Sharing God in abundance

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

Our vestry, the Board of Directors of our church, has been studying a book about the changes in religious attitudes and cultural patterns that have fewer and fewer people interested in what they think the churches have to offer.  At our meeting the other night, we were sharing stories and observations around the table about these changes as we experience them in our own neighborhoods and families, and one member of the vestry talked about a conversation with her daughter who said to her “why would I go to church?  I don’t need to go to some building to find God—to me God is everywhere.”  And she’s right, of course—God is everywhere, available to everyone, all of the time.   

During our long centuries of cultural dominance the message of the church to the world has been an accusation: “we have God and you don’t.”  The reply of the church to that daughter of the vestry member would have been, “no—the God you experience for yourself and relate to any time you want is not the real God.  It’s probably the Devil.  Our panels of experts decide what is, and is not, allowable religious experience.”  People who said publicly that you don’t need the church to find God, but that God is everywhere, all the time, for any one were considered dangerous.  They were excommunicated and persecuted and even burned for saying it.

But, thankfully, fewer and fewer people are willing to accept that anymore.  Today people recognize that nothing could be more preposterous than the notion that God is a scarce commodity.  Nowadays, anyone can rent an auditorium in an office park and call themselves the Divine Light Worship Center, and set up a light show and a pop band and an espresso cart in the lobby.  Today, you can browse at your leisure in an overstocked spiritual emporium, filling your cart with this Buddhist meditation and that Native American symbol, and it’s all good.  You can choose what seems to suit your sensibility and lifestyle and leave the rest behind.

This approach to religion mirrors the individualism of our culture, and our growing social fragmentation.  Because the unspoken corollary to “I find God on my own—however, wherever and whenever I want to,” is “you go have your God and leave me alone to have mine.”  I’m not going to tell you that this is wrong.  But I can say with conviction that it is not biblical.  The Bible is full of descriptions of sublime personal encounters with God.  One thinks of Abraham hearing the call to leave the land of his fathers and set out on a great journey, of Moses turning aside from the path to see a bush that burns without being consumed, or Saul of Tarsus struck blind by a great light on the road to Damascus.  But in every case, the import of these experiences is not individual but collective. 

Outside of a few of the Psalms, the Bible has very little interest in private religious experiences of personal illumination and consolation.  But it is very interested in experiences of conversion that turn a person into a leader, who summons others to share God’s vision of a transformed community.  The great and fundamental confession of the biblical faith is not “I have my God, now you get yours”, but “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.” 

This is the God of Jesus.  God sent Jesus to be a leader, to connect people across barriers of isolation and bring them into a new communion with God and with each other.  His mission was not to accuse the world—“I have God and you don’t”—but to ask it a question: “What could happen if we shared God together?”   [Repeat].  He put that question to those who had been pushed out to the margins and excluded from the sphere of blessing and holiness, and he put it to the elites who guarded the places of access to sacred power.  Jesus didn’t demand that people submit to his authority.  But he did ask them to imagine how they would be different if they could see the authority of God already here, present among us now, inviting all of us together to create in God a community of justice and love, of sharing and forgiveness. 

Jesus didn’t just talk about these things.  He showed people what it looks like by sharing with them at the most basic level.  Anyone who has carried a lunch tray through a crowded high school cafeteria, anxiously looking for a place to sit, knows the role that sharing a table plays in defining social rank and belonging.   But Jesus subverted the conventional norms about all that by eating with anyone.  It was one of the things that drove his critics crazy about him—“This man welcomes tax collectors and sinners,” they said, “and he eats with them.”

 I see this aspect of Jesus’ ministry in the background of the Gospel stories about the feeding of a great crowd.  I think the real miracle in these stories is not the multiplication of bread and fish.  It is that 5,000 individuals, each one of whom had come looking for Jesus out of his or her own need, jostling against each other, vying to be the first to get his attention—this crowd sat down together on the grass and shared a common meal; at least for a moment, they became a community.

They shared the miracle of the abundance of God, that not only is available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, but is also what makes it possible for us to get over our fear and suspicion and rivalry with one another and live together in unity and peace.  It was a powerful shared experience for those 5,000 people, and I think that when the church is at its best it gives people that kind of experience.  It’s something you can’t have by yourself: an experience of belonging, of being part of something, part of a people that are on a journey together toward a common homeland where they won’t exploit and oppress and deceive and slander, and commit violence against each other anymore.  It’s an experience that changes the way people see themselves in relation to the existing power structures in world.  Which is something the Gospel clearly understands—why else would it say that after the banquet the crowd tried to seize Jesus and make him their king?

