Tag: God

Words of Wisdom

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
The Lamp of Wisdom: sculpture at Waterperry Gardens. Image by Vanderbilt Divinity Library.  Retrieved from http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54977 on September 16, 2012.

Church is probably going to feel like an Indiana Jones movie this morning because I’m taking you on a hunt for lost treasure!  We’re going to explore some dangerous and exciting new territory.  There’s bound to be risks aplenty.  The treasure we’re looking for doesn’t belong on a dusty old shelf in some museum; we’re going to put it to good use in our lives, where it can yield a return on our investment.

(OK, that opening was a bit gimmicky, but give me a break, I’ve got to start the sermon somewhere!)

What I’m interested in doing today is exploring one of the lost treasures of the Bible itself.  It sounds weird to hear someone talk about “lost treasures in the Bible”, right?  I mean, isn’t the whole thing right there for us to open and read anytime we like?  Of course it is!  However, there are certain parts of the Bible that have been passed by or ignored over the years.  This usually happens because these passages just don’t fit very well with the big ideas of the people in charge, so they get minimized and pushed aside while other passages take center stage.  Once this has happened for several generations or even a few centuries in a row, most people forget those passages are even there.  But that’s just the thing about the Bible: if you actually read it, it has a way of challenging the status quo and opening you up to new ideas that the powers-that-be might even call “heresy”.

This is exactly what happened with our Protestant ancestors, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  Once they actually got their hands on the Bible itself, it led them to challenge a thousand years of church tradition and authority.  Both of them were eventually excommunicated for preaching this crazy idea that regular people, not just priests and monks, should be able to read the Bible for themselves, in their own native language.  It’s just like Desmond Tutu said in God Has A Dream, the book our congregation read together last summer:

Oppressive and unjust governments should stop people from praying to God, should stop them from reading and meditating on the Bible, for these activities will constrain them to work for the establishment of God’s kingdom of justice, of peace, of laughter, of joy, of caring, of sharing, of reconciliation, of compassion.

This morning, as we open the pages of this dangerously subversive and revolutionary manifesto that we call “the Bible”, we’re going to be searching for a particularly fascinating “lost treasure” that has been hidden in plain sight for thousands of years.  This treasure that I’m talking about is actually a biblical character, like Jesus and Moses.  Her name is Wisdom.

To the ears of us North Americans, talking about Wisdom as a person sounds weird.  We’re used to thinking of Wisdom as a virtue or a concept, like intelligence or compassion.  Wisdom (so we think) is not a person, but a character quality possessed by those of our elders who have lived long and lived well.  We all aspire to be holders of Wisdom in our old age.

But that’s not how the Bible portrays Wisdom.  The Bible sees Wisdom as a person, not a concept.  In this morning’s Old Testament reading, taken from the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is portrayed as a bold and brave woman:

Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.

There is so much to love about the scene that is being set here.  First of all, as I’ve already pointed out, Wisdom is portrayed as a person, a woman.  In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, the word for Wisdom is Hochma.  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for Wisdom is Sophia.  That’s where we get words like philosophy from.  Philosophy literally means “the Love of Wisdom”.  Sophia also happens to be a very familiar name for women in our culture.  Sarah and I actually considered naming our daughter Sophia, but then we found out that it was the single most popular name for baby girls in 2008, so we decided to name her something more unique to her.  So, for the remainder of this sermon, in order to emphasize the personal and feminine nature of Wisdom, as she is portrayed in the Bible, I will be referring to her by that Greek name: Sophia.

What kind of woman is Sophia?  We learn right away from this passage in Proverbs that she is both unconventional and courageous.  Proverbs says that she “cries out in the streets” and “raises her voice” at “the busiest corner”.  Imagine, if you will, the gender-segregated world of ancient Palestine.  In that culture, a woman’s traditional sphere of influence was limited to the home.  Proper women, so they said at the time, didn’t make their presence known in public, which was the domain of men.  If a woman needed something to get done outside of the home, she had to get it done through a man, like her husband, brother, or father.  There were only two kinds of women who would raise their voices on a busy street corner: prostitutes and desperate women who had suffered such an injustice that they had no other choice but to take matters into their own hands.  Either way, whenever a woman raised her voice in public, people were apt to think the worst.

So, I think it’s extremely significant that when we first meet Sophia, here in the book of Proverbs, she is crying out in the streets.  The fact that she is doing so in that culture meant that something had gone very, very wrong indeed: either something was wrong with her or something had gone wrong with the world.  Her willingness to speak up makes her the kind of person who is able to think outside the box and color outside the lines of what is socially acceptable.  She is this strong, creative, and dynamic presence who raises her voice in order to change things for the better.  In that way, the figure Sophia reminds me of pioneering women like Eleanor Roosevelt or the famous primatologist Jane Goodall.  Both of these women, in the fields of politics and science, respectively, made a lasting difference by trespassing over the borders of what was expected of them from society.  If we were to make a movie about Sophia, I think I would cast someone like Whoopi Goldberg or Kathy Bates in the lead role.

What can we learn about Sophia from looking elsewhere in the Bible?

In Proverbs 8, we meet her again.  Just like before, she is crying out in the street in defiance of public opinion.  She says:

To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
acquire intelligence, you who lack it…

…I have insight, I have strength.
By me kings reign,
and rulers decree what is just;
by me rulers rule,
and nobles, all who govern rightly.
I love those who love me,
and those who seek me diligently find me.

At this point in the poem, things start to get really interesting.  Up to now, we might still be able to dismiss Sophia as an impersonal concept, symbolically represented as a woman, but listen to what she says later in chapter 8:

Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth…

When [God] established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

This is most interesting.  Sophia, according to the ancient Hebrew sage who wrote this poem, holds a prominent place in cosmic scheme of things.  Somehow, God works through Sophia in creating and shaping the world.  The natural order we observe in the universe, according to this poem, is the direct result of God’s creative energy working with and through Sophia.  Earlier, she says, “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just”.  This means that the ideals of goodness and justice, far from being arbitrary cultural norms, are actually woven into the very fabric of the universe by Sophia herself.  In this sense, she can be compared to that which Chinese philosophers have referred to as the Tao, the fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos.

