Empowering Ourselves to Change the World

This deserves to be reposted every week...maybe every day; to remind us of the power we have and the accountability we must embrace in order to be the change we wish to see in the world.
- Lora

Millennium Development Goals: LOVE IN ACTION


by Marianne Williamson

I hear a lot of people say we have to wake people up... convince them of the urgency of this moment... make them realize that the planet is headed for disaster!

But I don't see it that way. Anybody who needs to be woken up at this point is so deeply asleep that they're not the target audience for global activism. We don't need to wake the sleeping so much as we need to harness the energy of those who are already awake. Enough people know we're in trouble; what they want to know is what to do about it.

We're living at a time when whole systems break down, calling for a whole systems response. It's not just outer change but also inner change that's called for. It's not just that this is wrong, or that that is wrong. The entire direction of human civilization is wrong, as we have placed economic principles before humanitarian values and in so doing have placed the very survival of the human race at risk.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related. The probability vectors for the next twenty years are grim, and our job is to turn the probability vectors into possibility vectors... in other words, we have to turn this ship around.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples. The fact that the adult human female is so relatively complacent before the collective threats to the young of our species bespeaks a lack of proactive intention for the human race to survive.

Yet how things have been has no inherent bearing on how things have to be, and I think we're living at a time when Western womanhood is just a moment away from emerging into the light of our collective possibility. Especially given the relative lack of power - even basic rights - given to millions of women in other parts of the world, we have a particular responsibility to speak up not only for ourselves but for them as well. And we are ready. Maybe not all of us; but enough of us. Western women should be a moral force on this planet. We should not be infantilized; we should not be pretending we don't know what's going on; we should not be giving in to the various and ubiquitous temptations to anesthetize ourselves. Quite the opposite, we should be taking the wheel of human civilization and saying to anyone who will listen: We're turning the ship around, and we're turning it around NOW.

One thing we should all be aware of is the Millennium Development Goals, a set of 8 goals signed on to by all 189 members of the United Nations in the year 2000. The goals are important because they speak to the underlying causes of so many of our most important problems, addressing them on a global level and giving everyone the chance to monitor how we're doing as a species.

The goals are a road map to cutting absolute poverty in half, improving health, getting children in school and reducing disease by 2015. When we think of "women's issues," we should be thinking of these issues. They should be our concern as the mothers of the world, the lovers of the world, and the leaders of the world.

Specifically, the goals are these:

1) Cut Extreme Poverty and Hunger in Half

2) Achieve Universal Primary Education

3) Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

4) Reduce Child Mortality by Two-Thirds

5) Cut Maternal Mortality by Three-Fourths

6) Halt and Reverse the Spread of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB, and Other Diseases

7) Ensure Environmental Sustainability

8) Develop a Global Partnership for Development

We are five years away from 2015, the year we are supposed to achieve the Millennium Goals. We are making progress but not fast enough. We need an accelerated sense of urgency from our decision makers. And nothing would make that happen more effectively than for the women of America to learn this information, to take it to heart, and to refuse to shut up about it. No matter what else you're doing to make the world a better place, add a P.S. about The Millennium Goals.
Facts to consider: Putting a child in school is one of the most powerful things we can to do to reduce poverty. An educated child earns more later in life, knows how to keep their own children from dying, produces more food, is less likely to get AIDS, and in the case of boys, is less likely to engage in armed civil conflict. And we already know how to address the problems of AIDS, TB, and Malaria; we just need to do more of it via mechanisms like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

So what can you do? You can call or write your Congresspeople (go to http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml) as well as the President, and tell them you want them to actively and substantially support the Millennium Development Goals. Remember: our Representatives get lobbied by wealthy corporations every hour of every day, but the poor of the world have no economic leverage. The only voice they have in the halls of power is yours.

And do more than that. Educate yourself. Look at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ Use your own platform, or create one. Consider ways to help spread the word. http://www.results.org/ Use Facebook and Twitter and every other way you have of building a buzz about something that could matter to the lives - even the survival - of millions of people. And some of those people might someday be your own grandchildren.

Then, when it's all handled, when 17,000 children a day are no longer dying of hunger; when the ecosystems of the planet are well on their way to restoration; when nuclear bombs are scarce if not completely gone; when females of the world are no longer treated like chattel; and the nations of the world are beginning to achieve a real and lasting peace; then, we can celebrate. But until then, we should mourn. Anyone who's looking at the world and not grieving isn't conscious; but anyone who's looking at the world and not rejoicing in the possibilities for how we can turn all this around, is underestimating what human beings can do. We can learn to love each other. We can be conduits for the miraculous. We can stop playing small and start playing large. We can stop giving in to our weaknesses and start claiming our strengths. We can tell truth to power. We can act like we mean it. We can never, never, never give up. We can be the mothers and the fathers of a new and better world. And all of this is possible because human beings can decide. We can decide to say something. We can decide to write an email. We can decide to step up and participate. But we must decide now... not later. There is no more time to waste.

