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No more kings

No more kings

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Actress Claire Foy trying on her crown in a scene from the TV series The Crown
Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in season 1 of The Crown

This coming Sunday I am the guest pastor at a nearby church. At my request, I will be preaching on the Gospel text for Thanksgiving, Matthew 6:25-34, from the Sermon on the Mount. Officially this Sunday is Christ the King, which a while ago I decided to ignore. The following is a post I wrote a couple years ago to explain why I think creating Christ the King was a bad idea and needs to go. I will use a few of the points here to explain to my host congregation why they are hearing a Thanksgiving sermon, rather than one for CTK.

Recently I’ve been watching the latest (and next to last) season of The Crown on Netflix. The multi-year program is the semi-fictional account of the life and reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The center of this season has been the final marital breakdown and divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

The recurring themes of The Crown are the obvious ones. Questions like what role does a monarch play in a democracy, how can the ancient traditions of monarchy be brought into the modern world, and how do all the “lesser royals”, including the heir apparent, keep from going crazy when they frankly have so little to do.

Queen Elizabeth is portrayed as having some awareness of these issues but not much insight into what is to be done about them. Her husband and eldest son show more practical concern than she does (it was Prince Philip who made the case for televising Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation). Where Elizabeth is completely befuddled is knowing what to do about all the disintegrating marriages in her family. The resulting sorrow and heartbreak are the most moving parts of the series and an overarching sadness pervades the story.

I thought of all this as we approached the last Sunday of the church year, designated in many churches as Christ the King. I decided a couple years ago I would no longer observe this festival. Last Sunday was simply designated as “The Last Sunday after Pentecost” and it served as our Thanksgiving worship service.

Christ the King has been on the liturgical calendar for less than a century, in contrast with most festivals which are over a thousand years old. It was made a feast day by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Originally in October, it was moved to the last Sunday of the church year in 1969, which is about the time many Protestant churches adopted it.

Ostensibly Pius XI’s goal was to challenge the growing power of authoritarian governments. “Christ is the true king, not you,” in other words. But it was also the case that the Pope was in a long-running struggle with the Italian government to save some remnant of the Catholic Church’s once formidable political power. A short time later, Mussolini agreed to the establishment of the Vatican State, the postage stamp size “country” in the middle of Rome, ruled by the Catholic Church.

That part of the story is mostly forgotten now and was not even thought of when Protestants adopted Christ the King for their usage. Today, it is understood as a hope-filled look to the future establishment of God’s rule on earth, and a challenge to forces of domination by the example of Christ’s power of service and compassion, symbolized by the cross.

But as the adage goes, saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. Words have meaning, and the symbol of “Christ the King” simply doesn’t communicate the laudable message intended by liturgical officials. “Christ the king” is not a biblical idea, for the obvious reason that the common understanding of “king” does not fit either the earthly Jesus or the risen Christ.

The Windsors are a pathetic last gasp of England’s centuries long monarchy. They retain the wealth and soap opera lives but now lack their ancestors’ power to use and abuse. Most of Europe’s monarchies ended in the violence of war or revolution. The few remaining kings and queens know their role is largely public relations, promoting tourism and national industry.

Presumably such kings are not what are in mind when thinking of Christ the king. But what then? Those revolutions (including our own) happened for a reason. Overall, kings have an abominable record. The ideal of just and benevolent monarchy lacks one thing: actual examples!

You can learn all you need to know about the Bible’s view of kings by reading the story in the 8th chapter of Samuel. Tired of their Judges, the elders of Israel come to Samuel demanding he appoint a king, like those of the countries around them. Samuel knows this will be a disaster and angrily describes the calamities that will befall them. But they won’t listen, and God tells Samuel to go ahead, give them a king, but don’t take it personally, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me”. The biblical saga that follows demonstrates again and again the truth of Samuel’s warning.

In the New Testament, Jesus never refers to himself as a king. His response to Pilate’s question if he is a king is basically, “you can call me whatever you want.” Even more telling is the story in John 6. After feeding the crowd with the loaves and fishes, they want to make Jesus king, but he runs away. Paul, writing earlier than the gospels, also never calls Jesus a king.

What is prominent in both the gospels and Paul is the phrase basileia tou theou, or “kingdom of God.” But for Jesus this is really a miniature parable in itself, and is the subject of most of his parables. The kingdom is at hand, Jesus says, it is in your midst, it is within you, it is spread upon the earth but people don’t see it.

This kingdom has no earthly equivalent but is an ironic, anti-kingdom, if you will. It is the end of all external rule, giving way to an internal and all-pervasive truth and life of the heart. Jesus and Paul both called it love, empowered by the Spirit.

No image of “king”, whether from the past or present, could ever invoke such an astonishing mystery, the “good news” which Jesus proclaimed. “Christ the king” invokes confusion at best, if not an outright contradiction of Jesus’ message. Like most monarchs, it needs to go.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Time for Luther to sit down

Time for Luther to sit down

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Scene from the movie "Luther"
Scene from the 2003 film “Luther”

Today is Halloween for most people. In church history, October 31 is considered the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Tradition has it (the history is a little murky) that on that day, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, nailed a list of 95 propositions for debate on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, in the German state of Saxony. Soon, thanks to printers looking for excuses to use their new presses, copies of the 95 Theses (as they became known) were spreading across Europe, igniting a firestorm.

Luther’s list was the culmination of a running argument he had been having with church officials over the sale of indulgences. It had been sparked by the arrival in Luther’s neighborhood of perhaps the supreme indulgence seller, one John Tetzel. Let me stop here and say that if you have any interest in this affair, I highly recommend watching Luther, the 2003 biopic staring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph’s brother) in the title role. (Be aware that, by a weird coincidence, there is another 2003 movie called Luther which about a British detective.) The film also features Alfed Molina as a wonderfully twisted Tetzel, and Peter Ustinov, in his last film, as Luther’s protector, Prince Frederick the Wise.

The sale of indulgences was probably the epitome of the corruption and superstition of the medieval Catholic church. While the Renaissance and its new thinking was expanding, it was still very limited. Luther makes clear that 1517 Germany, and by implication much of Europe, was still mired in the Middle Ages.

Indulgences were essentially heavenly get-out-of-jail free cards. They were certificates authorized by the pope releasing the person for whom they were bought from a certain number of years in purgatory (more money = more years canceled). That purgatory was a thing, and that the pope could get your deceased relatives out of it, was part of the medieval world view which, like spinning plates in a circus act, was destined to soon crash to the floor.

In a touching scene in the movie, a young woman of obviously limited intellect, comes Luther to proudly show him the indulgence certificate she has just bought from Tetzel. We watch her smile drop as a crestfallen Luther tells her to save her money because the certificates are worthless. The message is clear. The church is taking advantage of people’s gullibility and anxiety to finance its various projects, which included the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

In truth, the church’s spin hasn’t changed much. Protestant propaganda is that the Reformation set people free from the crass legalism of the Catholic church. “We are saved by grace and not by works of the laws” is the classic formulation of this new/old gospel. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

For Luther, especially, salvation was something still dispensed by the church. The gospel was the church’s “true treasure”, so one had to be part of the church to receive this gift. So just show up and you’ve got it? Not quite. You have to be baptized, receive communion, and live a moral life.