He wouldn’t let them do it, but not because his leadership was “spiritual” and not political, but because they’d misunderstood what he had just showed them about the way power works in the Kingdom of God.   Because you can’t point to any one place in the story and say, “here is where the five loaves and two fish became enough to feed a multitude.” Was it when the little boy came forward with his little bit of food?  Was it when Jesus took it and said the prayer of thanksgiving?  Was it when he broke the bread and passed it out to the crowd?  Was it when they received it, and handed it around? 

This isn’t a story of Jesus showing off his power, so people will become dependent on and submissive to him.  It’s an illustration of what can happen when we trust enough to share the blessings of God together; God, the Letter to the Ephesians says, “whose power working in us can do abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.”  This is the divine power that we worship, and put at the center of our common life as Christians.  It is the power that makes the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.   But where is the transformation—in the bread and wine or in the people who eat and drink them?  And when does it happen?  When the priest says the Eucharistic Prayer?  When the little bell rings?  When the bread is broken to be shared?  When it’s given out, or when we receive in our hands, or in our mouths?

It’s a mystery.  Difficult to comprehend, even harder to communicate, especially to someone who hasn’t been there, and has no idea what it’s about.  And yet this is the power that can disarm the forces of human self-destruction and save the world.  So I don’t think we really have a choice except to try to share it.  At least we know now what’s not going work—“We have God and you don’t.”  So let’s get up, and dust ourselves off and try again, this time with a question, Jesus’ question: “What could happen if we shared God together?”  I say we make more of an effort to ask that question, explicitly and implicitly, with words and with actions.  Let’s ask it of ourselves, and of our neighbors and our old enemies.  Let’s ask it with as much courage and creativity as we can muster, and let’s see.

Something to do with Jesus

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

I’ve been leading a class for the past six weeks or so on a book called the Wisdom Jesus.  It puts forward an image of Jesus as a teacher of the way of inner transformation that leads to higher consciousness.   A lot of people have responded very positively to this book, and the attendance at these classes has been the highest of any I’ve done at St. John’s.   We’re now in part 3, which presents contemporary approaches to ancient wisdom practices—some things you can actually do to follow in the way that Jesus taught.   And we’ve been spending a good part of each class doing these practices—not just talking, for instance, about Centering Prayer meditation, but practicing a twenty minute period of silent meditation together, and then having a conversation about our experience.

Last Sunday we did a form of Lectio Divina, a traditional way of slowly and sensitively digesting the scriptures.   And through the week as I was preparing to teach the class, I came back a few times to the problem of which scripture to pick for us to read.  I thought in passing about some personal favorites, but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on making this decision, so, finally, I decided the best thing would be to just go to the Lectionary Page and write down the chapter and verse numbers of the Gospel lesson for the following Sunday, and read that. 

So that’s what we did.  We sat and meditated for a few minutes and then a volunteer read aloud the same verses from John that I just read to you this morning.  Now keep in mind, this group has been buzzing with enthusiasm for weeks about a portrait of a Jesus who is not exclusive, one who teaches a wisdom that is quite compatible with that of other traditions.  This is a Jesus who does not appeal to an external, dogmatic authority, but to our own inner capacity to recognize the truth.  But here we have one of those Gospel passages that seems, on the surface at least, to defy every attempt to make it universal.  So I have to admit I was a little nervous about how this was going to go. 

As it turned out, I need not have worried.  As we listened to the reading a first and then a second time, we did hit the uncomfortable verses.  And we could have seized up, and forgotten to listen to the rest of the reading because we were stuck, back arguing with verse 18.  But we stayed with it.  We stayed still and kept breathing, and trying to hear what the passage might be trying to tell us.  And when we started sharing what we’d found, it turned out there was a lot.  There was a lot in this passage that spoke to people’s hearts, that stirred their love and their longing for God.  So it is in that spirit of the faith that if we keep working, and look deeper, we will find there is more to these texts than at first meets the eye, I want to circle back now and take another look at the things about this reading that are hard to hear and hard to understand. 

 

After all, Jesus himself introduces this saying by telling us it will be a tough one to swallow.  He does this when he brings up the serpent in the wilderness.  As we heard in the reading from Numbers, Moses makes a bronze serpent as a kind of medicine that heals by making you look at the thing you are most afraid to see.   And Jesus says things in this passage that we don’t want to look at, things that might turn and bite us with a poisonous sting.  First he gives this incredible that about the grace of God, who loved the world so much, and who sent his Son not to judge the world but to save it.  But then he starts to talk about condemnation.  “Those who believe in him are not condemned,” it says, “but those who do not believe are condemned already.”  I quoted this passage at a talk I gave last fall, at an interfaith panel on peace and nonviolence, in order to illustrate a paradox that has been at the heart of the Christian religion throughout its history, and when I read those words, the Muslim Imam who was also on the panel winced and shook his head.    

