saves us for, so that we can be him. And so we've been talking about changed lives for a changed world. How Jesus comes into our life and changes us to be more and more like him, not so that God will love us more, not so that God will like us more, not so that we'll be more self-actualized, but rather he does this because he knows that we are his way to then, with these changed lives, to be agents of change in the world, the world that he loves, and the world that he continues to love, and the world that he continues to love, specifically by raising up people like you, to be his love in the world. And this journey of spiritual formation, this journey of spiritual formation that moves in the direction of kingdom action, it really starts with our conversion. There's a very real sense in which the journey starts for every human being before the foundation of the world when God sees them. But it's just some human beings choose to choose Jesus and some don't. And for those that don't, they'll never live into their original purposes that God made them for. And for those that do choose Jesus, we have a chance. So this journey of spiritual formation, while it actually begins before the foundation of the world, when we were known by God, it really begins with our conversion. And then it ramps up at our baptism. And then it is sustained by the Eucharist. Sustained by the Eucharist. We have got the sacraments on full display this morning, and I love it. I love it. A sacrament has been understood by the church historically to be a visible sign of an invisible grace. A visible sign of an invisible grace. So it is showing us with our physical eyes something that is true, but that we can only see with spiritual eyes. Baptism makes visible our dying with Christ and being raised with Him. And I'm a big fan of baptism by immersion, which is what you're doing this morning. I just, you know, there's a place for sprinkling, but my gosh, what's going to really show you that what's going on here is I am dying with Christ and being raised with Christ. It's immersion, right? So I'm so grateful that that's what y'all are doing this morning. Um marriage is a sacrament. It makes visible, makes visible the same sort of relationship that Christ invites us into. Now, obviously, this is a sacrament that gets pretty broken. And so we don't always see the kind of life that Jesus is inviting us into when we look at marriages around us. But I'll tell you, a good marriage is the best symbol for the sort of relationship that Jesus wants with us. And so you remember how I started out our weekend by talking about Mother Teresa and when she talked about Jesus as her husband, and how I'd never heard anything like that before. Well, so that you don't have to be 20-something, let me put it very circling, Jesus invites us into a relationship with him that is as beautiful and intimate and passionate and vulnerable as a good marriage between a man and a woman. And anything less than that is less than what he's inviting us into. Now, I am actually married, and so I also know that not every moment of my marriage is passion. Can I get an amen? Right? That a lot of marriage actually, a lot of marriage is lived in the mundane, right? Um and it's it's it's it's lived in in ways that aren't particularly um you know fireworky. Um but I will tell you though, that you know, it's only been 13 years that I've been married, but 13 years in, it feels a lot more real than it did in the first year, right? Because Tara and I figure out what really what love really does. And so we have our moments of passion, of course. We have our moments of fireworks, and Jesus gives us those too. But as we grow in our relationship with Jesus, it becomes much more akin to a solid, stable, trusted relationship that you know is there. Does that make sense? Marriage, a good marriage, is a sacrament. It makes visible something that is invisible. And then the Eucharist. Eucharist is a sacrament, making visible the body and the blood of Jesus. Making visible the body and the blood of Jesus. So there are two big sacraments, and the church agrees, the universal church agrees with this, the two like biggies are baptism and eucharist, and we get them both this morning. Henry Nowen, who's got a quote there on the screen, uh, says this that sacraments are very specific events in which God touches us through creation and transforms us into living Christs. The two main sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist. In baptism, water is the way to transformation. In the Eucharist, it is bread and wine. The most ordinary things in life, bread and water and wine, become the sacred way by which God comes to us. These sacraments are actual events. Water, bread, and wine are not simple reminders of God's love. They bring God to us. In baptism, we are set free from the slavery of sin and dressed with Christ. And in the Eucharist, Christ Himself becomes our food and drink. Now, I, perhaps like some of you, am also a recovering Baptist. And uh and I will tell you that it took me a long time to try to lay down my fighting posture about the Eucharist and about communion. You know, the posture that says, it is only a symbol, it is only remembrance, right? What I'm doing here is that I'm remembering how much God loves me, and that's all I'm doing. I'm remembering the cross. There is no, there is nothing that happens to those little bread and wine things, right? It's bread and wine, thank you very much. Right? That's how I entered the um the Anglican church. Um but then it became that it was actually the sacraments that really drew me deeper in as I understood what was going on, and especially as Anglicans, uh, we are neither Baptists nor Catholics, we get to walk this happy middle way where we get to say, something is going on there. I'm not so sure exactly what, but I really do believe that God is meeting me somehow through Jesus in this sacrament. Let's not talk about the details. Right? That's basically that's the way Anglicans think oftentimes about theology. Um, not exclusively, but sometimes. And so, but this is, you know, so basically, you know, my posture has become, and I could go way deep into this, you know, uh what's going on in the Eucharist and the Eucharistic life is a whole weekend retreat. Um but uh so I do actually have some thoughts on this, but I always come back around to John Dunn, the great Anglican poet uh from the 1600s. He was an Anglican priest, um, as sensual as many of us are. And um and so uh and he he kind