Oh, and one more thing: you have to have faith. The full Protestant gospel formula is actually “we are saved by grace through faith.” And those two words have tied Protestant (and other) church leaders and theologians in knots ever since. What is “saving” faith? Basically, there have been two interpretations. One essentially equates faith with belief, an intellectual assent or conviction, which often meant having the right “beliefs”, as determined by church authorities. The other view saw faith as an experience, as a spiritual or interior “knowing”, not of doctrines but of a saving relationship with God.

In the first case, the question is: How do you know what the right beliefs are? The church will tell you. How does the church know? God revealed them in the Bible and to the early church leaders. But there are lots of churches and they don’t agree which beliefs are right. How do you know? We’ve got them right. Just trust us.

In the second instance, the question is: How do you know if your faith is real? Again, the church is the decider but not so clearly. Genuine faith wil “bear fruit” in tangible ways. You will “want” to go to church, read your Bible, do works of charity, etc. But again, whether those fruits were real or enough was open for debate. Here too churches differed in their understanding. More troublesome were the doubts in people’s minds: Do I really believe? What about my doubts? My sins? How do I know for sure that I am saved?

The history of Protestantism is essentially the story of the endless debates about these never resolved questions, and the repeated denominational divisions over them. In the meantime, Catholicism cleaned up the worst of its organizational abuses, and got involved in these debates to a degree, but essentially rested on its ancient history and tradition.

The church where I worshiped last Sunday observed Reformation Sunday, as Lutheran churches typically still do. The usual hymns and readings associated with the day were used to stir Lutheran blood, and even the Nicene Creed was dragged out (not typical for this congregation) in all its incomprehensible babble.

In her sermon, the preacher focused on a recent translation change whereby faith in Jesus Christ is now rendered the faith of Jesus Christ. It’s happened in a few places in Paul’s letters but in this case, it was Romans 3:22, “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The Greek can be translated either way, but this version takes the emphasis off our having faith in Jesus and replaces it with Jesus’ faithful service.

The preacher (and presumably the sermon helps she was using) seemed to think this was a big deal. In the case of this passage, however, (or Romans generally) it doesn’t really help in understanding the theological word salad Paul has produced here. And there are other places where the meaning obviously is faith in Christ or God.

“Faith” is used in lots of different ways in the Pauline epistles. And it’s used differently again in the gospels—and not at all in John! Today it’s popular to say the faith should be rendered or understood as “trust,” which may be helpful. But that’s obviously not how it is always meant in the New Testament, nor in the teachings of the Reformation.

Yet none of this gets at the church’s core problem today, which is the meaninglessness of salvation itself. People just don’t care. They aren’t joining the synoptic gospels’ “rich young ruler” in asking, “What must I do to be saved?” Progressive preachers think its wonderful to declare that “salvation is a free gift!” But like a free subscription offer, most people are saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Free, discounted, or full price, salvation is a nonstarter for more and more people.

In short, the church needs to get out of the salvation business. Salvation was finished as soon as heaven and hell lost any tangible meaning. But even apart from that, biblical scholars and theologians have been saying for centuries that salvation is not the only lens through which to interpret the Bible, or the most important. Individual salvation gets almost no mention in the Old Testament. Nor is it obviously Jesus’ central concern in the gospels. The church’s salvation obsession is mostly based on its reading of Paul, and even that interpretation is now recognized as simplistic.

What “business” should the church be in? For an answer, the church needs to eat some humble pie and turn to another tradition, from about the time of the prophets but several thousand miles apart: Buddhism. For the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is the concern of all people: the reality of suffering. More fully: What is suffering? Why do we suffer? Can we keep from suffering? If so, how?

I agree with those who say, especially from a Western perspective, that Buddhism is more philosophy than religion, though that isn’t quite right. In any case, many modern Christians have found Buddhism to be a very compatible spiritual partner and ally. And that for the simple reason that suffering is a major theme of both testaments of the Bible, as well.

In the Old Testament, this is especially true of the wisdom books and the prophets. In the New Testament, it is a theme of Paul (believe it or not) but it especially jumps out in Jesus’ endless concern for people’s ailments and disabilities. Jesus heals everyone who seeks it, often adding enigmatically that it was “your faith” that healed them.

But perhaps it is in John where the alleviating of suffering is most clearly Jesus’ mission. Here Jesus repeatedly offers “eternal life” as the answer to the human predicament, not as something experienced someday in a great beyond but here and now. He promises peace to his troubled disciples, and in John 16 says,

“I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation [suffering]; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

For the Bible, and especially for the centuries-long Christian mystical tradition, the end of suffering is not a promise in the by-and-by, not a theological doctrine to be believed, nor a social or political project. Rather, it is an experience of awakening and rebirth, the discovery of our true nature, and being set free from the endless turmoil of our egoic obsessions.

If we want to still use the word, “salvation” then is not from sin, the devil, or the wrath of God. Rather, the gospel is the we are “saved” by being set free from the delusions and suffering of our false self. We awaken to our oneness with God, to as Jesus says the kingdom of God within us, to our essential nature as Spirit.

In other words, Christianity has the seeds for its own rebirth. But as Jesus says in John, it has to let the old plants die for the new seeds to fall to the ground and sprout anew. Luther said he had to take a stand to reform the church. Today, it’s past time for him to take a seat.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

A God of silence

A God of silence

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Hurricane Milton image from spaceIn the days before Hurricane Milton made landfall, I saw multiple Facebook posts appealing to God for protection from the storm. They often were not for personal protection but for some specific location or the whole state, and often in very assertive language. One such post said,

In the mighty name of Jesus, we believe that Hurricane Milton will dissipate and cause no harm to the state of Florida. In the powerful name of Jesus. Amen.

The post had a graphic with a set of praying hands amidst swirling clouds over the Gulf, next to an image of the state of Florida. Similar posts had pictures of Jesus calming a stormy sea from a boat or on shore. The post quoted above had over 800 likes and over 200 responses, the largest number being simply “Amen”, often with one or more hands-together emojis. (In the US, most assume they are “praying hands” but, having been created in Asia like most emojis, they actually represent the gesture accompanying the Hindu Namaste greeting.)

A few responders expressed skepticism about the prospects of any divine intervention. Some of them in turn got surprisingly strong, often judgmental push-back for their lack of faith. A common theme of the posts I saw, as well as many of the comments, was the notion of “claiming” supposed divine promises of protection. Many responses to the skeptics included citing biblical stories of God saving or protecting people in danger. He did it before, so he will do it now.

I recognized these assertive “claiming” prayers as common to a certain strain of evangelicalism, often of the megachurch and Pentecostal variety. They are based on the conviction that believing strongly enough some presumed biblical promise will result in God fulfilling it. The strength of your belief, and the numbers who share that belief, will determine God’s reward.