We can learn even more about the development of the idea of Sophia by looking at the books of the Apocrypha.  While these books, written by Hellenistic Jews in the centuries after the last Jewish prophet and the birth of Christ, were not accepted as sacred Scripture by the Protestant reformers, they are nonetheless helpful for demonstrating the developing thought patterns of the Jewish people in the years leading up to Jesus’ lifetime.  This passage, a meditation on Sophia, comes from chapter 7 of a book called The Wisdom of Solomon:

because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be superior,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

What I find so fascinating about this passage is that the figure of Sophia is becoming more and more closely associated with God’s own self.  As we move into the New Testament, the apostle Paul refers to Christ as “the Wisdom of God” in his first letter to the Corinthians.  Decades later, someone writing in Paul’s name expanded on this association of Christ with Sophia in the epistle to the Colossians.  Listen for the similarity between this passage about Christ and the one we read earlier from Proverbs 8:

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.

It seems that the early Christians saw Christ as the earthly embodiment of Sophia herself.  More than anyone else in history, Jesus lived a life in harmony with this fundamental organizing principle of the universe.

How can it be then, that such an important figure as Sophia has become one of the “lost treasures” of the Bible?  The answer, I think, comes from the various kinds of cultural momentum and inertia that can be found in people of every place and time.  Christianity itself has grown up in a patriarchal society.  The sad fact is that women’s voices have not counted as much as men’s voices.  When it comes to the metaphors we use to describe God, Christians have embraced images of masculinity and power (e.g. Almighty Father, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, etc.) to the exclusion of more feminine images (e.g. Sophia raising her voice in the marketplace).  Nevertheless, our sacred Scriptures remind us that men and women are both equally made “in the image of God”.  The Bible also gives us several feminine metaphors for God apart from Sophia the Wisdom Woman.  Deuteronomy 32 describes God as an eagle teaching her young to fly.  Isaiah 49 describes God as a mother who could never forget her baby.  Women served as metaphors for God in more than one of Jesus’ parables.  One of my favorite images comes from the Hebrew root of the term that gets translated as “tender mercies”, a character quality that is often applied to God.  In Hebrew, the word for “tender mercies” is rachamim, which comes from the word rechem, which literally means “womb”.  When the Bible tells us that we are the recipients of God’s “tender mercy”, it means to say that we are being nurtured and loved as we grow within the very womb of God.  I like to tie this right back in to the image of Sophia as a metaphor for God.  When I think of God, I have little use for the image of an angry, powerful man with a long white beard who sits on a throne above the clouds, hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to the earth.  That kind of Deity sounds more like Zeus than Jesus.  When I think of God, I prefer to think of Sophia: that brave and beautiful woman who raises her voice for justice in the city streets and carries the earth like a baby on her hip.  That’s the God to whom I have given my heart.

This week, as you go out into the streets where you live, work, and play, I pray that your ears would be open to Sophia’s voice, calling out to you.  Whether you are walking along an autumn trail, sitting in a meeting, milking a cow, or ringing up a cash register, may you become aware in those moments of that same sacred presence that shaped and renews the cosmos.  Like Jesus, may you feel her creative energy pulsing through your veins and granting you the insight you need in order to live a life in total harmony with the universe itself.

In the Fullness of Time

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

Excerpt from God Has A Dream:

There is a lovely phrase which St. Paul uses in his letter to the new Christian converts in Galatia.  And that phrase is “in the fullness of time.”  Paul speaks about how when Jesus was born it was at just the right time, all the pieces had fallen into place, the antecedents were just right, and it all happened at exactly the right moment.  A little earlier would have been too soon and a little later would have been too late.  When it happened it could not have been at any other moment.

Last year, many of us had a good laugh at the hype created by a fringe religious group who claimed to have exclusive knowledge that the end of the world was coming on May 21, 2011.  As you may (or may not) recall, the day itself came and went without event.  This was by no means the first time someone tried to cash in on apocalyptic hype.  At the turn of the Millennium, there was “much ado about nothing” regarding the Y2K computer bug.  In the 19th century, a man named William Miller made three unsuccessful attempts to predict the end of the world before his followers lost faith in him.  Even before that, at the turn of the previous millennium, Pope Sylvester II trembled in prayer in his church, convinced that the world would come to an end that very night.  Later this year, so we’re told, the Mayan calendar is supposed to run out, leading some people to speculate that this ancient civilization knew something we don’t about the apocalypse.

Predicting the what, where, and when of the end of the world has never failed to be a sensationalistic, money-making pastime for would-be prophets and their paranoid followers.  We Christians have proved to be especially vulnerable to these scam artists, mainly because of the presence of the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament.  Many claim that this document, when read and interpreted properly, provides a detailed road map for the end of the world.  It’s bizarre and cryptic imagery are said to contain secret messages about the Apocalypse that are meant to be decoded by those with the proper biblical study tools.  The downside of this approach is that every single prediction supposedly “decoded” from the book of Revelation has turned out to be wrong.  God’s plan, it seems, is not so readily available for human review and approval, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure it out anyway.

Many of us might find it easy to laugh at them for their misguided pursuit.  However, I’d like to take a moment to sympathize with them.  My theory is that folks who tend to obsess over this kind of thing are looking for something.  I think they’re looking for a sense of meaning and purpose in life.  They want to believe that God has a plan for the world and that we’re not all just wandering aimlessly through history.  I can relate to that.

The next step that most of these folks take is to apply this concept of God’s plan to their personal lives.  They might say, “Not only does the universe have a destiny, but so do I.  I’m an important part of God’s plan.  Therefore, my life has meaning.”  Like I said before, I can respect that need.  I feel it too.  I think we all do.  But we have to watch out and make sure that we don’t carry this idea too far.

Our ancestors in the Calvinist tradition were famous for believing that God predestines the fate of every single human being.  They believed that some people were destined for eternal bliss in heaven while others were doomed to endless suffering in hell.  What makes the difference, they said, is “unconditional election” by God.  God chose who would be “saved” or “damned” from the beginning of time, and there is nothing that anyone can do or say to change their fate.  What’s more is that there was no way to know with any absolute certainty about which category you were in.  This theological belief, called “double predestination”, caused people a lot of anxiety.

I’ve also seen people take the idea of God’s plan to unhealthy extremes in rather mundane matters.  When I was in high school, I worked in a bookstore that had a section where we sold religiously themed posters.  One day, I was walking through the stacks when I came across a woman who was kneeling on the floor, weeping.  She had two posters laid out on the floor in front of her.  The problem, it turned out, was that she couldn’t figure out which poster God wanted her to buy.  Just like those folks who are obsessed with predicting the end of the world and the early Calvinist belief in double predestination, this person in the bookstore had taken the idea of God’s plan too far.