Now some might say, “who cares?”  To them this passage is simple to understand: our religion has the right beliefs, and everyone else’s has the wrong ones.  We will be saved, they will be condemned, and its just too bad for them.  But a brief look back at our history tells us all we need to know about the poisonous snakes that lie along that path—wars of conquest and wars of religion, witch trials and inquisitions, pogroms, and genocides.  In a world of religious pluralism, especially in a place like California, where Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists and Sikhs, Neo-pagans and Atheists all live side-by-side, this interpretation has lost its credibility—especially for the young, who have no memory of life in an ethnically and religiously homogenous community, and no desire to go back there. 

Because it’s no longer credible to say that the Christian church is in sole possession of the truth, even about religion.   We know too much about the world’s other faiths to continue to pretend that they are all false and misleading paths that take people to hell.  Even if their practices and doctrines seem alien to us, we can’t ignore the evidence of their saints.  People hear the Dalai Lama say “my religion is kindness” and they compare it with the self-righteous sectarian contempt preached in so many churches every Sunday.  Needless to say, it's not a favorable comparison.  So if we believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, who came into the world not to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him (and I take my stand on the position that the world needs, more than ever, people who believe this), we have to start see how that might be true exactly because it doesn’t require that everyone convert to Christianity.

That means having a different kind of faith, one that is broader than we’ve had before, but also deeper.  It means having an imagination of what God is doing in the world in Christ that is no longer limited to what happens in churches, or with people who profess the Christian faith.   And it means embracing a new kind of Christian discipleship, one that is less defined by our belonging within the rigid boundaries an exclusive social group, where people think and act and look more or less the same.  It means being less concerned with believing the right things, and more with doing what Christ is asking of us to help him save the world.

I think that’s actually more in line with what the Gospel means by “believing,” anyway.  The Greek word that our Bibles translate as “believing in” Jesus doesn’t just mean “accepting as true certain ideas about him.”  It means to put our trust in him, to trust him enough to let him change the way we live.  Believing in Jesus means following his lead, doing the things he said to do.  And today’s text emphasizes that point very strongly.  “The light has come into the world,” it says—not into the church, you notice, or into the hearts of Christians—“and the people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”  “But those who do what is true, come to the light (they come out into the world), so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”   The truth, says the Gospel, the truth that really matters, is not something that you think, or something that you say, it’s something that you do.

Enlightenment on display

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147 or 147:13-21 

As has been reported in the Petaluma Argus-Courier,  I once lived for a number of years in a Zen Buddhist community, and if you spend much time hanging around with Buddhists you will sooner or later run across the concept of “enlightenment.”  Now, I’m not a Buddhist, or a Buddhist teacher, so I’m not going to try to explain that concept to you, but I did learn enough about it to realize that “enlightenment,” which is also sometimes called “awakening,” or “liberation,” is a lot more subtle and complex in Buddhist thought and practice that than our society’s popular notion about it might lead you to believe.  However popular notions are powerful things, and so at least part of the attraction that drew folks to the Zen Center was the hope of attaining enlightenment.

And that popular idea is a little easier to explain than the authentic traditional teachings.  It goes something like this: that a person might, through strenuous meditative discipline under the guidance of a master teacher who is him- or herself enlightened, achieve a direct, intuitive experience of ultimate truth that would dramatically and permanently alter his or her consciousness—in a good way.  This notion of enlightenment is not popular only with people who practice Buddhism. All over the world, and especially in certain places like Northern California, there are people following all manner of spiritual paths and traditions who have in common the cultivation of meditative states of consciousness and the desire for enlightenment. 

Some of them are even Christians, and I’m of the belief that if you study the history of Christian spirituality you will see that there is nothing inherently un-Christian about enlightenment or the pursuit of it.  In fact, beginning in January I’ll be leading a Sunday adult study course on a book that represents Jesus as a wisdom teacher, skillfully provoking his disciples to a radical transformation of consciousness.  It’s an image that speaks to an urgent desire that many people feel today to go beneath outward forms of traditional ritual and religious doctrine, which they find have lost their freshness and vitality, and to plumb the depths of direct religious experience.  So I’m not one of those who preaches fear and suspicion of this phenomenon, but see it as part of a welcome and much-needed reawakening of the Spirit.