In a worship setting, such prayers are a combination of “positive thinking” and group-think, and are often used to bind worshipers together. That’s the reason these posts got so many affirmations and why the naysayers were so firmly reprimanded. The skeptics disrupted the group cohesion of the post.

When Milton initially seemed to be behaving in a less destructive way than predicted, posts appeared claiming this was in response to people’s prayers. But as the actual extent of the damage and suffering became apparent, those posts disappeared. Less storm surge was accompanied by damaging winds, flooding rains, and (surprise) fatal tornadoes.

During the heyday of his 700 Club TV show, televangelist Pat Robertson once claimed to have “prayed away” a hurricane threatening his Virginia Beach headquarters. This was quickly slapped down by critics pointing out that the hurricane’s turn simply resulted in suffering and destruction happening somewhere else.

On the flip side was the assertion by Jerry Falwell and others the Hurricane Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ debauchery, especially its hosting of an annual gay festival. The fact that the vast majority of victims had nothing to do with their city’s supposed depravity was ignored.

The idea that God punishes the wicked and protects and rewards the righteous is found throughout the Bible and is common in the Bible-based religions. This belief is especially prevalent in the Psalms, which probably explains their continuing popularity.

What is often ignored, however, is that such a belief is regularly challenged by other biblical writers. The prophets, especially, reject the notion that God will automatically give his people protection if they ask for it. Going further, wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes reject the notion that righteous living and piety will result in God’s blessings.

The Bible never resolves the issue. An overarching and unanswered question of the Old Testament is why God’s chosen people suffer so much. The New Testament continues that conversation by embracing suffering and death as the path to eternal life. But even there such a notion is never fully satisfying.

To put it bluntly, the biblical tradition struggles with the question: What good is a God who doesn’t help us, and in a predictable and reliable manner? Evangelical “claiming” prayers seem more like magic than faith. Say the right words and get the desired outcome. They also seem to be trying to manipulate God. You said You would protect us, so You have to come through for us when we ask.

Why do we appeal to God for help? Crying out when we are in distress or danger is a natural and automatic response, though not necessarily to God. John Shelby Spong quotes a woman who didn’t believe in God but in a time of great suffering cried out to the Universe for relief. The effect for her was probably the same. It expressed her distress and deep desire for her circumstances to be different.

So is God like a therapist or close friend, listening and nodding as we recite our problems, responding when appropriate, “I feel your pain”? In the progressive Christianity of mainline churches that seems to be the case. Even though prayers are said during weekly worship for the world’s problems and the needs of members, no one can explain what they believe will result from those prayers. Some will say that such prayers make us more aware of others’ needs and perhaps motivate us to act in some helpful way. That may well be true, but what has God got to do with it?

God as a Supreme Being far above us yet watching over everyone and everything is no longer credible for most people, including many religious people. Yet progressive churches have done little to help their members imagine, let alone experience, God in a different way. Countless numbers of theologians of the past two hundred years, Protestant and Catholic, have done valuable and productive work in this regard. Yet their own churches, often while saying affirmative things about them, have largely ignored their insights when it came to reshaping their beliefs and practices.

But it seems now that theology is not the way to move Christianity forward. Rather than more words, it is silence that is opening the way to a new understanding and experience of the Sacred. And some theologians themselves have recognized this.

One of the primary theologians of Vatican II, Karl Rahner, said that Christians of the future will be mystics or they will not exist at all. The great 20th century German American theologian, Paul Tillich, declared that God does not exist, but rather is the ground of existence. This was an idea he derived from the preeminent medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart. God is not a being but Being Itself. Such an understanding has support in many places in the Bible but probably the most well-known is a saying attributed to Paul in the book of Acts: “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

The essence of the mystical experience is not the God far off, out there, somewhere. Rather it’s knowing God right here, right now, within and all around us. In times of distress, we don’t appeal for God’s help so much as center ourselves in the sacred presence that is at the center of our being. By a life of “practicing the presence of God”, as Brother Lawrence described it in the 17th century, we come to know our essential security by our oneness with God and all things.

And this is primarily known in silence. As the Psalmist says, “Be still and know that I AM God.” This is how we experience what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is a peace not of the mind but of the heart, not of words and ideas but of the boundless, silent Awareness that is our True Self. In the words of Meister Eckhart,

The Word lies hidden in the soul, unknown and unheard unless room is made for it in the ground of hearing, otherwise it is not heard. All voices and sounds must cease and there must be pure stillness within, a still silence.

Making room in our overfull lives and silencing the chatter in our minds is today’s spiritual challenge. Only then will we realize that we don’t need to cry out to God to come closer, but rather awaken, again quoting Eckhart, to the God “who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.”

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Walking each other home

Walking each other home

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In my last blog post, I mentioned the name of Ram Dass as one who was an early proponent and practitioner of spirituality apart from religion. To many, Dass (1931-2019) was the quintessential 1960s/70s hippy, but he was also a serious thinker and writer and deeply compassionate.

Two sayings came to be associated with him, often appearing on bumper stickers and posters. The most well-known was “Be here now.” This is the challenge to the tendency of our minds to be focused on the past or future, or on what we imagine is happening somewhere else. Being in our heads someplace other than “here, now” is the primary cause of our distress and anxiety.

The other phrase, which I think is equally powerful, was, “We are all just walking each other home.” The meaning of this may not be as immediately obvious. Dass often used it in the context of being present with the dying, but he understood dying as a lifelong spiritual journey. To me it is one of the simplest descriptions of our spiritual life and of what Jesus (and others) saw as our calling in life.

The overarching theme of Jesus’ teaching was the kingdom of God. The meaning of this phrase was not obvious. It was not an idea found in the Old Testament, which talks instead about the political kingdoms of Israel and Judah, so it left most of his hearers puzzled. Jesus never gives a clear definition of it, preferring instead to describe it with metaphors and to tell stories about it through parables.

It seems that even Jesus’ most devoted followers never really understood him. At the beginning of Acts and just before the resurrected Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the disciples ask him, “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” One imagines Jesus shaking his head and thinking, “After all this, you still don’t get it.” Instead, what he says is that it’s not his decision to make, but hang tight for the coming of the Spirit. At Pentecost it’s made clear that God’s plan is for the whole world. But “the plan” always remains a mystery.

Jesus’ parables and other teachings make clear that the “kingdom” he is talking about is metaphorical. It is not a political or geographical entity, nor is it something to anticipate happening in the future. This is said most explicitly in Luke 17:

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”

In the noncanonical gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

In a surprising story in Mark 12, Jesus is challenged to name the most important commandment. After responding, a scribe congratulates him on his answer and then expounds upon it in greater detail. Jesus in turn affirms the scribe’s response, saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The words “not far” imply a spatial relationship, yet it is obviously not literal but metaphorical. The kingdom is somehow “present” but we may be at some distance from it.