When I think about the idea of a divine plan for my life or history, I try not to get too hung up on the details of what, when, and where certain things are supposed to happen.  If we occupy our time with those kinds of questions, I think we’re more likely to end up in an unhealthy state of mind.  Rather, when I think about God’s plan, I prefer to ask questions of who, how, and why.

God is far less interested in what you’re doing and more interested in who you’re becoming, how you’re living, and why you do what you do.  These are questions of the heart.  Answering these questions goes a long way in helping us forge a sense of meaning and significance in our lives.  For example, let’s take a young person in school who is trying to decide on a career path.  I don’t think God tends to care very much whether someone decides to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister.  Those are questions of what, where, and when.  Of greater concern to God is whether that person wants to become a lawyer in order to just make money or to serve the greater cause of justice.  In God’s eyes, a waitress in a diner with a heart for hospitality is more holy, more in step with God’s plan, than a minister who just likes to hear the sound of his own voice.  Who we are is much more important than what we do.

That’s why I tend to avoid the phrase “God’s plan” when it comes to the events of history.  I much prefer to think of “God’s vision” or “God’s dream” as Desmond Tutu calls it.  God’s dream is a dynamic thing.  It’s always changing and in motion.  God is the ultimate creator of this dream, but has invited each one of us to become co-creators with God and each other.  Archbishop Tutu says it like this:

It has often been said, “What we are is God’s gift to us.  What we become is our gift to God.”  What we become is not about status, it is about love.  Do we love like God, as God so deeply desires?  Do we become like God, as God so deeply desires us to be?

As for the substance of the plan itself, the shape it takes is up to us, and God works with and around what we bring to the table.  Again, in the words of Archbishop Tutu:

There is a wonderful Portuguese saying that God writes straight with crooked lines.  God works through history to realize God’s dream.  God makes a proposal to each of us and hopes our response will move His dream forward.  But if we don’t, God does not abandon the goal, He does not abandon the dream.  God adjusts God’s methods to accommodate the detour, but we are going to come back onto the main road and eventually arrive at the destination.

I love that phrase: “God writes straight with crooked lines.”  To me, it describes so well my experience of life in this world where things don’t always go according to plan.  Accidents happen.  Things don’t always go your way.  Life goes on.  It doesn’t mean that God isn’t present or working in this world and in our lives.  It means that, if we’re going to look for God, we have to look deeper than the level of surface appearances and random events.

When someone gets sick, or an accident happens, or a terrible tragedy overtakes us, people are prone to ask, “Why is God doing this?” or “Why did God allow this to happen?”  I have to be honest with you, I don’t think God had anything to do with it.  The God of love that I believe in is not in the business of causing cancer and car accidents.  I think these things just happen.  The God I believe in is the one who meets us in the middle of these disasters and leads us to respond in a certain way.

One of my favorite examples that I use to illustrate this point is the terrorist attacks of September 11.  Some people said that God allowed those airplanes to crash because God was judging the United States for one reason or another.  I don’t think that’s true.  I don’t see God in that at all.  I see God in those volunteers who climbed the smoldering piles of rubble with buckets in their hands to get the trapped survivors out.  I see God in the police and fire fighters who risked or gave their lives to save others.  That’s where God is.  That’s God’s plan, God’s dream, in action.

I don’t know if there will one day be an apocalyptic end to the world.  I don’t know if there will be a once & for all victory of goodness over evil “in the fullness of time”.  I don’t know if we, or our children, or our grandchildren will ever live in a perfect world.

I don’t know much, but this is what I believe:

When I look out at the stars in the heavens, I see a harmony that human selfishness cannot touch.  We might destroy ourselves and each other someday.  We might even take our whole planet into extinction with us.  But the beauty of nebulae, quasars, and galaxies will still be there.  The impulse toward order and equilibrium will never be gone from our universe.  That same impulse exists in each one of us.  We call it life, we call it justice, and we call it compassion.  I call it God.  As long as there is a universe to exist, God will never stop working within it to shape darkness, death, and chaos into light, life, and love.  As long as we are alive in this world, God will never stop inviting us to join God in this continuing mission.  I close this sermon and end this series by going back to the words of Desmond Tutu himself:

All over this magnificent world God calls us to extend His kingdom of shalom—peace and wholeness—of justice, of goodness, of compassion, of caring, of sharing, of laughter, of joy, and of reconciliation.  God is transfiguring the world right this very moment through us because God believes in us and because God loves us.  What can separate us from the love of God?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And as we share God’s love with our brothers and sisters, God’s other children, there is no tyrant who can resist us, no oppression that cannot be ended, no hunger that cannot be fed, no wound that cannot be healed, no hatred that cannot be turned to love, no dream that cannot be fulfilled.

Disturbed With the Joy of Elevated Thoughts

On By J. Barrett LeeIn poetry2 Comments
Rätikon mountain range in Austria. Image by Böhringer Friedrich

I must confess that I have been hitherto unfamiliar with the poetry of William Wordsworth, but my mind was blown this morning as I came across this passage of his, quoted by Karen Armstrong in The Case for God.  It quite simply set my heart on fire.  I would point to poetry like this if someone asked me to give my definition of the term “God”:

…I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart

On By J. Barrett LeeIn God Has A Dream, SermonLeave a comment

Morpheus, a character from ‘The Matrix’ who introduces people to “the real world” by inviting them take a red pill. “If you take the red pill,” he says, “you stay in Wonderland and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Genesis 50:15-21

Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

Excerpt from God Has A Dream

Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.  It seems to be part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble.  Our suffering can become a spirituality of transformation when we understand that we have a role in God’s transfiguration of the world.  And if we are to be true partners with God, we must learn to see with the eyes of God—that is, to see with the eyes of the heart and not just the eyes of the head.  The eyes of the heart are not concerned with appearances but essences, as we cultivate these eyes we are able to learn from our suffering and to see the world with more loving, forgiving, humble, generous eyes.

I have to confess that I really get a kick out of those movies and TV shows whose plots are built around the premise that the everyday “normal” world we all inhabit is a hollow fantasy and the “real” world is way more intense and exciting than most people can imagine.  I went to college in the late 90s and the movie that most exemplifies this idea for people my age is The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves.  In this movie, the “normal” world turns out to be a computer simulation used by evil robots who are trying to control the minds of the human race.  The main character, a regular guy with a boring job in the beginning, turns out to be a hero with super-powers who is destined to save humanity from the robots.

Another example is the TV show Weeds.  This show takes place in sunny, suburban California, where a soccer mom named Nancy is trying to make ends meet for herself and two kids.  But the deep, dark secret is that Nancy is actually selling marijuana.  The show follows Nancy as her life drifts farther and farther away from the world of PTA meetings and white picket fences and into the criminal underworld of gangsters and drug dealers.