Amazing Grace Happens

Delivered October 31, 2010 at First Congregational Church, UCC, of Murphys, CA

Isaiah 66: 1-5

Thus says the Lord:
“Heaven is my throne

And the earth is my footstool;

What is the house that you would build for me,

And what is my resting place?

All these things my hand has made,

And so all these things are mine,” says the Lord.

“But this is the one to whom I will look,

To the humble and the contrite in spirit,
Who trembles at my word.”

“Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being;

Whoever sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
Whoever presents a grain offering, like one who offers swine’s blood;

Whoever makes a memorial offering of frankincense, like one who blesses an idol.”

“These have chosen their own ways, and in their abominations they take delight;

I also will choose to mock them and bring upon them what they fear;

Because when I called, no one answered,

When I spoke, they did not listen;

But they did what was evil in my sight,

And chose what did not please me.”
Hear the word of the Lord,
You who tremble at his word;
Your own people who hate you and reject you for my name’s sake

Have said, ‘Let the Lord be glorified, so that we may see your joy;’

But it is they who shall be put to shame.”

Matthew 22:23-40
The same day some Sadducees came to him, saying there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. The second did the same, so also the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman herself died. In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her.”

Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is God not of the dead, but of the living!” And when the crowd heard it they were astounded at his teaching.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

This is the first part of the recording of my presentation on Oct. 31, 2010

Here is the second part of the recording:

My Mother sent me the following story in an email earlier this week and in honor of the San Francisco Giants playing in the World Series (which they won on November 1, 2010!) I would like to share it with you. It’s called God’s Baseball Game and while the theology is a little thin in places the message is a "grand slam."

Freddy and God stood by to observe a baseball game. God’s team was playing Satan's team.

God’s team was at bat, the score was tied zero to zero, and it was the bottom of the 9th inning with two outs. They continued to watch as a batter named Love stepped up to the plate. Love swung at the first pitch and hit a single, because “Love never fails.”

The next batter was named Faith, who also got a single because Faith works with Love.

The next batter up was a fellow whose first name was Holy and last name was Wisdom. Satan wound up and threw the first pitch. Wisdom looked it over and let it pass: Ball one. Three more pitches and Holy Wisdom walked because he never swings at what Satan throws.
The bases were now loaded. God then turned to Freddy and told him He was now going to bring in His star player. Up to the plate stepped Grace. Freddy said, “He sure doesn't look like much!” In fact, Satan's whole team relaxed when they saw Grace.

Thinking he had won the game, Satan wound up and fired his first pitch. To the shock of everyone, Grace hit the ball harder than anyone had ever seen! But Satan was not worried; his center fielder let very few get by. He went up for the ball, but it went right through his glove, hit him on the head and sent him crashing to the ground; the roaring crowds went wild as the ball soared over the back fence . . for a home run! God’s team won!
God then asked Freddy if he knew why Love, Faith and Holy Wisdom could get on base but couldn't win the game. Freddy answered that he didn't know why. God explained, “If your love, faith and wisdom had won the game, you would think you had done it by yourself. Love, Faith and Wisdom will get you on base but only My Grace can lead you Home:

[“For by Grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift of God; not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9; Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; he bestows grace and glory; no good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly.”]

Our Scriptures this morning are two of the more difficult ones in the Bible. We cheer as Jesus puts it to the Sadducees and the Pharisees but what he says to the Pharisaic lawyer is the entire basis of the theology of Grace. First, you shall love God with everything that you are; body, soul and consciousness. Then the second commandment, I think, is not a commandment at all but an imperative that is based upon the requisite of loving God completely. In other words, WHEN we love God with all our heart, soul and mind, THEN we will love our neighbor – that is, everything in proximity to us, whether near or far – as ourselves. That doesn’t mean “like” ourselves; it means, love our neighbors as if they ARE us. This is the divine wisdom that every master who has ever walked the face of the planet has known; that we are so much a part of each other and of God that to make a distinction is really only a matter of convenience or, in the case of sin – that which separates us from full union with God – a matter of truly deadly inconvenience. When we forget how connected we all are we tend to find it easier to hurt and kill each other. Remembering our unity is vital for grace.

