Formation and Hope
By Dawn Frankfurt

In the name of God.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I went off to seminary, there were introductions to many new things. While I was being oriented to the ways of being at seminary, at times I heard professors or priests or students, who were further along in their course of study, talk about how important life together at seminary was for our formation.

To me, that word ‘formation’ was a not-quite-defined term. It was sort of nebulous. I mean, I knew, of course, about taking some play-dough or modeling clay and forming it into any shape I wanted it to be. I also knew about building wooden forms for shaping concrete. Once the forms are built, fluid wet concrete is poured into them. When the concrete is set and hard, the forms can be removed, and what is revealed is a piece of concrete which has been formed into a specific shape for a specific reason.

The older one gets, the less one thinks about being shaped and changed into a new or a different kind of person. So it took a while for the concept to fully penetrate my consciousness. What they were talking about was Christian formation, Anglican formation, Episcopal formation. When they said formation, they meant formation as a priest, formation as a worship leader and formation as a pastor. Still,there was the question, how do you form a mature person,especially one who is well into adulthood, into a new shape, into a new way of being?

It didn’t take me long to figure it out. With at least eighteen opportunities to worship every week, daily books to read, classes to attend, discussions in which to participate and reflections to have, I discovered that almost every single thing I did every day had something to do with God, the church, my faith or some combination thereof. My classmates and I jumped into the energized and eager Christian culture of the seminary as fully as we could.  For most of us, this was the first time in our lives where we were in a community with people who wanted to talk about the sorts of things we wanted to talk about. For example, we loved talking about God, debating different styles of worship, comparing theologies of baptism, and praying together. This happened whether we were at worship, at class, at home, out to dinner, at social gatherings or over the first cup of coffee in the morning.

I arrived at seminary in early August and the first time I left that environment was to go to my parents’ house for Christmas at the end of that first semester. I’ll never forget what a shock it was. It was like going to another planet, or at least another country, where you don’t understand a word anybody is saying because they are speaking a different language. It was like going to the doctor for an eye exam, getting your pupils dilated, and then walking out into a bright sun-shiny day without sunglasses. At seminary they’d prepared me for formation, but I wasn’t prepared for the new me coming into sharp contrast with what the life of the old me used to be like. 

Or maybe it was something like the experience soldiers have when they return home after a long tour of duty at war. Recently, we are hearing more and more stories about this in the news. Imagine … you’ve returned to be with people you’ve know forever, you’re in places which are familiar to you, and the traditions are the same as they’ve always been. But nothing is right. Everything feels foreign. The ways you used to behave seem wrong. It seems like you are meeting all of the people you love for the first time. It is surprising, confusing, and disorienting.  There is no way to anticipate what a shock “re-entry” it is.

These may be rather extreme examples of formation. There are hundreds of day-to-day examples you could think of. Formation might take place as someone begins taking piano lessons or takes up running to get a little exercise. For the runner, the distances they run will gradually lengthen, and the number of minutes it will take to run a mile will decrease. Improvements like this encourage a runner to devote more and more time to the development of their skill. For a new runner it may mean spending less time hanging out with friends at the coffee shop. And you’ve heard of carbo-loading. A runner may choose to eat particular things at particular times depending on when they plan to run next. Over time, these growing athletes may observe that they are capable of running even better if they are well rested and if they eat healthier things. So, someone who is being formed into a runner, goes to bed earlier and eats fewer fried foods. The whole life of one-being-formed gets shaped in new ways. Runners, who at one time were satisfied to run out the front door for a short jog, may start looking for races to run, they may seek out more difficult courses, they may even investigate traveling to various race locations as their passion for the sport increases.

Not everyone who enrolls in a PE course will be formed into a top-flight runner. Not everyone who takes piano lessons will be formed into a world-class pianist. Formation is something special. Formation is not just learning a new skill or taking in new information. Formation is about becoming something.

The basics of a skill or activity must be learned when you try something new. Once a student begins practicing, and the more they practice, the more the doing of the activity begins to shape their life. What they are doing begins to go beyond just performing a single act. I imagine, a pianist will forego doing some things like: growing super-long fingernails, wasting a lot of time watching TV, and staying out of the boxing ring. All of this would be done in order to practice more often, in order to play more skillfully, more soulfully, more artfully – eventually playing the piano as a pianist, not as a student simply taking lessons.