What all of these movies and shows have in common is the idea that the “real” world is somehow darker and seedier than the “normal” world.  Wesley Snipe says it like this in the movie Blade: “You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world beneath it – the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to pull the trigger!”

Sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it?

I think these stories tend appeal to people because they reflect, in a metaphorical way, the experience of disillusionment that everyone goes through in the process of growing up.  When we were young, our parents tried to shelter us from the harsh realities of life.  We do the same for our kids and grandkids.  Are there any good parents who don’t worry about the amount of gratuitous sex and violence their kids see on TV?  I doubt it.  We instinctively want to protect our kids from being exposed to those realities too soon, even though we all know our kids will eventually see them anyway, in spite of our best efforts.

So, why do we try to shield them?  Why, instead, do we bring them to church and enroll them in Sunday school where they can learn the stories of the Bible and the basic beliefs and values of our faith?

There are many out there who argue that we are simply trying to delay the inevitable.  They would say that we are trying to keep our kids locked up in a fantasy world that’s “just a sugar-coated topping” in the words of Wesley Snipe.  They would say that we parents are pining for our lost innocence and therefore trying to prevent that loss from happening to our kids.  Afraid of reality, they say, we try to keep ourselves and our children imprisoned in a fantasy world where everything is fine and everyone is happy all the time.

Religion, according to these folks, is the ultimate enforcer of the fantasy world.  Karl Marx, the philosopher who founded the idea of Communism, called religion “the opiate of the masses.”  Faith in God, he said, was part of the fantasy world.  The real world, according to Marx, was a struggle to the death between the haves and the have-nots.  Religion, he said, was one of the tools that the haves used to keep the have-nots in line.  Similarly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously declared that “God is dead,” considered virtues like compassion and humility to be part of the morality of the weak.  According to Nietzsche’s thinking, might makes right.  The only real winner is the superman who rises above the masses and imposes his will upon his fellow human beings.  Power, according to Nietzsche, is the only real morality.  It should come as no surprise then, that Nietzsche’s number one fan in the twentieth century was a man named Adolf Hitler.  Nazism was basically just Nietzsche’s philosophy in practice.

Both Marx and Nietzsche (the founders of Communism and Nazism, respectively), as materialist philosophers with a cynical edge, believed they had found the real world beneath the surface of everyday “normal” reality.  Each one thought he possessed the secret knowledge that held the key to history.  And you know what?  They were right… to a point.

They were right in observing that the happy world of easy answers, black & white morality, and “happily ever after” fairy tale endings is ultimately a fantasy constructed by people who want to shield themselves and their kids from the harsh realities of real life.  They were right in observing that many people use religion as a means of enforcing belief in the fantasy, threatening hellfire and damnation to those who question or doubt the fantasy’s validity.  They were right in guessing that truly mature people are those who can face the darkness of reality and see this complicated world for what it really is.  They were right in those things.

But they were also wrong.  They were wrong insofar as they believed that they had fully sounded the depths of reality.  They were wrong insofar as they presumed that this new level of consciousness they had uncovered was the final one.  They were wrong, not because they went too far in their quest for the truth, but because they didn’t go far enough.

As a person of faith, I believe there is another level of reality, of which Marx and Nietzsche were apparently unaware.  The existence of this level of reality can be neither proved nor disproved by philosophy.  Reason can lead us only to the point of possibility, at which point each of us must then freely choose for ourselves what we will accept as the more probable truth.

The world I see beneath the so-called “real” world of harsh realities is characterized by the presence of justice and compassion.  Hindus call this reality “Brahman.”  The ancient Greeks called it “Logos.”  Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history have traditionally identified this reality as personal and called it “Adonai,” “Allah,” or “God.”

God, so we say, is the one “from whom, through whom, and to whom” all things come.  It is in God that “we live, move, and have our being.”  For us, God is the mysterious “all in all” at the heart of the universe.  And what is the character of this ultimate reality?  We say that it is love.  “God is love,” as it says in the Bible.  How do we know this to be true?  We don’t, in an absolute sense.  We trust it to be true, however, because of what we have experienced in and through the person Jesus of Nazareth.

Looking at the life of Jesus, we experience something that Christians for millennia have chosen to accept as a revelation of God, the ultimate nature of reality.  Because of Jesus, we choose to believe that God is love.  We see it in the way that he drew our attention to flowers, birds, sunshine, and rain as evidence of God’s providential care.  We hear it in the parables he told about the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.  We feel it in the way he touched the unclean lepers and welcomed outcast sinners to dine at his family table.  Above all, we encounter it in the way that he died: forgiving his enemies and entrusting his spirit to God’s care.  Because of this, we say, “This is love.  This is ultimate reality.  This is what God is like.”  Because of this, the cross of Christ has become the central symbol of our faith.  And, because of this, we refuse to believe that death can have the final word over such love, so we celebrate Easter, the central holiday of our faith.  We tell stories of how, after Jesus’ death, some women came to his grave to pay their respects.  Upon their arrival, they found the tomb empty and the stone rolled away.  Then an angel suddenly appeared and asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here.  He is risen.”

Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these things actually happened?  No.  But we believe them to be true because the love we see in Jesus leads us to believe that “love is strong as death” and is the creative power that gave birth to the universe.  The belief that “God is love” is the ultimate truth that “was from the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our eyes, that we have looked at and touched with our hands” in the person of Jesus.  We can’t prove any of this.  The truth of it can’t be forced on anyone.  It must be freely chosen.

We are free to choose whether we will confine Jesus and his message of love to the annals of history or see him as our living window into the ultimate nature of reality.  This is what Desmond Tutu means when he talks to us about “seeing with the eyes of the heart” in this week’s chapter of God Has a Dream.

This new way of seeing, Tutu says, changes things.  It changes the way we look at Jesus, the way we look at others, the way we look at ourselves, and the way we look at the world.  Archbishop Tutu says:

Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful.  It is true.  People really are wonderful.  This does not mean that people cannot be awful and do real evil.  They can.  Yet as you begin to see with the eyes of God, you start to realize that people’s anger and hatred and cruelty come from their own pain and suffering.  As we begin to see their words and behavior as simply the acting out of their suffering, we can have compassion for them.  We no longer feel attacked by them, and we can begin to see the light of God shining in them.  And when we begin to look for the light of God in people, an incredible thing happens.  We find it more and more in people—all people.