But I also can’t help noticing that the image of Jesus as a kind of guru, who teaches the way to spiritual enlightenment, is missing something very important, maybe the essential thing that makes Christian religion what it is.  It might be hard to see if you’re sitting on your meditation cushion with your eyes closed, repeating a Jesus mantra in your heart.  But it is plain as day if you go to where Christians gathering on Sunday to hear the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures, and to celebrate the Sacraments.  It is at the heart of this yearly Church festival called Christmas, and our scripture lessons for today are all about it.

It is the news given in the Gospel of John that the true light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world.  This light is nothing less than the life of all things, without which not one thing came into being, and now we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  This is not the cryptic language of esoteric instruction, but the plain-spoken, public announcement of something that is there for all to see.  Because the gospel of Jesus Christ does not begin from the premise that if we just find the right teacher and practice diligently in the right way we also have the capacity to attain the hard-won prize of enlightenment.  The gospel begins from the premise that the one who is light has come into the world, and offers enlightenment to anyone who wants it, absolutely free.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make an effort to open our lives to a more whole-hearted acceptance of this gift.  But it does mean that our basic religious attitude is not one of anxious striving or restless seeking, but one of celebration and thanksgiving, of trust, and wonder, and joy.  It is, as the scriptures point out in various places, the attitude of a child.  This is not just because Jesus himself had that attitude, and taught that it was fundamental, but because it is the stance that accurately reflects our relationship with ultimate reality.  Jesus’ own name for that reality was “Abba,” a word sometimes translated as “Father.” But that translation is not exactly right, because “Abba” is a child’s word—“Papa”, or “Daddy” would be better.

Every year at Christmas we encounter an image of Jesus, not as the masterful teacher of enlightenment, but as the tiny child at Mary’s breast.  It’s a powerful image not just because babies are cute, and people are sentimental.  It is powerful because it is an image of a person who hasn’t accomplished anything except to be born, who doesn’t desire anything except to be fed and kept dry and warm.  He hasn’t had any great mystical experiences, or said any timeless words of wisdom, or performed miraculous healings or heroic sacrifices.  He spends most of his time nursing and sleeping.  No one could be more helpless and vulnerable, and yet the scriptures insist that he is already the light that darkness did not overcome. 

I think it is instructive that in the ancient church, “enlightenment” was just another word for baptism.  Recently I had a meeting with our parish Worship Committee, which is a fairly new group that has formed to do some in-depth study and theological reflection about what it is we are actually doing when we gather together on Sunday in this building, so we can do it with more joy and sense of purpose.  We were talking about a book we’d read that said that when we come together for worship, it is not just the priest who is doing the work.  It is priestly work, but everyone participates in it, in whatever way they can, in hearing the words of scripture, and singing the hymns, praying the prayers, passing the peace, and sharing the bread and wine of the Holy Communion, and so the entire service is an act of the whole community.

The folks on the Worship Committee had no trouble with that concept at all, but some of them balked at the part in the book that said that the authority to share in the priesthood of the Body of Christ comes from our baptism.  I could understand where they were coming from.  How can we equate the decisive breakthrough to a whole new life, a new identity, and purpose, and way of being, with an experience that few of us can remember, that happened to most of us as infants?  When we go to church and see a baby having some water poured over its head, maybe crying about it, it doesn’t really square with our idea of what spiritual enlightenment is.

But maybe that’s because we’ve got the wrong end of the stick.  In the Worship Committee meeting we decided to forget about baptism for the moment and start a list of other words that might express the idea that all of us are called to be equal partners in the work of the church’s worship.  We came up with terms like “welcome,” “membership,” “belonging,” “initiation,” and “covenant.”  They were all words that have to do with community.  And, interestingly enough, they have all long been used to describe baptism, which says to me that we can’t really understand how baptism is spiritual enlightenment, if we think about it only from the point of view of the person being baptized.

Maybe what happens at baptism is the enlightenment of the community that is gathered to do the baptizing.  This would be true in all cases, but especially so when we baptize a child.  What we look at Christina and Cason, Tristan and Vincent, being picked up and washed in the water, maybe we are seeing a revelation of ourselves, as we really are in Christ: persons whose significance is not defined by human preconceptions, even our own, but is a word spoken in secret the full meaning of which is yet to be revealed; persons whose potential will not come to fruition without the love, guidance, support, and testing that a family and a community provides; persons participating in a drama we don’t ourselves fully understand, but in which we are called to play our own conspicuous role as one of the vulnerable but beloved children of God.