Things lost and returning to where they belong is a frequent theme of Jesus’ parables. Of these, the most well-known is the parable of the prodigal son. The familiar story tells of a younger son who wants to leave home and see the world. So he travels to “a far country,” squandering his inheritance from his rich father in the process. Destitute, he realizes his family home actually has all he wants so he goes back and is rapturously welcomed by his father.

A second parable is ingeniously attached to the first. It tells of the elder son’s bitterness as his father’s welcoming back his useless brother. However, the story reveals that the elder son has never appreciated what he was blessed with living with this father. While physically present, he too was “lost” and far from home.

Meister Eckhart understood the message of these stories and what it means to be in God’s kingdom. He summarizes the human predicament in a quote I used last time. In this translation, however, the connection to the parable is obvious.

God is at home. We are in the far country.

Thus, according to Eckhart and to Jesus’ lost-and-found parables, the mystery is not where to find God but why have we left our true home where God has been all along. The “returning home” experience is summarized in a line from the popular hymns Amazing Grace.

I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

Now the deeper meaning of Ram Dass’ saying becomes apparent: “We are all just walking each other home.” To be lost and wandering is the human predicament. Our life journey is finding our way back home and helping others along the way to do the same.

But what and where is “home”? As I’ve said many times before, the corruption of religious language makes it hard to take the Bible and theology seriously. Ironically, the same was true in Jesus’ day, which is why he resorted to parables to communicate his ideas.

Home is where we belong because it is where we are from. We can rephrase Jesus’ response to the scribe as, “You’re almost there; you’re almost home.” The gospel of John, written for the Christian community decades after Jesus, sees Jesus as a symbol for home, the place where we are meant to “abide.”

I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.

The turning point for the prodigal son is when he “comes to his senses.” Amazing Grace talks of being found and regaining sight. The most common description which transcends religious and spiritual traditions is “waking up,” from delusion to reality.

Where is home? It is all around us, and within us, Jesus says, if only we could see it. What is home? It is our true self, our being, experienced as pure silent awareness, but obscured by the made-up roles and identities we have accumulated over our lifetime, and the endless chatter in our heads.

To be at home is to know our oneness with the Source of all reality, the ground of being, with “God,” if that word works for you. This Oneness is beyond words, in any case. All we have are pointers and metaphors. But more important than words to describe it, is the experience of being home. Paul calls it “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It’s the deeper truth of the saying, “Home is where the heart is.”

We are all on the journey home. It can be arduous and frustrating, filled with distractions and detours, but there are guides along the way. And it all becomes less stressful, and seems more doable, when we realize that we are all on the same journey, that “we are all just walking each other home.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Going Out of Your Mind

Going Out of Your Mind

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Young man sitting watching a mountainous horizon

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant … that they broke…. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.

This passage from Jeremiah 31 is like a peek behind the curtain. It’s slipped in by an unknown scribe to show the real point of Jeremiah’s futile saga. Jeremiah (like all the prophets) was doomed to fail from the start. Judah’s political and religious leaders were never going to listen to his call to repentance and to return to the Lord’s ways. Jerusalem’s destruction was baked into the cake.

In fact, this text, like others that pop up here and there in the Old Testament, blows down the house of cards that is the saga of God’s chosen people. The dramatic Mosaic “take off” story of the people of Israel, with the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the ten commandments and establishment of the covenant at Mt. Sinai, was always destined to end with a fatal crash landing. These texts are like a Greek chorus, helping the audience to recognize and understand the tragedy that is unfolding before them.

These few verses are the center of the book of Jeremiah and, in effect, declare the failure of the project of religion. Whether in the political form found in most of ancient and medieval history, or its politically independent form typical today, religion will never bring about its goal of creating a humanity in harmony with God, the One, our Divine Source. The “covenant”, the external form of people’s relationship with God, no matter how sincerely adopted, how cleverly written, how strictly enforced, will always fail in the end, will always be “broken”, as Jeremiah says.

So, what’s the answer? Is there an alternative? Formal relationships with God, whether chiseled on stone tablets, written on paper, or digitized on a computer drive will always fail. They make our relationship with God into an idea which, as with all ideas, eventually blow away like leaves in an autumn wind.

But neither we nor God are ideas. While its mythical stories and language sound antique to us today, nonetheless the Bible repeatedly gives priority to human experiences of God. The formulation of ideas about God always takes a secondary role. Yet the biblical religions have put their emphasis on concepts, expressed in theology and doctrines and enacted in rituals and liturgy.

When I was in seminary, I worked part-time in our library. With over a million volumes, it was the joining of three different Christian traditions and one of the largest theological libraries in the country. I later came to see it as symbolic of Christianity’s preoccupation with words: endless rows of centuries of dusty books, filled with words about God.

I went to church recently, for the first time since Easter. During the service I heard four Bible readings, multiple hymns, lengthy recitations of liturgy and formal prayers, and, of course, a sermon. My experience for that hour was words, words, and more words.

But this is exactly what this passage from Jeremiah says needs to change. Teaching people about God doesn’t cut it. Instead, the prophet says, rather than being taught about God with words people will know God by having God’s Word written on their hearts. God isn’t an idea to be taught and learned but an experienced reality within us.

What is the “heart”? Where is our deepest center? It isn’t our mind, with its endless stream of words and ideas, especially ideas about ourselves, called our ego. Our inner being has been called different things over the ages. Today it is most often identified as consciousness, our deepest awareness of our self and our being.

This is the true Self that is aware of our egoic self, aware of our thinking and feeling, but it is not them and is unaffected by them. It is, as Paul describes it, the source of the peace that surpasses all understanding. Christianity has said that it is Spirit, God’s own presence within us.

Religion is the quest to find and understand God. Spirituality, however, says God doesn’t need to be found but is already here, within and around us. God, as Paul is quoted saying in Acts, is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” In Galatians he says, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” In the gospel of John, Jesus’ last prayer for his followers is that they would all be one, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you.”

The primary activity of religion is worship, directing prayers and praise to “the God out there.” In the spiritual life, the primary activity is meditation (in Christian circles often called contemplation or centering prayer), which opens us to our true Self and liberates us from the confusion and pain of our ever changing egoic self.

So, for example, in meditation we may still hear voices in our heads of self-judgement, anger, frustration, anxiety, relentless demands, etc. But over time we come to realize that those voices are not us. We, our real selves, are the ones listening to those voices, which, once recognized, gives us the freedom to choose how to respond to them, or (often the best course) to just ignore them.

I am not my mind any more than I am my heart or my lungs, which are all largely out of my control. Going out of my mind is not a path to insanity but, on the contrary, the path to my true self, the path to freedom and true peace and happiness. It is the path to God.

Today, religious language seems antique and much of it has been corrupted by centuries of abuse. About the time of Vatican II, one of the Roman Catholic church’s top theologians, Karl Rahner, said we should stop using the word “God” for fifty years since its meaning had become so distorted. The rise of the spiritual but not religious is due not only to a rejection of religious institutions but religious language, as well. For them, “religious-speak” is neither helpful nor meaningful.