There is another story in the Bible of a person who was able to look past his own disillusionment and “see with the eyes of the heart.”  I’m talking about the story of Joseph, from the Old Testament book of Genesis.  Joseph, you may remember, was his father’s favorite son.  This fact made his brothers green with envy to the point where they faked his death and sold him into slavery.  Later on, Joseph was falsely accused of rape by his boss’ wife and ten thrown into prison to rot.  Much later, after a few providential run-ins with royal officials, Joseph was freed from prison and appointed to what we might call the Vice Presidency of Egypt.  It was at this point in the story, in the midst of a severe famine, that Joseph’s brothers show up again, this time groveling and begging for food, not realizing who they were talking to.  This would have been the perfect opportunity for revenge.  No one would have blamed him for holding a grudge, but that’s not what happened.  In this story, after telling his brothers who he was, Joseph wept with them and forgave them.  He said to them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good”.

Joseph knew all about disillusionment.  His fairy tale dreams were shattered at an early age.  He was well aware that, beneath the world of his childhood dreams, reality was a lot more complicated.  However, unlike Marx, Nietzsche, and the producers of those movies I mentioned, Joseph never stopped searching for that presence of justice and compassion at the heart of the universe.  I think it’s pretty clear that he must have found, or at least glimpsed, what he was looking for.  Somehow, he was able to look past the darkness and into the light beyond.  This way of seeing with the eyes of the heart brought Joseph to the point where he was able to forgive those who had done such unforgivable things to him.  He was even able to see the hand of providence at work at work in his circumstances, saying, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”

Desmond Tutu tells us the story of another modern-day Joseph who was able to overcome injustice and let it shape him for the better.  He writes:

Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of them on Robben Island breaking rocks into little rocks, a totally senseless task.  The unrelenting brightness of the light reflected off the white stone damaged his eyes so that now when you have your picture taken with him, you will be asked not to use a flash.  Many people say, “What a waste!  Wouldn’t it have been better if Nelson Mandela had come out earlier?  Look at all the things he would have accomplished.”

Those ghastly, suffering-filled twenty-seven years actually were not a waste.  It may seem so in a sense, but when Nelson Mandela went to jail he was angry.  He was a young man who was understandably very upset at the miscarriage of justice in South Africa.  He and his colleagues were being sentenced because they were standing up for what seemed so obvious.  They were demanding the rights that in other countries were claimed to be inalienable.  At the time, he was very forthright and belligerent, as he should have been, leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, but he mellowed in jail.  He began to discover depths of resilience and spiritual attributes that he would not have known he had.  And in particular I think he learned to appreciate the foibles and weaknesses of others and to be able to be gentle and compassionate toward others even in their awfulness.  So the suffering transformed him because he allowed it to ennoble him.  He could never have become the political and moral leader he became had it not been for the suffering he experienced on Robben Island.

All of us are bound to become disillusioned in the process of growing up.  That much is inevitable.  What is not inevitable is how we will respond to our disillusionment.  Will you halt your search for truth with those cynics who say “God is dead” and “might makes right”?  Or will you continue to follow the living Christ ever deeper into the heart of reality where you can experience firsthand the love of God giving birth to the universe?

My prayer is that we would all choose to see with the eyes of the heart, that we would all come to know this eternal love for ourselves, and that we would all be forever transformed by that experience.

 

 

 

Dark Night of the Soul

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Dark Night of the SoulLeave a comment

I was at a pastors’ retreat earlier this week where a spiritual director suggested that I might find Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross to be a particularly helpful read at this point in my journey.

So, I’ve decided to take it up.  Just for fun, I’ll also be posting my thoughts on the chapters here on my blog.  I hesitate to call it a “commentary” because the book itself is a commentary on a poem by the same author.  Mine would be a commentary on a commentary, sort of like the Jewish Talmud, but without all the incessant arguing.

But first, here is the poem that forms the basis for this book.  I read it out loud to myself before each chapter, therefore I’ll be posting a copy of it with each blog post in this series.

I found this translation online at http://josvg.home.xs4all.nl/cits/lm/stjohn01.html

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised
–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide,
save that which burned in my heart.

This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he
(well I knew who!) was awaiting me
— A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined
Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping,
and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand
He wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

Since I only got the idea to blog about this after I’d already read the first two chapters, I’ll be playing a bit of initial catchup in this post.

Mother and child in Bolivia. Image by Peter van der Sluijs

The first chapter talks about the love of God being like the love of a mother for her baby.  A newborn soul (i.e. someone taking ownership of her spirituality for the first time) is nourished and cuddled without much being required on her part.  Later, as the child grows, the mother weans the child from nursing and teaches her how to walk on her own.  This is a difficult-but-natural phase in the growing-up process.

In years past, I would have read this chapter as a legalistic call to arms.  I would have said that it was my responsibility to walk on my own and live up to God’s impossible moral standards.  However, reading this chapter as a parent changed my outlook significantly.  I’m currently at the phase of life with my kids that John of the Cross was using as a metaphor for the spiritual life.

Yes, it’s true that parenting is a challenge for everyone as babies become toddlers.  However, the phase doesn’t end all at once.  Even on the toughest of days, there is still a lot of affection to be given.  My wife and I didn’t just decide one day that it was time for our daughter to grow up.  That is happening naturally over time.  We expected her to fall down as she learned how to walk.  We expected accidents to happen during potty-training.  We expected her to mispronounce new words.  She wasn’t punished for these things.  We just loved her through them and she figured them out on her own (with some help from us).

What’s really amazing is watching her personality emerge as she gets older.  Some of it she learns from imitating us (like laughing at fart jokes).  Some of it seems to be inborn (like her tendency toward left-handedness).  But all of it is part of who she is.  And we love her for it.

The same thing is true of us in our development as human beings of the spiritual variety.  God’s tenderness toward us does not end as we grow more spiritually mature.  God expects us to make mistakes and loves us through them.  God is raising us, not to conform to some foreign standard of piety, but to become the best versions of our own unique selves.

If I, as a parent, can find such joy in this process with my own kids, how much more does God do so with each one of us?

The New Theism: Shedding Beliefs, Celebrating Knowledge

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Evolutionary Thoughts3 Comments

Re-blogged from evolutionarychristianity.com

Interesting ideas.  Kind of feeling it…

Since April 2002, my science-writer wife Connie Barlow and I have traveled North America virtually non-stop. We have addressed more than 1,600 secular and religious groups of all kinds. Our goal is to communicate the inspiring and empowering side of science to as many people as possible…

(Click to read the full article)

I Have Called You Friends

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment

This week’s sermon from Boonville Presbyterian Church.