I’ve talked a great deal over the last three Sundays about what Grace is. First, I found I couldn’t talk about grace without acknowledging sin and finally concluded that sin is not morally good or bad but, rather, sin is whatever we think, say or do that separates us from being in full relational union with God and that it is our doing. Sin is that state of being for which we are accountable; it is our deliberate attitude of, “I can do it myself!” because God is always inviting us into an intimate relationship and this divine invitation is what I call original grace.

Second, I declared that it is actually impossible for us to be separated from God in any real sense of the word because God is the very source of our being. It is my theological and mystical opinion that it is actually the very substance of God, which we all identified last week as Love, that is not only the basic stuff which makes up all the matter in existence, but it is also the force which holds it all together, the soul of the cosmos. Likewise, we have bodies that are made up of the same substance as all of the rest of the matter in the universe and they inhabit our souls which are what hold our bodies together for the entire time we need them.

My point is that there really is nothing in existence that isn’t God. Interestingly, God’s name in Hebrew is Ehyeh asher ehye. This self-identification of God’s is rendered in English as “I Am that I Am” but, literally translated, reads something more like, “I shall be that I shall be.” The sense of this declaration is that not only is God be-ing right now but that God is ALL Be-ing; then, now and ever.

From a burning bush in the desert God speaks to Moses and God names God’s self as the one Being that is all beingness. This mean that everything is holy and sacred; the dirt, the air, the plants and animals, ourselves, the sun and moon and planets, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe and the entire cosmos are God expressing God’s self as unconditional love. Can you imagine how it will be when we all – everyone and everything that exists – recognize (literally, rearrange our thoughts about our perceptions; re-cognize) that everything is sacred, holy and intimately related with everything else? We will take off our shoes and leave them off because we will remember that every square inch of ground upon which we walk is holy. This existence will become heaven, A.K.A. the realm of God, and it will occur due to God’s grace. Grace is the state of being in full and complete union with God who is all that is.

However, even though I think that for the sake of our own survival we must, and very soon, all become again conscious of our place within the entirety creation, we humans are special among all the species on this planet because we are the only ones who can imagine ourselves to be autonomous individuals; little godlets, if you will, who don’t need God. So, while we are sacred and made of the same stuff as the divine, we are also sinful in that we create within our own little universes an imagined sense that we are separate from God and everything else in our proximity. As lonely as this is and as much as we long to feel whole and complete and "enough" we continue to separate ourselves from that which completes and fulfill us, which is God.

Again, God’s grace saves us from the peril of actually being separate in any real way. The fact that we literally cannot exist apart from God is what saves us from having to really try to do so. The separation, the sin, occurs only in our intentions. Our very existence is divine grace.

Third, I spoke about the eternal nature of grace. Because we have hooked our souls into these bodies which are actually hurtling through space on the face of a little blue, spinning ball, we experience the phenomenon of time. This, in itself, is a little blessing because it allows us to interact with each other and everything else in little, bite sized, digestible pieces. Due to our perception of time as past, present and future, we can have what we call experiences which are memories and interpretations of encounters that happened in specific moments of time. Encounters, ordinarily, are our interactions with other people, places and things that occur in any given present moment. There is something unique, though, about our relationship with God in that we cannot be in conscious awareness of our connection with God in any time other than a present moment; right now.

We spend a great deal of our thinking, however, revisiting past experiences and anticipating future encounters so that our consciousness of God is actually pretty minimal. We have to be intentional about being aware of our relationship with God or we just forget about it. This forgetting about now is what makes it possible for us to think we might somehow be separate from God and each other and everything else. There’s a joke about asking a dog what time it is and the dog answers, “NOW!” The truth in this is that very few, if any, other animals besides ourselves spend as much time out of the present moment as we do. We are actually pretty unconscious! We are vastly unaware of the eternity of all moments. We think these little lives, this string of moments we knit together like a sweater, are all that is during the time we are doing them and we very rarely, if ever, take the opportunity to just be, instead of always doing.

Ironically, separating time into sections the way we do and separating ourselves from the present as we do causes us to feel isolated and alone and we suffer because of it. When we start to feel too awful in our supposed isolation we cry out to God as if God were somewhere far away. We’re like a baby who, after dreaming of the womb, wakes up to find itself separated from its mother and alone. However, God is always right here whenever we cry. God is never more than a thought away. All we need do is to focus our awareness on the present moment and “pop” our consciousness back into full union with God, even though we were never really separated in the first place. It’s as if our dream is of being separated from God and when we wake up to the real “now” we realize we really aren’t.