But for those who remain within establishment religion, it is all the more important to see how, over the centuries, many religious texts and authorities have been well aware of religion’s limitations. It is a thread that runs throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition, especially among the mystics. For them, reality is not dualistic, requiring that we strive to span an enormous gap between us and God. Rather, the challenge is to awaken from our confusion and blindness to know our oneness with God and all that has been created.

One of those mystic authorities was the medieval German theologian, Meister Eckhart. His understanding of our oneness with God was clear and profound and still speaks to us today of the peace and joy of that experience.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Consider the lilies

Consider the lilies

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photo of liliesThe news today, whatever its source or format, provides endless sources of distress. Local events, national politics, international conflict, natural disasters, and predictions of future catastrophes all contribute to our sense of dis-ease: feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, frustration, guilt, depression, sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness.

Of course, people have been upset by distressing events long before there were news media. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses this in one of the most famous passages in the gospels.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear? For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

On first hearing, Jesus words sound pollyannish. “Don’t worry. God will take care of it.” Worse, you may have heard such sentiments from people thinking they were being helpful. And Jesus can also seem annoyingly simplistic when he tells people on multiple occasions that they need to have faith, or that their faith has healed them.

But this text contains profound wisdom if we listen carefully. As he often does, Jesus tries to get his listeners to open their eyes to see the world as it really is, learn the lessons it has to teach, and re-frame our own self-understanding as a result.

Remarkably to us, perhaps, Jesus begins by noting that all life is part of an ecosystem. The seeds and bugs birds need are simply there for the taking. Lilies beautify the fields they occupy simply by being what they are. Yet while this is supposed to encourage us in trusting that we too will be taken care of, Jesus almost off offhandedly adds that the field that is so beautiful one day will, nonetheless, be cut down and tossed in the oven the next.

Jesus joins the Buddha here in teaching the most basic lesson: nothing is permanent, including you and me. An emotional reaction to distressing news is natural, whether it’s something happening right in front of us or halfway around the world. But when those emotions begin to overwhelm us and we can’t find peace again, then something else is going on. We are clinging to what can’t be held on to.

Buddhist priest Norman Fischer summarizes this Buddhist teaching.

Practitioners have always understood impermanence as the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice. All that exists is impermanent; nothing lasts. Therefore nothing can be grasped or held onto. When we don’t fully appreciate this simple but profound truth we suffer…. When we do, we have real peace and understanding…. As far as classical Buddhism is concerned, impermanence is the number one inescapable, and essentially painful, fact of life. It is the singular existential problem that the whole edifice of Buddhist practice is meant to address.

Jesus is, perhaps, less systematic than the Buddha but his response to impermanence is essentially the same. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. That is, seek what is permanent and stop looking for security and peace in the impermanent, what is so pretty one day and tossed in the oven the next.

Now here, of course, we run into the problems of language and the corruption of language. For most today, a statement like “seek first the kingdom” drips with a cloying piety from generations of manipulative preachers and evangelists. Jesus’ concern isn’t with religion, however, but daily living.

“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

We hear this expressed in AA as living” one day at a time” and in nondual spirituality as “living in the now.” Neither past or future are real; they are only ideas in our head. And those ideas are the source of most our distress, anguishing about what did or didn’t happen in the past or what might happen in the future. Real life happens only here and now. This is the meaning of existence and is our true being. Anything else is fantasy.

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said that God is “the ground of being.” That phrase was embraced in the 20th century by the German American theologian Paul Tillich and has grown in usage since. Being is the Really Real. “Ground of being” echoes the famous story of Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks for the name of this God, he is told it’s “I AM”, Being Itself, speaking to him.

Mystics of all religious traditions have said that, in some profound way,  existence itself it the ultimate revelation and experience of God. Reality’s countless forms are expressions of existence, of Being, but they are all transitory, constantly changing, impermanent, forever coming and going.

To “seek the kingdom” as Jesus says, is to find and ground ourselves in the permanent, the timeless, the Really Real, and to let go of the transitory, that which is forever changing and impermanent. To do otherwise, Jesus and the Buddha both say, is to live in confusion and suffering.

How do we respond to the world’s chaos and crises? “Today’s trouble is enough for today,” Jesus says. Do what you can and are moved to do here and now: donate, write a politician, vote, volunteer, etc. But endless thinking, ruminating, fuming, stressing about this problem or that crisis won’t accomplish anything.

When these emotions get us in their grip and won’t let got, nonduality teacher Angelo Dilullo says it’s time to practice a type of meditation called self-inquiry. In this practice, we look inwards to find the underlying emotions that have been triggered by the event or events that have so distressed us. What painful experiences or negatives ideas have been opened within us? Often the question will be, what are we clinging to that we need to let go of?

The events and situations causing so much distress to people today are not trivial but often have little direct impact upon us. And in most cases, there is usually little we can do about them. Obsessing about them in response to our powerlessness, including feeling deep anger or depression, does nothing. This is the suffering that comes from clinging to the transitoriness of life.

Tying ourselves in emotional knots over the latest news story or headline disconnects us from living here and now. It closes us to the beauty of the world around us and to the opportunities we have to bring hope and healing to situations right where we are. “Today’s trouble is enough” to challenge our abilities and to create new possibilities of love and life, if we can be centered in the Really Real, the kingdom which Jesus says is all around us and within us.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Finding Rabbi Jesus

Finding Rabbi Jesus

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Modern mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene
A contemporary mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene at the Magdalena Institute in Magdala, Israel, on the Sea of Galilee.

I’ve been writing about the near impossibility of knowing who Jesus really was: what he did, what he taught, and what his ultimate intention was, if he had one. Our earliest writings about Jesus are by someone who never knew him, the apostle Paul. The gospels are written decades after Jesus’ death, again by people who never knew him. What the sources were that the gospel writers used are unknown and we can only speculate about.

Reading the gospels, it’s obvious that their authors, like Paul, each had their own agenda, i.e. a particular understanding of Jesus they wished to promote. Complicating things even more, we have no original manuscripts for anything in the New Testament and it’s now accepted that many of its texts were later edited by unknown scribes, and not just for spelling and grammar.

In short, immediately after his death, Jesus’ followers struggled to define who Jesus was and what his message was. Why was this so? Likely because Jesus himself had laid out no clear agenda, or at least not one that fit with the expectations of the people of Judea. Personally, I think Jesus himself had a clear understanding of what he was about, but he did not have a programmatic agenda and his message was not easily understandable for many of his listeners. Jesus was thinking and behaving far outside the conventional Jewish box.

As a result, Jesus made use of symbolic stories called parables, symbolic acts of inclusion, especially meals, and healings—parables in action, if you will—to get his “message” across. And that strategy worked, at least in touching and changing many people. Jesus’ gracious welcome, and the sense that in doing so Jesus was acting on God’s behalf, seems to be the one thing universally remembered about him. In simplest terms, Jesus communicated that God loved everyone and people just needed faith to experience that love.

Unfortunately for his followers, Jesus left no organizational plan. And that was likely intentional: he just wasn’t interested. So no, Jesus’ goal was not to found a new religion. Not surprisingly then, the story of early Christianity is as disorganized and dysfunctional as can be imagined.