John 15:9-17

If you were to ask the average person on the street to define the term ‘God’ (as it is often used in most contemporary monotheistic religions), you would probably get an answer similar to what the late Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson used to call the God “up there.”  In his more cheeky moments, Bishop Robinson also referred to the God “up there” as “the Old Man in the Sky.”  This idea of God was taken quite literally by superstitious people during the Medieval Dark Ages.

Folks these days, while they might use language about God that describes “the Old Man in the Sky” as being “up there,” will most likely admit when pressed that God (if they believe there is a God) is neither biologically male, nor does “he” exist in a physical location that just so happens to be directly vertical in relation to the speaker’s current point of reference.  Most folks who believe in a traditional monotheistic deity these days tend to think of the God “out there” (to use Robinson’s words again).  In other words, they think of God as a singular, intangible, all-knowing, and all-powerful Supreme Being who exists independently of the created universe.  Depending on their overall outlook on life and religion, they may or may not identify this Supreme Being as benevolent or compassionate.

The attribute of God that people tend to name more than any other is omnipotence, which means “all-powerful” or “almighty.”  Have you ever paid attention to how often people begin their prayers with the words ‘Almighty God’?  We kind of take it for granted that God is almighty.  We figure that a Supreme Being can do anything that comes to mind.  This is a tremendous source of strength and comfort for those who face difficult circumstances.  It’s helpful to know that God is in control, can handle any crisis, and has a plan to work everything out for the better.  The downside to this idea is that there seems to be so much meaningless suffering in the world.  How could God possibly bring good out of it?  Philosophers and theologians have been wrestling with that question for thousands of years.  If they ever come up with a single, universally acceptable answer, I’ll be sure to let you know right away.

I find it interesting that omnipotence has taken such a central place in our ideas about God.  When you think about modern society, it kind of makes sense.  Modern people are obsessed with power.  In the last five hundred years, we’ve used the power of science and technology to accomplish things that our ancestors never dreamed of.  We’ve come to see ourselves as the masters of our own destiny.  We worship what we value, so it would be fair to say that modern people worship power.  When we try to conceive of a Supreme Being, the first thing we think of is someone who possesses unlimited power.  Thus, to the modern mind, God must be omnipotent.  It is as the philosopher Voltaire famously said: “If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”

However, our faith in the power of power has been shaken as of late.  The twentieth century, with its two world wars, the holocaust, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, gave us reason to doubt our ability to bring about utopia through science and technology.  The current century, as young as it is, has already drawn our attention to the growing problems of global warming, international terrorism, and social stratification.  The modern era’s faith in the power of power has left us feeling empty, helpless, and alone in a sea of political propaganda and consumer advertising.

The God of modern power-lust has also presented us with certain problems.  I’ve already mentioned what philosophers call “the problem of evil.”  How can an all-powerful deity allow such horrible things to happen in the world?  Whole books have been written on that question, so I won’t get into it just now.  The problem I want to focus on is a relational one.  There is only one way to relate to a God who is primarily understood as all-powerful: servitude.  Obedience is all that matters in a power-based relationship.  This much is true, even when power is trustworthy and only exercised in the interest of our individual or common good.

This idea of God is quite popular among religious believers today.  God is an all-powerful lawgiver with a plan for the world that must be obeyed to letter, or else…

The spirituality shaped by such a theology is characterized by crime and punishment, as well as guilt and forgiveness.  Average people, uncertain of what an all-powerful Supreme Being wants of them, tend to vest the authority for moral decision-making in some tangible and supposedly infallible source like a church, a Pope, or a Bible.  This infallible source, so they say, represents the will of God to the people.  In their minds, questioning the words of the Pope or the Bible is disobedience toward God.  One must either obey or face the consequences of eternal damnation in the fiery abyss of hell.  As you can see, this is how religious fanaticism and fundamentalism are born.

So, the question I want to ask today is this: is there a way to relate to God outside of the modern obsession with power?  The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

I have already noted how the only way to relate to the omnipotent God of power is as an obedient servant.  So, with that in mind, I love how Jesus says to his disciples in today’s gospel reading, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.”

Jesus was (in)famous in his day for challenging the authority of traditional orthodox religion in order to replace it with authentic and radical relationships.  His own family called him insane, all the preachers said he was demon-possessed, and respectable folks called him a glutton, a drunkard, and “a friend of sinners.”  Those who followed him were as diverse as they were dense.  They were ancient versions of government workers with guerilla fighters, barstool brawlers with church choir soloists, adult film stars with senators’ wives.  It was an offensive and unlikely collection of people that found friendship with this remarkable person and each other.

Jesus, in his teaching and his living, replaced the God of power with the God of love.  He told his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”  He makes it clear to them that his friendship with them is not based on religious observance or moral performance.  He says to them, “You did not choose me but I chose you.”  His love for them is a free gift of grace.

Gone is the sophisticated legal system of the Torah with its 613 commandments.  Gone too are the famous tablets of the Ten Commandments.  In fact, the only commandment that Jesus leaves his disciples is the commandment of love.  “This is my commandment,” he says, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”  The only thing Jesus asks us to do with this free gift of love is pass it on.  And the end result, he says, of this extravagant love-fest is a lasting fullness of joy for eternity.

What Jesus knew on an instinctual level, and his friends learned by following him, is that God is love.  The experience of a lived compassion and affection is more than just a fleeting emotion.  It is divine.  Love, as Jesus lived and taught it, is an expression of that which is the “Ground of all Being” and the very heartbeat of reality.  Live like this, he says, and you will touch the face of God.  For Jesus, God is not some all-powerful Supreme Being who rules the universe from a golden throne behind a pearly gate on a white, puffy cloud.  The throne of God, the place from which God reigns, is much nearer to us than that.  The kingdom of heaven, according to Jesus, is within you and among us.

If you want to find God, don’t look up, look deep.  Look into your own eyes and those of your neighbors.  Honor the relationships in your life and you will automatically be following the will of God for you.  As the Christian theologian, St. Augustine, once said, “Love and do what you want.”

This is a radically different view of God than the one we get from religious fanatics, fundamentalists, and other modern folks who are obsessed with power.  According to Jesus’ experience, love (not power) is the primary attribute of God.  Everything else we might say about God must be understood in light of this first principle.  This kind of God, the one revealed in and through Jesus, is Emmanuel (i.e. “God with us”).  The life of Jesus represents a fundamental shift in the way we think about God.  Going back to serving the demanding God of power after this would be an act of sheer idolatry.