This waking up time can really only be facilitated by the act of prayer. We are actually designed to be in prayer – conscious connection with God – at all times. Jesus certainly was. What else is all of our non-verbal communication for? To whom else are we commincating? Again, we just forget what we are doing and being right now because we can and because it is easier than staying focused. With practice, we can remember to be right here, right now, more often and the more conscious time we spend with God, the greater our joy because there really is nothing that fulfills us more than being in intentional relationship with God. So eternal grace is the fact of God’s eternal presence and the fact that, even though we are experiencing time as linear and sequential, we can still focus our attention upon God’s presence and “meet” God, so to speak, in the moment, any time we choose.

Finally, only two thousand words later, I’ve reached today’s subject which is the amazingness of grace. Actually though, I’m not talking about how amazing grace is but why we don’t like it because it is clear that we reject the reality of grace all the time. Both of our scriptures this morning are about the majority of people who profess to belong to a faith tradition and yet reject grace. You see, when we focus our attention upon our intimate union with God we are unable to treat each other and our home planet in the ways we have. It is clear, from our behavior, that we have been going it “alone” for some time.

Jesus was teaching the disciples what it looks like to live in grace, to be graceful at all times. He said in order to be all that we are meant to be we must love God with everything we are and love each other as if we were the same entity. Yet, even they did not understand. Why not? Unfortunately, it all boils down to self-centeredness. I hate to put it that way but we don’t have another word in English that means quite the same thing.

The next few things I say are going to sound pretty harsh but bear with me and try not to take any of it personally. This isn't judgment, it's discernment.

This self-absorption of ours can be charted along a spectrum from suicide to homicide. Suicide is the conviction that one’s own life is not worth living. Homicide is the conviction that someone else does not deserve to live. Most of us fall somewhere along the middle portion of this spectrum which is shaped like an upside down bell curve with the majority of us clumping up at the bottom of the bell, sort of sloshing around down there in the trough. Throughout our lives we move along the spectrum between the extremes and, fortunately, it is much harder to move up the side of the curve toward those bitter ends. Sometimes we feel pretty balanced. Other times we feel more or less homicidal or suicidal depending upon our interpretations of our experiences. I’ll offer you a brief example from my own life since I’d rather not implicate anyone else with these assertions of self-centeredness, just in case there’s someone really evolved in the congregation this morning.

A couple of years ago my partner Sally and I were robbed…three times in one week. We were divested of nearly every item either of us had collected that we considered to be particularly valuable. Most painful were the things that can’t be replaced with any amount of money, such as the canvases that Sally’s mother had painted and given to Sally before she died. To say we were devastated would be an understatement, indeed. We were in the process of moving from one house to another and so we just closed the doors on the destruction and left it all there until we felt strong enough to deal with it again.

When we did go back we were like bombing victims returning to their neighborhoods, numb and dull-eyed, sifting through the wreckage to see what, if anything remained of our former lives. I remember feeling the build-up of an impotent sense of rage that we had been so violated and wishing that I were able to confront the thieves with a gun in my hand. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to kill them or just intimidate them but the realization that I felt like holding a gun – a device intended only for killing – upon another human being stopped me in my tracks.

I sat down in the middle of the living room floor and, of course, burst into tears. I prayed and asked God “why” this had been done to us. I apologized for thinking about killing the thieves and explained to God how mad I was and how violated we both felt and asked for guidance about how to deal with the situation; at which point I was granted a vision of grace so powerful that it turned my entire understanding of God and my relationship with God upside down and inside out.

First, God told me in no uncertain terms that I should feel compassion for the thieves because they were hurting so badly inside that they thought they needed things, someone else’s things, our things, in fact, in order to fill up the empty spaces they felt inside. Their biggest problem was that everything they did only separated them further from the one and only thing that could make them feel better, which is a full and completely satisfying relationship with God.

I then saw myself entering a room in which our thieves stood waiting and I opened my arms toward them and said, “Don’t worry. Everything is okay. You didn’t actually steal anything from us because we are giving to you what you thought you had taken and you can’t steal something which has already been given to you. What’s ours IS yours; as it always has been and always will be and we wish you all the joy of these things that we were so blessed by when they resided with us.” But they didn’t understand. They thought I was toying with them. They didn’t believe I had for-given them everything they had stolen. They continued to live in sin because they could not allow themselves to receive grace. (For-given. Fore-given them…I’ll come back to this concept in a few moments.)

One of the best descriptions of this state of mind, of our believing that we don’t deserve grace, is given by Annette Benning’s character in the movie Open Range. She explains, “I don’t have the answers, but I do know that people get confused in this life about what they’ve done, and what they should’ve because of it. Everything they think they are or did takes hold so hard that it won’t let them see what they can be.” This is what it means to live in sin. It’s a confusion that takes hold so hard it won’t let us see everything the way God sees everything. It won’t let us see ourselves the way God sees us.