It’s unlikely, for example that “the twelve” was ever as solid an inner core as the gospels want us to believe—they can’t even agree on their names! Peter was supposedly the primo disciple, yet scholars now agree that it was Jesus’ brother James who was head of the Jerusalem church, and he seems to not have been an original follower.

After Jesus’ death, his disciples remained faithful Jews. But then Paul sailed in out of the blue, announcing that Jesus revealed himself to him and told him that gentiles were to be included in this new Christian community. The church’s split over this issue was not resolved until the center of Jewish Christianity was decimated by the first Jewish Roman war and the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70.

After that, Gentile Christianity became the norm but it existed in countless different flavors. Non-canonical gospels and other writings from the first centuries testify to the diversity of beliefs and practices of the early church. A centuries-long power struggle ensued leading to infighting, persecutions, and excommunications. This was mostly ended in the 4th century with establishment of Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman empire and the adoption of creedal decrees about the content of true Christian belief. Anyone who disagreed was now officially a heretic and beyond the pale.

As this process ensued, the historical Jesus of Nazareth became an ever-smaller dot in the church’s rear-view mirror. Today, thanks to archaeology and the techniques of critical scholarship, we know more about the historical Jesus than any of those gathered to thrash out the Nicene Creed in 325. It’s not surprising that the creed says almost nothing about Jesus’ life besides his birth and death.

We know more but, as I’ve said, we don’t know enough to construct a convincing, definitive picture of the historical Jesus. And our problem isn’t so much lack of information as it is having too much. It’s as if the pieces from multiple jigsaw puzzles have been (partially) poured into the same box. The question isn’t which picture is “right” but which picture do you want to (partially) put together from all those pieces?

The question of who Jesus really was will never definitively be answered. But we can answer the question of who we want or need Jesus to be. This doesn’t mean that Jesus is a blank slate. The early Christian writings establish discernible boundaries. And reestablishing those boundaries would help knock down the more outrageous caricatures of him that keep popping up: “We don’t know for sure who Jesus was but he certainly wasn’t that” (thinking of the Rambo Jesus recently on posters and t-shirts).

Besides the questions of history and the record of the first Christians is the question of our context today. For centuries the church was able to create the context. Life orbited around the church and was called Christendom. That time is long gone, though many in the church haven’t figured that out, or nostalgically long for its return. But it’s not coming back, no matter how many copies of the Ten Commandments get hung up.

In fact, religion itself is rapidly fading away. All the so-called “world” religions are well past their sell-by date. Rituals continue to be performed, texts continue to be studied, and people return to congregations in times of crisis. But religion can’t shake its pre-modern origins. That’s the world it was created for but that’s not the world we live in now. Today that’s obvious in Westernized societies for most people under 50, at least.

Even in its heyday, though, religion was not without its critics. The fluidity of Hinduism always allowed people to live outside its traditional boundaries, including its most famous wayward son, the Buddha. The most well-known and influential ancient Chinese writing, the Tao te Ching, has little to say about religion. The prophets railed again Israel’s corruption and denounced the hypocrisy of temple worship. And the embarrassing irony now highlighted by many scholars is that Jesus himself showed little interest in formal Judaism or in founding another religion.

Thus, the growing number of the “spiritual but not religious” can find ample support in the tradition of Jesus, as well as in the many other religious renegades that have appeared over the centuries. There is still much we can learn from voices of the past, so long as we realize it doesn’t require us to return to the past.

In a nutshell, Jesus the mystic and wisdom teacher has much to offer our distressed world today. Jesus the Messiah and savior from sin and hell does not. The Jesus who says that God’s kingdom is within and all around you, and that you must lose your life in order to find it, speaks in harmony with countless other voices down through the centuries who are part of what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” And the teachers and followers of nondual or unitive spirituality today follow in their footsteps. It is in recognition of this transcendent tradition that Meister Eckhart said, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language.”

Robert Funk was the brilliant founder of the Jesus Seminar, the multi-year effort to gain a clearer picture of the historical Jesus. In his book summarizing its work, Honest to Jesus, Funk says with typical humor and irony:

We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.

Funk believed Jesus has much to offer us today but we can’t see it because he has been swallowed up by centuries of religious titles and symbols. He needs to be set free. He needs a demotion, but only in the eyes of the church. In John’s account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener. But when he calls her by name, she recognizes him and says in Aramaic, “’Rabbouni!’ (which means teacher).” If rabbi/teacher was an adequate title for the one who was probably Jesus’ most devoted follower, it should be good enough for us today.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Untangling Jesus

Untangling Jesus

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Tangled yarn

16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.  1 Thessalonians 4

26 “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels and gather the elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven…. When you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.  Mark 13

20 Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”  Luke 17

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”  Thomas 113

What is the kingdom of God? How do we find it, or when is it coming? The passages above are examples of how the New Testament can contradict itself. Even more, they represent the fundamental divide in the church’s understanding of Jesus’ message.

The first quotation is from the oldest Christian writing we know, Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Writing about twenty years after Jesus’ death, Paul is convinced Jesus will return very soon “in glory” to bring about the consummation of all history and establish his reign over all creation. In the passage from Mark, Jesus expresses essentially this same idea. This time, however, writing twenty years after Paul, it will be Mark’s readers, reeling from the catastrophic Jewish-Roman War, who will experience this.

In the passage from Luke, however, written fifteen or twenty years after Mark, Jesus explicitly rejects the notion that God’s kingdom is coming, sooner or later, because it’s already here! The quotation from the Gospel of Thomas expresses a very similar idea, with Jesus adding the explanation that, while the kingdom is here, most people don’t see the it.

The difference in these texts is not just about timing. The kingdom envisioned by Paul and by Jesus in the Mark passage is very different than Jesus’ idea of the kingdom in the stories from Luke and Thomas. In the first instance, the kingdom represents the apocalyptic establishment of God’s eternal rule. The statements by Jesus in Luke and Thomas, however, are enigmatic. What does it mean to say the kingdom is among you or within you or “spread out upon the earth”?

I think Jesus left most people puzzled, including his disciples. The curious scene where Jesus asks the disciples who people think he is points to the popular confusion. As I wrote last time, Albert Schweitzer came to the conclusion that Jesus thought his mission was to be the spark that initiated the coming of God’s kingdom, but it didn’t happen. He failed.

There are scholars today that agree with Schweitzer but I think they are wrong. Nonetheless, I recognize that there isn’t the evidence to resolve this conclusively one way or the other. As I quoted Robert Price, we have too many Jesuses. But neither do I think figuring out who Jesus really was is our concern. Instead, I believe we need to listen to the many Jesus voices to hear what speaks to us here and now.

Regardless of what Jesus intended, most of his followers, aka the church, have interpreted his teaching about the kingdom in one of two ways. Either God was going to bring about the establishment of the kingdom with Jesus’ return and at a definite time which Christians could anticipate, or the kingdom was coming at some indefinite and unknowable time in the future.