of offered this classic, this classic take on what is the Eucharist, right? What is it that's actually going on? Um what am I taking in? And this is what he said. Very simple poem. He was the word that spake it. He took the bread and broke it, and what the word did make it, I do believe and take it. R So, in other words, whatever Jesus meant is what I believe. But um, but you know, part of our part of the wonder, part of the wonderful aspect of our true of our Anglican tradition is that we we do we do as Anglicans believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. We really do believe that Jesus is uniquely present in these ordinary things made extraordinary by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And however it is that he is present to us, that's less important than the fact that he is present to us. And so, and so all this talk, all this talk about being the body of Christ, you are the body of Christ, right? Trying to, you know, I feel in some ways like Paul, who's just who's pleading with people, myself included, to live into our identity, you know? To live into our dignity. All this talk about we are the body of Christ. What is one of the main ways that the body of Christ is nourished? Eucharist, right? By, let me put some more language on it, by feeding on the body of Christ. Make sense? Oh my. Oh my. This changes how I come to the table. Right? I'm not just coming to the table, although I am coming, you know, lots of ways we come to the table. Coming to the table, yes, to remember that God loves me, yes to remember the death of Christ and resurrection of Christ, yes, to proclaim Christ's death until he comes again, right? All that. Yes, to remembering, you know, to receiving God's love. But most deeply, most deeply, whether we know it or not, we are coming to the table as the body of Christ to feed on the body of Christ in order to be the body of Christ. It is, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, spiritual food and drink. Um, how many of us have seen, how many of us have read The Lord of the Rings? And how many of us, keep your hands up, and how many of us have seen the Lord of the Rings? Right? Almost all of us. You know, Tolkien said many times that it was not a conscientious Christian allegory, right? Um, but he did say that there were two places where actually there was specific Christian imagery. And uh one of them was about the Eucharist. Can anybody tell me what that is? Where in the Lord of the Rings is the Eucharist? What is it? The elven bread, the lembus. Eucharist conscientiously wrote that in as a reference to the Eucharist, right? Where a little bit of bread could give you more strength than you realized. A little bit of bread that you relied on in times of need, a little bit of bread that would not let you down, a little bit of bread, even the crumbs of which could sustain you. We feed on the body of Christ in order to be who we are. So let me let me sum up our whole weekend in just a couple of sentences, okay? That Jesus came into the world to intentionally confront the effects of the fall, to take on the suffering of the world upon himself, and by the power of God to redeem it. His very own body being the conduit of God's grace and the revelation of God's glory. And that is what we are to do. As followers of Jesus as his very body on earth, we too are to intentionally confront the effects of the fall, take the suffering of the world upon ourselves, and by the power of God see it redeemed, with our very bodies being conduits of God's grace and the revelation of God's glory. That's what Jesus did. And when Jesus' body left the earth 2,000 years ago, his body didn't leave the earth. Because he left us. God did not leave the world broken, he did not abandon the world without a way for his grace to continually encounter and counteract and even overcome the effects of the fall. Because he left us, the body of Christ. So this morning, as we come to that table, let's feed on him in order that we might be like him, in order that we might be who we are and who God is calling us to be. And as we observe the baptism, let's cheer and celebrate our new members. Let's come to the table with yes. God, whatever seeds you've put in my heart this weekend, yes, grow them. Whatever you're doing in my life, yes, do that. I give you liberty to make me and change me into who you know that I am and who you are making me into. I give you liberty to make you more and more like your son, to fill me more and more with the Holy Spirit. Pay attention to this prayer that we're all gonna pray at the end of Eucharist, okay? Sums all this up. Sums all this up as the way to send us out into the world. This is what we're all gonna pray at the end of our morning. Eternal God and Heavenly Father, you have graciously accepted us as living members of your Son Jesus Christ, and you have fed us with spiritual food in the sacrament of his body and blood. So send us now into the world in peace. To love you, serve you with gladness and singleness of heart through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Drew Masterson: 28:52

Thanks so much for listening to For the Journey. We hope you'll join us again next week, and in the meantime, you can explore past episodes and see what we're up to at in theCoracle.org and on social media at in thechoracle. If you've been blessed by what you just heard, please subscribe, as we'll be releasing new episodes each week. Please also rate and review this show and share it with others who might be blessed by it. For the journey is made possible by the generous support of our Coracle partners, the wonderful men and women who choose to support this ministry through their prayers and financial gifts. If you are one of our partners and are listening, we are so, so grateful for you. If you would like to join us as a sustaining partner, you can set up a monthly donation of any amount at in thechoracle.org slash support. The link is in the show notes. Our growing community of partners gets access to tailor made resources, gifts, and events, and we would love for you to be a part of that. Our theme song is Mystery Hymn from our friends at Lowland Hum. Please give them a listen wherever you get your music. And so, friends, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. And the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen, and we will see you on the journey.

Speaker 3: 30:18

This old mystery won't let me go. Let me spend my whole life looting eyes wide all been to the show.