The way God sees us is as precious and sacred and unique and infinitely important components of all that is. Another movie character, Dr. Ellie Arroway played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, explains how it feels to see ourselves as God sees us. She says, “I had an experience…I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything I know, as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever – a vision of the universe that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are; a vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves; that we are not – that none of us – are alone. I wish that I could share that. I wish that everyone – if even for one moment – could feel that awe and humility and hope…but…that continues to be my wish.” This same type of encounter happened in real life for Dr. Martin Luther King who described it as having been to the “mountain top” so that he had a dream.

Unfortunately, the Sadducees and Pharisees from this morning’s reading aren’t the only ones who don’t understand the scriptures. We Christians are woefully disobedient of the teachings of Jesus who says to us, “Whatever you do to the least of these you do to me,” and also, “turn the other cheek” and “You have heard it said ‘an eye for eye’ but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’” About six years ago Bill McKibben wrote an essay that appeared in Harper’s Magazine called, “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong.” He writes that 75% of Americans in a poll think that the declaration, “God helps those who help themselves,” is from the Bible. Actually Benjamin Franklin said it and it runs counter to everything Jesus taught which is to love God with our entire being and to love everything and everyone else as our very selves.

We are like those in our Psalm this morning who have chosen our own way instead of God’s. We do all kinds of good works but we do them without grace, praising ourselves for being so wonderful and accomplished and in so doing, further separating ourselves from God. We make idols of our worldly possessions and even of our good deeds. What is the thought of vengeance but yet another thing that we focus our attention on instead of God? Besides which, the majority of our leaders teach us by their words and actions that grace is actually a weak response to immorality, to those who are being "bad." Forgive them? What does that do but just encourage them to continue being “bad” and probably allowing them to continue hurting a lot of “good” people in the bargain? Let’s just bomb them!

Furthermore, a large majority of we Christians don’t like grace because it is free…to…everyone. We don’t want “them” to experience grace because “they” have not “earned” it and “they” do not deserve it! I know you know of whom I speak when I say “them” and “they” because we all have “thems” and “theys” in our lives. This is precisely what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Because we are all together in this, because of our unity in God’s very being, whenever we deny grace to “them” we deny grace to ourselves. There is no grace for some, there is only grace for all and the vast majority of us are not yet reconciled to this truth.

The crux of the problem is forgiveness. Grace is founded upon forgiveness. You see, we think of forgiveness as “pardon” because of the way we experience time. We do something “bad” and then we ask pardon for it if we feel contrite. But the word forgive actually means, “to give before.” That’s what grace is, it is God’s giving before whatever we think, say or do so that there is no need, no want, no lack, no shortcoming, no sin. You see, when we believe we are separated from God we live in fear. Fear produces self-centeredness. Self-centeredness produces all the thoughts, words and actions that we consider “bad” and immoral and they are all found along the same spectrum from suicide to homicide.

If we don’t want to live this way anymore, if we really wish to change the world, we are going to have to accept God’s grace and not only for ourselves but for everyone. We are going to have to become willing to break open our little shells and crawl out into the blindingly brilliant light of God’s love and grace. We have to become willing to be born again, not as in the sense of being “saved” like many of our Christian theologies claim, but as in the sense of becoming who and what we have always been meant to be.

We were never meant to stay so self-absorbed. This is an infancy stage and we’ve been in it for thousands of years, but we were intended for a much greater purpose. Do you want to find out what that is? Do you want to live into your potential? Jesus offers a way out, a way to grow up, but we have to become willing to give up this life and our selfish ways of thinking in order to attain what he offers. We have to become willing to be laughed at and scoffed at. We have to become willing to let go of all the things that we use to keep ourselves separate from full-time awareness of God and live in the holy realm of now.

Grace is not some weak response to immorality that we offer up because we don’t have the fortitude to lay down the law. Grace is advanced spirituality. It’s not for the timid and it requires courage and a faith the likes of which most of us don’t want to pursue because it is like swimming upstream against the tide of the majority of human kind. It requires us to forgive the way God does. It requires us to love the way God does. It requires us to align our wills with God’s will and to be graceful.

Fortunately, God also knows most of us aren’t ready for this, we aren't mature enough to be very graceful even after all this time…but we can always start practicing.