The Paul and Mark quotes obviously are in the first category. As time when on and Jesus did not return, this first interpretation fell out of favor. But it didn’t disappear. Over the centuries, movements have sprung up, usually in times of social crisis, which believed that Jesus’ return was imminent. Quotations from Paul’s letters, the gospels, and especially the book of Revelation have been patched together to support these groups’ predictions. Most recently, large numbers of evangelicals have held such beliefs, often with bizarre consequences.

It is the second view of Christ’s return and the kingdom’s coming which has been more common, however. The church became Christ’s interim institutional representative, keeping the lights burning, however long that might be, until the bridegroom returned, as one of Jesus’ parables says. But waiting is hard (as the same parable teaches). What are we supposed to do in the mean time?

As the centuries went by, the church found it more and more difficult to come up with an answer to that question. In effect, the church itself became the answer: build up the church as an institution, recruit lots of clergy and religious, develop elaborate doctrines and theology, and create more Christians by birth or conversion. I think we all know how well that strategy has turned out.

The institutional church has gone through endless cycles of growth, power abuse, corruption, infighting, division, and reform. The folks in the pews were mostly taken for granted. “Go to church, live life as best you can, and when you die God will take care of you.” Since the Enlightenment and rise of modernism, fewer and fewer people have been satisfied with either the church or its message of salvation after you die. In the West, at least, the church is now on life support and Christianity as a religion is hardly taken seriously.

The natural response of those distressed about this turn of events is to wonder how the church and Christianity can be revived. In other words, how to turn the cycle once again. I’m not sure that’s possible anymore. More importantly, I don’t think it’s even desirable because I don’t believe it’s what Jesus ever intended.

As we’ve seen, Jesus either believed the kingdom was coming very soon, or it wasn’t “coming” at all because it was already here. The option the church chose, that the kingdom would come at some indefinite time in the distant future, was not one of the options. It made that one up. The church has had an amazingly long run with it but has finally run out of gas.

But what about that second option, that the kingdom of God is already here? Well, that actually is part of the story, as well, though one largely unknown or forgotten. In fact, it is a thread that has run throughout the church’s history.

It is the story of the monastics and the mystics. It is the story of clergy, theologians, and lay people who quietly snuck this idea into their conventional beliefs and practices. It the story of others who boldly declared such beliefs in contrast with official teaching and were persecuted and even martyred for their efforts. And it is the story of everyday piety, often simple, sometimes superstitious or magical, but which believes that at any time and in any place, we are in God’s presence.

There is a tradition found in nearly all religions, but especially in the East, that the greatest source of humanity’s suffering is our own ego. In traditional Christianity the ego is our sinful self which we must struggle to control and subdue. But there is another understanding, shared with religions of the East, that the problem actually is that the ego is a fraud. It is an imposter, a “false self” blocking our vision of our true self, our sacred sense of “I am”, the indwelling Spirit, or simply God.

To discover this is to awaken to our true nature. The ego doesn’t need to be fought in a moral wrestling match in which few succeed. Rather, it needs to be seen through, discovering in the process that we are not separate selves but we are all united as incarnations of the one Self. In Jesus’ words, we need to lose our life to find it. In describing his own spiritual awakening, Paul says that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Our world of 8 billion separate egos is careening towards disaster. And the more of us there are, the more isolated, lonely, angry, and afraid we become. Yet that is how our culture wants us to view ourselves, “growing the economy” as we all scramble to get ahead of everyone else.

But what if we took Jesus seriously, and literally, when he says the greatest commandment can be expressed in two ways, which in practice mean the same thing? That our life’s purpose is to love the one God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That true peace and happiness are found when we unite in love with the Being who is the ground of all reality, and that when we love our neighbor, we are actually loving ourself since we are all manifestation of the one Self.

In another passage near the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says this:

“The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

“Spiritual poverty” may be one of the best descriptions of life in our world today. Yet there is a thread running through the world’s religions that says it doesn’t have to be this way. This wisdom tradition says that we suffer from a case of mistaken identity, a global amnesia about our true self. The Jesus tradition, and the Christian religion which grew from it share that thread, though few have known to look for it. While mostly falling on deaf ears in the past, it is this voice of Jesus and the Spirit that we most need to listen for.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Fixing worship

Fixing worship

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woman sitting alone in a churchI have been to many wonderful worship services. I like to think I’ve planned and led a few. Overall, however, I would say the quality of worship is declining because churches are increasingly uncertain what worship is actually for. But that’s only a symptom of worship’s troubles.

For most of its history, worship is the basket into which the church has placed nearly all its eggs. The popular phrase “going to church” says it all. Worship is what church is about, this saying assumes. Further, it’s an essentially passive activity. You go to worship, you attend a service, like you go to a movie or attend a graduation. You are primarily a viewer of the featured event.

With the rise of popular culture in the 20th century, churches began to realize worship was losing its hold on people. They recognized that they needed to do a better job of “connecting with their audience.” The Catholic church substituted Latin for modern vernacular languages and Protestants gave up King James English for more modern versions. Music became more contemporary. To get people more involved, communion became more frequent. A new emphasis was placed on lay worship leadership.

All of this remained, however, within the context of worship as “spectator sport” because that’s what worship is. Even if you’re singing, reading, dancing, or giving a communion cup, you’re doing it for the congregation, the vast majority of whom walked in, took a program, found a seat, and then followed directions. Sometimes they joined in the singing or liturgy but mostly they watched and listened to what was going on up front. Which is what they expected to do when they came.

All the time I was a parish pastor, one of my primary objectives was to “improve worship.” In my last years, however, I came to realize that such efforts were putting lipstick on a pig. Better worship changed nothing. More specifically, it didn’t change people.

Since at least the 4th century, Christianity has been largely a passive activity. That was its appeal: it was simple. Be baptized, go to church, believe a few things about God and Jesus, make some effort to be a good person, and you’re in. The church was a carrot-and-stick institution, wielding the threat of hell and dangling the promise of heaven to keep people coming. Worship was the main place that wielding and dangling took place. It was there that you got your ticket punched to eventually be admitted to the main event “upstairs.”

With the advent of the modern world, that scenario went into a long, steady decline. The carrot and stick stopped working. Worship became a feel-good act of nostalgia, supplemented with some contemporary entertainment and self-help advice. Coffee hour and potlucks became as much of a draw. Now, though, few remember or long for the church of yore, and thousands of congregations close in the US every year.

To cut to the chase, religion assumes an enormous gap exists between God and humanity. There are many explanations for why this is so (“original sin” is the most notorious), but it is religion’s job to bridge that gap for us. Worship is essentially an endless reiteration of the story of Jesus as the “gap-bridger.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, assumes that we are actually one with God, but we are blind to that reality and do not experience it. Here the culprit is our identification with an illusory separate self, created in our mind, often called the ego. This is the mask we wear, our persona (the Greek word for mask), which is actually hiding our true being. In Christian terms this is God’s own Spirit. It is our sense of “I am”: silent, imperturbable, and eternal. It is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is God’s own being incarnate in us.