The more you do something, the more you become it. These examples illustrate what we mean when we talk about being formed as Christians. The more we pray, the more it occurs to us to pray, and the more it occurs to us to pray, the more we pray.  We find our relationship with God strengthened and life-giving. Formation builds on itself. The more we volunteer and help out on a church project we care about, the more we will invest our money, our time and our hearts in it. The more we care about a project, the more we’ll want to work to see it succeed. For some, the practice of giving things away can be free-ing. The more you give your stuff and your money away, the more you will feel its mighty hold on you decrease. The more you contribute to the well-being of other people, the more you treat others as you want to be treated, the more you feel convicted that you are making good choices and encouraged that you are doing the right thing, the better you feel. Your desire to be compassionate and kind grows. Becoming a Christian is a process of formation.We continue to grow, to move forward, to evolve, to make progress.

I recently heard an example of two doctors whose formation as people and as physicians were very different from each other. I know somebody who was admitted to the hospital for an appendectomy this week. I also know that my friend who needed this operation was barely making ends meet before she got sick, and she didn’t have an employer who would give her paid sick leave or be tolerant of too many missed days of work.

There are two ways an appendectomy can be performed. One is the old fashioned way where they make a big incision on your torso, open you up, take it out, and sew you back up. When surgery is done this way, critical abdominal muscles which you use for breathing and moving your body around, are cut in two, essentially rendered useless for a while. Recovery from an operation like this is extended – taking as long as 6 to 8 weeks.

The other way your appendix can be removed is via laparoscopy. Using this method, doctors only have to make a few small incisions around the belly button. They have a technique where they are able to insert a device which can remove the appendix through these tiny holes. When the appendectomy is done this way, recovery is relatively rapid – only taking a few days to a week to get back to feeling well again.

In this case, the doctors were unable to tell my friend which sort of procedure would be necessary. They wouldn’t know until they started the operation. Everyone who knew this woman was praying that the doctors could do the job laparoscopicly so that her recovery would be easy. Naturally, her family and friends wanted her to suffer as little as possible, but they also knew that a lot more than the next few weeks of discomfort and recovery were on the line. If the doctors decided it was necessary to make a full incision, it would likely have enormous repercussions in her life.

Although she had been putting the surgery off because of its cost, removing it became a necessity. She could hardly afford to go through with it, but she couldn’t put it off any longer. The fear was that if she had a long recovery, she would very likely lose her job. If she was unable to work for a month or two, how would she earn money to pay for the operation? But more than that, how would she pay the rent or buy groceries? How could she recover if she didn’t eat properly, or worse yet, if she was evicted from her home?

At the conclusion of the surgery, the doctor who regularly works at AMC came out into the waiting room and explained to her family that she’d had a resident from UVA assisting her with the surgery, and although it had taken two hours, much longer than expected, they had succeeded in taking the appendix out laprascopicly.  It wasn’t until the next day when the doctor visited the hospital room that she told my friend more about what had happened. At a couple of points during the operation she thought they were going to have to stop and make the large incision. The resident, who was assisting, kept urging the doctor to go ahead and make the incision, get it over with, and move on. He said something to the effect of, If we were at UVA, we would have cut and been finished a long time ago.Despite this, my friend’s doctor persisted and was able, by patiently keeping at it, to remove it the less invasive way.

Of the two doctors, don’t you imagine one had been formed with a strong business perspective of the practice of medicine? Where what was important was the bottom line and how quickly and efficiently procedures could be accomplished? In this example, it didn’t appear that the other doctor had been shaped by the same set of values. One cared about the well-being of the whole patient, and understood that medical procedures impact an entire life, not just the bottom line of a hospital organization.

We are shaped all of the time by the influences we choose to have around us. This is one of the reasons Episcopalians believe so strongly in the importance of coming to church every Sunday. We want the worship of God to shape our lives. We are continually being formed on our Christian journey and the things we choose to include or exclude in our lives makes all the difference. The things you do and the environment you live in are constantly contributing to your formation.

The day you become a saint, the first day you say I believe, you might find following some of the instructions we heard Jesus give in the Gospel this morning downright out of the question. He said: But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. These things don’t have to go on being hard.

Today, on All Saints Sunday, we remember all of the Saints who have gone before us, and all of the saints in our lives who are providing examples of virtuous and godly living for us. They remind us what is important and what’s not.  They point the way.  They show us what Christian influence can accomplish. They tell us that the difficult is not impossible.

Our Christian formation is never over. Those who set their hope on Christ always continue being formed and shaped as faithful believers. We are BECOMING Christ’s blessed saints. Our hope is coming to those ineffable joys which have been prepared for us.

Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 

We run with endurance the race that is set before us.

AMEN!