I can’t help myself: I think music is a really fabulous metaphor for grace, for the beauty and the harmony of bringing individual notes and instruments and voices together to make an amazing and unified sound. As children, most of took lessons on some sort of instrument or we sang songs, even if it was just with the radio. I think we are all God’s instruments for grace but we don’t start playing in a symphony without first taking a few lessons. I think this is why we are here in the way we are, to practice. I don’t know what that symphony God is writing is going to sound like but I know I want to participate in it. It’s going to be a harmony the likes of which we can’t imagine in our current, finite state, but we can learn our parts. We can become skilled musicians. We just have to practice and it is said, practice makes perfect. How do we get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!

Jesus showed us the technique; we are the instruments and the whole world is our practice room. Let’s practice grace together. We don’t have to get it right the first time or all the time but we can get ourselves ready and we can teach the techniques to others, as well. At first, the noises we make are going to be really awful. Most of us are going to have our selfish little dreams of being soloists, at some point or another, but we’ll eventually settle down and learn to play second or even eight-thousandth chair in our section. There will be soloists but there won’t be any prima donas because no one will be afraid of not being loved as well or as greatly as everyone else. Each one of us will know how ultimately important we all are and everyone will learn to play together in order to make the music itself, the grace, the most important aspect of every breath we take and of every note we play. When we finally decide, when we choose with our whole selves, to submit to God’s love and grace and will and allow the Maestro to truly conduct this global band/orchestra/chorale, the piece that we all play together for the pure enjoyment of our entire cosmos will be none other than God’s masterwork arrangement of Amazing Grace.

Break a leg!

McKibbon, Bill. "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong" in Harper's Magazine, April 2005.  http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695

This is a recording of the anthem the choir sang during this service, called "Bring Us To Your Light" by Henry Mollicone, published by E.C. Schirmer

This is a recording of the "sermon song" I sang, called "If I Want To" by Burt Bacharach

This is a recording of our closing hymn, called "I Am An Instrument" by Daniel Nahmod

Eternal Grace Happens

delivered at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA

on October 24, 2010

Psalm 150

Matthew 6:5-8

Meister Eckhart said, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.” I think that there isn’t anything in the universe that doesn’t communicate with its source, the Creator of all that IS, whom we call God. For instance, an alpine field of wildflowers is definitely communicating something to God. Perhaps the riot of color is a nonverbal song of praise to God for life and sunshine and earth and bees and rain and love and beauty. I’d like for you to hear something I think is astounding. If you are comfortable, please close your eyes and just allow yourself to relax as we listen to a truly amazing chorus. You are hearing recorded cricket song and the ethereal choir accompanying the crickets is the way you and I would hear it if our metabolisms were sped up to match that of a cricket. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjJNVH01YLo If you wish to hear this again you will find the link to my YouTube channel in the text of this message on my BlogSpot. We often think of cricket chirping as something humble and somewhat “cozy” but this puts the songs of crickets in a completely different category. It makes me wonder what other kinds of communication the non-human inhabitants of this world use when “talking” to God.


Do you recall last week I stated what I believe about all things in the universe being made of the same stuff as God? We call that stuff “soul” and I identified it, quite imaginatively I think, as the substance of the element Love. In fact, perhaps the designation “L∞” should be added to the chart of the elements right along with Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Carbon. It used to be understand that God was the elemental force that held everything together. In fact, if we look up the etymology of the word life it goes back to meaning something like, “sticky.”


After Jesus lived and died the earliest believers understood him to be what scholars call the Cosmic Christ. He was the Logos, the original creative word of God made flesh and dwelling among us. He became that divine someone, the very substance of life itself that held the entire cosmos together and revealed the elemental nature of God. This is what caused the writer of the Gospel of John to declare, “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” This is, partially, what caused Paul to declare that we are one body in Christ and to exhort us all to have the mind of Christ, to live in Christ Jesus. We are to inhabit Christ, the soul of the cosmos, just as our bodies inhabit our souls.


If we put these ideas together, that 1) everything in the universe is, at its most basic level, made up of the same substance so that we are all really one in many forms and manifestations; and 2) that the second aspect of God in the trinity, the Christ, is the very soul of the cosmos; then there really is no separation between ourselves, or anything else for that matter, and God except that upon which we insist and persist in calling sin. So, if we are all in constant connection and communion with God and the cosmic Christ (which, by the way, all of the spiritual leaders and mystics in every faith tradition have identified and named as something similar, and which our tradition identifies as having been corporally manifested in Jesus of Nazareth) if we are all in everlasting communion with God then I really believe that everything in the universe is in communication with God at all times and that Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing is redundant because we can’t help ourselves. If prayer is communication between ourselves and God then we do it, constantly, just by the very simple fact that we exist. With this perspective suddenly all sorts of ideas make sense from the ancient Greek concept of the “music of the spheres” to the current Theory of Everything which sprang out of a combination of Einstein’s theories and the various String Theories of Quantum physics. Everything that exists at the most elemental levels vibrates at various levels and manifests in what are now believed to be 11 different dimensions, most of which we cannot, in this form, at least, even perceive.