This is why Jesus says that we must lose our life (ego) in order to find it (spirit). It is the essence of Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 2:

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Unfortunately, power brokers in the early church drained these teachings of their spiritual content and twisted them into a legalistic framework of sin and forgiveness. Jesus’ death ceased to be a metaphor and model of the ego death we must all undergo and became instead the God-required atoning death for human sin, whose benefits only the church could provide.

In the gospels, Jesus is the human face of God. Early on, official church teaching added and he is the only human face of God. But there are plenty of stories that contradict this. For example, Jesus says both that he is the light of the world and that we are the light of the world. Why do we hear so much about the first but little about the latter?

In the closing parable of Matthew, people are judged for how they treated “the Son of man” when they encountered him in the poor, sick, hungry, naked, and imprisoned. Jesus also says the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed because it’s already here, within us and all around us. And Paul challenges his readers, “Do you not know your body is a temple of the holy Spirit?”

In its ancient and indigenous forms, worship renewed and celebrated people’s experience of the sacred in their lives and in the world. The church needs to rediscover that tradition. To do so, it will need to get rid of its carrots and sticks once and for all. It will need to drop the notion that people are coming to find God and realize instead that God arrives with every person who walks in the door.

In poetry and prose, spoken and sung, worship must find new words (and rediscover old ones) that open people’s eyes and hearts to the eternal spirit that surrounds and fills them. But just as importantly, worship must enable the most profound experience of sacred being, which is silence. For only in silence do we realize that we are not the ego’s endless chatter and thoughts. Only in silence do we recognize our true nature as boundless awareness and eternal peace. In silence, we know ourselves as God’s own spirit. Even the ancient Israelites are directed in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

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God has left the building

God has left the building

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Intoned in a dramatic voice (by lead actor Kelsey Grammer), many of the episodes of the long running TV comedy, Frasier, concluded with the announcement, “Frasier has left the building.” If he had known the phrase, the iconoclastic 19th century German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, might have used it and declared, “God has left the building.” Instead, he famously (or infamously) said, “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is an odd “feast day” because it is the only one dedicated to a doctrine. The Trinity has been argued about throughout church history. The meaning of it has never been clearly stated, so that Jews and Muslims both view it as a polytheistic heresy. Nearly every group that has separated from orthodox Christianity has done so, at least in part, over rejecting the Trinity.

Nonetheless, century after century, the church has clung to the Trinity like a life preserver. But as is always the case when we need to rise to a new level of maturity, it’s time for the church to let it go, and swim.

Typically, the problem with the Trinity has been with “persons” two and three: Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. How could the human Jesus be divine? How can the Holy Spirit be a separate divine entity? But I don’t think that’s the real problem. The “problem” is actually with the first person, God the Father, because he’s the one that’s “left the building.”

When I was in seminary in the late 1970s, there was great controversy over “God language” and the maleness of God. “Inclusive language” should be used to refer to God, it was said, as God was not male or female. Or God was both. It was never clear which it was. Old prayers and hymns were revised to reflect this, and new ones were created. Even the Bible was retranslated. But the results of all this were often awkward and stilted.

What was rarely discussed, however, was who, or what, this God actually is. In other words, Nietzsche’s announcement from over a century ago was not part of the conversation. In debating God’s gender, were we actually talking about anything at all?

“God is dead… and we have killed him.” That second phrase often gets left off. What Nietzsche was referring to was the transition to the modern world. In ancient and medieval times, superhuman divine beings existed in a nearly invisible heavenly realm above the clouds. The three-tiered universe was like a layer cake, a lower realm or “underworld” of the dead and/or hell, earth was the middle layer, and above that was an upper realm called heaven. It was often believed to have several levels of its own, where God, or the gods, and various angelic-type beings all existed.

As I said in my latest video, all this, of course, was swept away by Galileo and his scientific successors. The being called God, or God the Father in Christian terms, disappeared along with God’s abode. How can there be a God if there is no place for God to be? That this is now universally accepted is demonstrated by the fact that no one is breathless waiting for the new Webb telescope, peering further into space than ever before, to discover heaven at the edge of the universe. God the Father has left the building.

The belief in God as a supreme being existing somewhere “out there” is called theism. To not believe in such a God is called a-theism. In American culture, it’s one of the most disreputable labels a person can be given. But that’s because it’s misunderstood to mean not believing in God, when it actually means not believing in the theistic being God-out-there.

Recently, pollsters have expressed confusion about why the decline in religious identity has not been matched by a rise in atheism, which remains in the low single-digits. That’s because many of these people also think atheism means “no god.” In reality, many of them likely are a-theists because they have dropped a belief in a God-out-there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God.

What do the “spiritual, not religious” believe in then? What are the alternatives to God the Father, to God-out-there? Not to be flippant, but it’s the God-right-here. Such an understanding of God is found around the world and throughout history. In fact, archaeology indicates such a notion of God has been around a lot longer than that of a God-far-off.

Early archaeology and anthropology were dominated by Christian Westerners. We still live with their prejudiced judgments. They scoffed at, what was to them, the primitive and clearly inferior animism and pantheism of prehistoric and indigenous peoples. Yet the notion that God pervades reality and that we live in a sacred, spirit filled world has been the a more common view than theism. Today, contemporary indigenous spirituality is viewed much more positively, often as something modern people can learn from.

There has also been renewed interest in the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism. To borrow the title of the popular 17th century mystical work of Brother Andrew, in simple terms mysticism is “the practice of the presence of God.” Mystics (who are present also in Judaism and Islam) generally have little interest in traditional liturgy and theology. They are usually not concerned about achieving forgiveness of their sins, but of knowing God’s presence within and around them, and of being awakened, enlightened, transformed by that experience.

What’s surprising to many is that such a description could also be applied to Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus shows little interest in temple ritual, believing rather in God’s presence within and around him. Unfortunately, the church got the notion that this made Jesus unique because he was the Son of God. Yet the case can be made (and increasingly now is made) that Jesus viewed himself as a child of God, like everyone else. His ministry was demonstrating a life possible for anyone who has been awakened by the Spirit to their true identity.

Today, much of the language of the Bible and traditional religion is too pious and antique for modern ears. Indeed, in the 1960s, the renowned Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said the church should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because it had been so abused and misused! What we need to remember is that all words are metaphors and approximations. There is a valuable Buddhist saying that all words and teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon. We too easily get obsessed with the finger, when what we need to be looking at is the moon.

Surprisingly, and significantly, “spirituality “is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, or of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

God the Father has left the building. Yet rather than being dead and gone as Nietzsche assumed, God is increasingly recognized as a sacred spirit, the unifying and energizing dimension of all reality, embodied must fully in human consciousness.

In the biblical story, this spirit brought creation out of chaos and the first human to life. At his baptism, the spirit awakened Jesus to his sacred identity. Knowing this spirit, he taught that the “realm of God” was not a unique place far off somewhere but here and now, within and all around us. Centuries later, that vision may finally be coming to life.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the topic conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and enables me to keep doing this.