Jesus’ God of love offers us a healing balm for the wounds and ailments of power-driven modern society.  In spite of our incredible technological capacity for communication and information exchange, folks of all ages today tend to feel more isolated and lonely than ever.  We are besieged by an endless invasion of barbarians who tear us and each other apart in the effort to obtain our money and our votes.  We are horrified to discover, as Charlton Heston did at the end of the movie Soylent Green, that we are all destined to become mere consumers and products for consumption.  But Jesus shows us that there is another way.  There is more.

Jesus turns us onto the God of love and the subversive power of committed relationships.  When we, as a community, begin to learn and practice this art, we find ourselves living the life of heaven on earth: the fullness of joy forever more.  We might not be luckier, happier, or more prosperous than before, but we will have discovered the secret to living well.

I want to invite you then, whoever and wherever you are, to begin to look deeper into the relationships in your life.  Take a second (or third) look at your family, friends, and neighbors.  Take an especially good look at those you might consider your enemies.  Take a look at those strangers you pass by in public and at the store.

If you’re listening to this sermon online or on the radio, I would invite you to take a break our culture’s individualism and consumerism to come visit us on Sunday at 10:30 and start exploring these relationships with us at our church.  We don’t do it perfectly all the time, but we give it our best try.  Come and get involved.  See what love looks like in our little community of unlikely friends and ragtag disciples.  Get involved and help us look for God in these little things.  Maybe you’ll find the God of love while you’re helping Wally move chairs after the rummage sale, helping Vivien make sandwiches, or helping Rod put up the Christmas tree.  These are the places and times when heaven comes to earth and the Spirit of God takes on flesh and bone again.

These relationships are sacred.  Try to treat each person as you would treat Christ himself.  Maybe you could memorize what Jesus said in Matthew 25:40 and recite his words silently to yourself as you interact with people, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  This is the secret to living well.  This is the fullness of joy.  This is how the kingdom of heaven comes to earth.  This is how we come to recognize the sacred face of Jesus’ God of love.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)

Abiding in the Vine

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Symbolic enactment of Ubuntu by African school children. Photo taken at Nazareth House Apostolate in Sierra Leone

John 15:1-8; 1 John 4:7-21

This past week, I was glad to wrap up another semester in my teaching job at Utica College.  I have to say that one of my favorite things about this academic year has been my daily walk from the parking lot to my office.

When I first arrive on campus in the morning, I like to sit in my car for a few minutes.  With two young kids, it’s hard to find a quiet moment to myself at home.  During these few minutes in my car, I like to close my eyes and pay attention to the natural rhythm of my breathing.  This is an exercise that I learned from a doctor named Jon Kabat-Zinn.  You would be amazed at the effect that it has on my day.  I feel so much more relaxed, focused, and “tuned in” to the present moment.

When I get out of my car, I am so much more aware of my immediate surroundings.  I feel the wind blowing my hair back as the soles of my feet hit the ground rolling and propel me forward, I smell the dirt emerging from beneath the snow, I hear the sound of birds chirping and cars going by, and I see blue sky meeting red brick and green grass that stretches as far back as the eye can see.

I’ve become particularly good friends with the two deciduous trees who flank the front entrance to White Hall, where my office is located.  I don’t know my botany well enough to name their species, but I’ve enjoyed watching them change with the seasons.  The brilliance of autumn gave way to the stark bareness of winter.  The buds of spring have now given way to new green leaves that seemed to burst forth overnight.  I suppose they have been right there for at least as long as I have been teaching at the college, but I never really noticed them before this year.  I guess you could say that, because of this new meditation practice, I’m literally “coming to my senses” in ways that I hadn’t before now.

I’m tempted to label this effect as a “spiritual experience,” except that it lacks so many of the characteristics that are often associated with mysticism.  There are no visions of angels or voices from heaven.  There is no intuitive sense of a supernatural presence within or around me.  I am simply aware of the present moment and caught up in what I like to call the “is-ness” of everything.  If I am experiencing God at all through this meditation exercise, it is as the “Ground of all Being” and the great “I Am Who I Am” that Moses encountered in the burning bush at the beginning of the book of Exodus.  If God is present at all, it is in the overall wholeness of “the big picture” and the natural lines of connection that weave us into “the interdependent web of existence.”

I said, “if God is present,” but of course I do believe that God is eternally present in all places and at all times, whether we perceive God’s presence or not.  Our moment-to-moment existence, as creatures, is forever dependent upon that which is greater than us.  For example, we do not “take birth,” our mothers give birth to us.  To illustrate further: imagine the finely-tuned delicate balance of creation that allows for life to exist on this planet.  If Earth were just a little bit closer to the sun, the oceans would boil and we would burn up.  If she were just a little bit farther away, we would freeze.  If Earth’s rotation on her axis were just a little more tilted, the seasonal conditions would be so extreme that the Arctic Circle would reach all the way to the tropics and vice-versa.  If the moon floated only a few miles closer to the Earth tidal forces would decimate our coastlines.  I could keep going, but I think you get the point.  We do not create or sustain ourselves.  Life cannot be taken for granted.  Existence is a gift that is given freely to all.

All of this has been in the back of my mind this week as I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ words from John’s gospel: “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  He goes on to talk about “abiding” in the vine and “bearing fruit.”  This is a powerful image.  It speaks beautifully of the grace of being, which connects us to each other and to the greater whole.  Christians from the first century to the 21st century have come to believe that the great Source of Life and the Ground of all Being was revealed to the world through Jesus, not just in his words and accomplishments, but in his very person.  Other religions have noble sages and prophets who delivered the will of God or the meaning of life to people, but it was always the message and not the messenger that was most important.  Christianity is unique in our belief that the messenger is the message.  Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

Each of us is begotten and sustained by our connection to this vine, the Source of Life.  This truth is so easily forgotten by people who live in the modern age.  We are trained to be rugged individualists.  In spite of our rational disdain for all things superstitious, we retain our belief in the ridiculous myth of the “self-made man (or woman).”  I think you can ask anyone in a hospital maternity ward and they’ll tell you that there’s no such thing.  We are all branches off the same vine.  Our lives intertwine and intersect with one another.  Our separate identity as branches presents us with the illusion of independence, but we can only keep that idea up so long as we persist in living what the Greek philosopher Socrates called “the unexamined life.”  The minute we start asking questions about who and what we are, it becomes self-evident that we are all connected to and dependent on each other and the whole.  Scientists have identified this inherent connection in their study of ecosystems.  Individual species are mutually supportive of each other in symbiotic networks that form the engine, if you will, of evolution.  Plants feed animals, who feed other animals, who die and return to the earth, where their bodies become fertilizer for plants.  The food chain, it seems, is not so much a line as a circle.  One of my favorite illustrations of this point comes from the process of breathing itself.  We animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide as waste.  Plants, as many of you already know, inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen.  What a wonderful coincidence!  What beautiful symmetry!  We are sustaining one another through the very air that we breathe.