Last week I talked about the fact that we seem to be the only creatures in existence that can pretend to be something we are not. Everything else absolutely has to be authentically itself from the tiniest insects to the largest mammals living on land or in the sea. I think that what we heard a few minutes ago was the sound of crickets praising God just for being. I think they celebrate themselves as part of life. Of course, we have no way of knowing what they think or feel. I am, once again, using my imagination to create the world the way I would like it to be, just as God used God’s imagination to create the world the way God thought was pretty cool, and I find myself in agreement. This space-time continuum we call the world and the universe is, by its very nature, really “good.” What more reason is there to praise God? Life IS good and we are alive and exist exclusively in God’s love but we forget and pretend that this is not the case, at all.


Because we have been defining grace as “that which removes all that separates us from full relationship with God,” then we could say that our very existence – as beings who live and move and have our being completely from within God’s very own being, Love – our very existence IS GRACE! Matthew Fox says that in cosmology we find ourselves in relation with all the other beings of creation whom it is clear are graced. The anthropocentric nature of religion has to keep focusing on sin and redemption but when we focus on ourselves as part of the Grace-fullness of creation we are free to feel graced, ourselves.


Fox declares, “The response to grace is praise…our civilization is in a praise crisis, we are starving for reasons to praise...we’ve lost the sense of grace and of praise.” Rupert Sheldrake adds his explanation to this phenomenon of a praise crisis: “There’s a very strong strain in science, …which removes praise. The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, for example, says that everything you see, however wonderful it may seem, is merely a matter of chance mutation and natural selection, the purposeless product of blind mechanisms,” and Matthew Fox retorts, “It stuffs the praise back into your body, doesn’t it? Even if you’re feeling grace, you don’t dare let anyone know.”


He continues, “When I say we’re in a praise crisis I mean we’re anal-retentive as a civilization. And there’s nothing more anal-retentive than worship. Check it out. Almost everyone in our formal worship in the West is holding back. Our body isn’t there, we’re holding back; the breath isn’t there; the spirit isn’t there. Praise is very practical. Getting praise back is about getting our breath back, it’s about getting our energy back, and it’s about our capacity to let go and to rediscover a capacity for joy and a bigness of soul.”


Praise is the basic form of prayer. The word Grace and the word “thank you” in Latin, Gratia, are the same word. “Gratisas agimus tibi in the Mass – we give you thanks. So gratitude is an intricate part of grace. Meister Eckhart says, ‘If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice…. Being grace-conscious is being grateful.”


Martin Buber was a Jewish, German theologian and he had an idea about God so he wrote a book about it called “Ich und du.” In German this means, “I and you.” The title has been translated to “I and Thou” because Buber was talking to the you who is God. But the pronoun, “du” in German is the intimate form of “you.” It is the “you” who is a close personal friend, with whom you can be yourself at all times. It is the “you” who is beloved, a member of your close family. We don’t have such a designation in English but this is what he meant in his title and when you read what he wrote that becomes abundantly clear. Herr Buber’s idea was this: that we cannot experience God, we can only encounter God in the present moment, in person, in the immediate “now.” To explain this much further would take much of the rest of the day but suffice it to say that this is the very meaning of the term “Emmanuel” which means, God is with us. We can only invoke our conscious perception of God’s presence in this very moment and this is extremely important to the concept of prayer which is defined as communing, our unifying ourselves, with God.


In researching the subject of grace I’ve discovered what is for me a newish form of prayer called Visio Divina, which means “divine seeing” or “divine sight” and the gist is that in prayer we use our imaginations to have a personal, one on one, I and you, encounter with God. I say “newish” because I think we, as a species, have actually been participating in this type of prayer all along. How it works is that we quiet our bodies and our thoughts and we focus first on our breath, in order to center ourselves. Then we allow ourselves to perceive that we are, in fact, in the presence of God.


This is quite terrifying for many people because we judge ourselves so harshly. But the premise of Visio Divina is that God’s grace is sufficient for whatever we bring before God in the form of the faults, shortcomings and burdens – the bricks and stones, if you will, with which we build up the walls, the sins, that effectively separate us from being fully present with God. God’s love does not even acknowledge the existence of these walls, these sins, the obstacles of our own making for Jesus has already spanned the heights and the depths of the sins we place between ourselves and our beloved God. That’s what he came here to do, to experience all our sins and then to smash them to smithereens. As Paul writes, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.