As Christians, we have come to understand and interpret our connection to the whole through the person of Jesus.  To us, he is far more than our favorite philosopher and an ancient wise man.  What we celebrate during this Easter season is our experience of Jesus as an eternally living reality.  Christ is alive in our hearts and the world around us.  He may not be visibly present, but he lives nonetheless.  We’ll say more about that when we celebrate Ascension Sunday in a few weeks.  Christ is alive.  He is the vine of which we are all branches.  This is the Christian’s fundamental understanding of the universe.  You might even call it our most basic principle.

In response to this truth that we believe, Jesus instructs his followers in John’s gospel to “abide in” him so that they might “bear fruit.”  What is that all about?  If we’re all branches on the same vine, wouldn’t we just naturally “abide in” (i.e. “stay connected to”) the vine?  On one level: yes.  We can’t cut ourselves off from the source of existence any more than one of us could willingly disconnect ourselves from an arm or leg.  But the vine analogy breaks down when we consider that human beings have a quality that plants do not have, to wit, consciousness.  We are able to think and make decisions in ways that other life forms cannot.  Through the choices we make and the lives we live, we are able to either honor our connection to the whole or not.  We can nurture the common life that is in us all or not.  We can water the seeds of faith, hope, and love in our souls or not.  That much is up to us.  To the extent that we choose well, our lives will tend to flourish.  To the extent that we choose poorly, we will wither and die.  Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading make it clear that we are meant to flourish.

How can we do this?  How do we, as branches, abide in the life of the vine?  I think there are many ways that this is possible.  Personally, I have found my aforementioned meditation practice to be most helpful in this regard.  It reminds me of the significance and sacredness of the moment in which I find myself.  There is no day but today.  There is no place other than here.  Here and now is where I live.  Simply recognizing and respecting this reality goes a long way in nurturing my connection to the vine.

If you want to try it sometime, I recommend that you set aside a quiet place and time (I find that early in the morning, after my first cup of tea, works best, so that I don’t fall asleep).  Sit upright in a comfortable position with your back straight and your feet flat on the floor.  Close your eyes and try to become conscious of the fact that you are breathing.  Don’t try to breathe more deeply or slowly than usual, just notice this unconscious act that is happening in us all the time, whether we realize it or not.  Stay in this place for a while.  As thoughts pop into your head (and they will), don’t fight them or get angry at them, just simply acknowledge them and then gently direct your attention back to your breathing.  Do this as often as you need to.  It doesn’t matter if thoughts pop up one time or a hundred times.  Simply recognize the thought and redirect your attention.  You’re not trying to accomplish anything in the moment.  There are no “altered states of consciousness” that you are trying to reach.  You’re just trying to be fully aware of the present moment.  If you want to, try this exercise for five minutes a day.  When you feel ready, try increasing it by another five minutes at a time.  Some people stay at five minutes, some go for fifteen or twenty, and some sit like this for as long as an hour at a stretch.  It’s your practice.  Do what works best for you.

Another way that we can “abide in the vine” is through the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist (a.k.a. Communion).  Just as we’re about to do in a few minutes, we gather as a community around one table, breaking bread and drinking wine.  This ritual reminds us that we are part of one another through Christ.  We are what we eat: the body of Christ.  The wine reminds us that the blood of Christ flows in our veins.  They say that “blood is thicker than water.”  This blood is thickest of all.  As we eat and drink in this sacramental ritual, the branches abide in the vine.

Finally, and most importantly, the best way to “abide in the vine” is to nurture our relationships with each other.  This is the true mark of our religion and the true measure of our spiritual health.  Jesus continually told his followers that the “fruit” of this vine is love.  The community that first published John’s gospel also published his epistles, which we also heard from this morning.  They offered additional advice to flesh out what Jesus meant by “abiding in the vine.”

They remind us that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”  If you want to know how spiritual a person is, don’t look at his/her church attendance or theological beliefs.  Look at the way s/he treats other people.  I once heard someone say, “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.”  The size of your waiter’s tip says more about the quality of your Christian faith than the Bible you leave on the table.  In fact, your life might be the only Bible that another person ever reads.  What does that Bible say about what you believe?

I was talking to someone just yesterday about politics.  I know that’s a dangerous topic for preachers to broach in church (especially in an election year), so I’ll choose my words carefully.  I’m not going to tell you how you should vote.  Frankly, I don’t care what your ideological stripes are: conservative/liberal, Democrat/Republican, whatever.  That doesn’t matter nearly so much as the way we treat each other.  I care very much about that.  We live in a time of intense polarization in this society where those labels (conservative/liberal) are thrown around and used as insults.  We slander each other with names like “fascist” and “socialist.”  We categorize and demonize those who think differently from us.  We paint them as stupid or evil.  This, rather than the particular views we fear, represents the real threat to our democracy.  We’re so busy attacking each other that we’re unable to make any real difference in advancing the common good.  It’s high time that we learn to “abide in the vine” and nurture the life of the whole plant, so that we might bear the fruits of peace and justice.

There is an African word, Ubuntu, that refers to a particular character quality.  A person who has Ubuntu is conscious of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all people and all life.  We might say that a person with Ubuntu really knows how to “abide in the vine.”  We need more Ubuntu in our common life today.

Evolutionary Thoughts: Divinity Reconsidered

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Evolutionary ThoughtsLeave a comment
Image by Frank Douwes

We belong beautifully to the earth and intimately to the cosmic web of life.  Daily we breathe in the odor of sanctity that imbues creation.  Our God walks with us in the garden of life, the Originating and Sustaining Mystery who is radically transparent for those who have eyes to see.  We need a fresh approach to our theology of God, one that honors the mystery in which everything is held.  The divine is written all over creation: the quantum vacuum, the supernova explosions, the recurring cycle of birth-death-rebirth, the process of photosynthesis – these and many more are the chapters of our primary scriptures.  Divinity abounds, in and around us.

–Diarmuid O’Murchu, Evolutionary Faith, p.205