So, Visio Divina starts from this place of acknowledging our sins, those life experiences and memories of events that have caused a blockage, a wall, a veil, an obstruction of some kind between God and us. In our heightened sense of awareness of ourselves in our present state of being, of our pain or our resentment, of our fear and anxiety, of our sorrow or loneliness or lack of self-worth, our self-condemnation, we open ourselves to God’s healing presence and allow God to offer to us, in person, whatever it is that we need in order to be healed of that which blocks us from living each moment in God’s love.


Visio Divina allows us to avail ourselves of the idea that God’s grace is eternal. It invites us to engage our imaginations in such a way that we can meet God in person, in a manner which is most familiar and meaningful to our present state of being human, so that God can touch us, embracing us in tender compassion. In Visio Divina God can hold us while we cry out our grief and heartache. God can walk with us, arm in arm, as we traverse a difficult road in our lives. Many people encounter Jesus as a mother figure in Visio Divina who nurtures them as infants, when they first began to feel unloved and unlovable due to the unhealed hurts that had been inflicted upon their parents in their childhoods. This is only one of the many kinds of prayer we can practice but I think it is one of the most important kinds of prayer practices especially for those of us who haven’t had or don’t get a lot of practice because it is a prayer which facilitates God’s grace, the removal of sin, obstacles, that keep us from moving any more deeply into relationship with God in the first place.


Notice that I used the word “practice” in reference to prayer because the act of intentionally perceiving ourselves to be in the presence of God is something that we have fallen out of the habit of doing. We have learned to perceive ourselves and our entire reality as being separate and “out of touch” with God. We have also become quite habituated to living in – that is keeping our awareness in – either the past or the future. Being in the moment, applying the “power of now” as Eckhart Tolle says, takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally. I’ll illustrate: picture past, present and future as being in the shape of a shallow bell curve with the present at the apex and the past and future at either end. How easy is it to stay in that place of the immediate present? It isn’t! It takes a conscious effort or we gently slide toward one end of the curve or another; into the memory of the past or into a projection of the future. Being more consciously aware of our eternal state of grace – our constant connection with God which is continuously reoccurring in each next present moment – takes practice on our parts. Which is why we call prayer – the state of being in intimate communion with God – a spiritual practice.


As we become more practiced at the skill of staying present with God, at staying in an eternal state of grace, our joy multiplies exponentially and our souls grow. This results in praise, in the spontaneous expression of our joy in our living in eternal grace. May the grace of God continuously be increasing our joy and may we one day achieve the praise mastery of even the crickets. Amen.





Buber, Martin, I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science. New York: Doubleday, 1996

Kuchan, Karen, Visio Divina: A New Prayer Practice for Encounters With God. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005

Divine Grace Happens

To those of you who were present, I apologize that this is not yet the complete text of the message I delivered. I spoke of some things that I hadn't written down and I am going to have to wait until next week for a recording of the service so I can transcribe the rest of the message I offered. I have also not completed my citations or bibliography for this sermon and I will be doing so during this coming week. This is what I had before me.

Divine Grace Happens - Delivered at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA on 10/17/2010.

Deut 4:4-9

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Eph 4:4-6

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad. (barukh shem kevod malkhuto le’olam va’ed.) Hear, Oh Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. (Blessed is the name of his glorious majesty forever and ever.)

The Hebrew word echad that defines Adonai in the Jewish Shema prayer can mean a unity, rather than a singularity. In other words, the oneness of God, in this Bible verse in Hebrew, can be interpreted as being a oneness that unites all of the various and diverse parts of itself, just as the human body can be described as being a unity composed of various parts such as arms and legs and hands and internal organs, etc. So God could be considered a unified oneness that is, nonetheless, composed of any number of parts.

I think that Paul’s description of God in the letter to Ephesus leads to a similar conclusion. The Greek words eis theos kai pater panton have been translated almost invariably as “one God and Father of, or above, all.” But the term panton really denotes a sense of something that is “altogether,” or the sum of all its parts. The same word panton is used in the two following phrases, epi panton, meaning “over all” or "over altogetherness," and dia panton, which is “through all” or "altogetherness." But the final phrase is en pasin which means “in everything” not “in all.” Pasin is a much more comprehensive word than panton and has more of a cosmic connotation. A more direct meaning of this verse might be something like, “There is one God and father (the Greek is pater so I'm staying with "father" in my translation.) of all that exists, who is over all that exists, through all that exists, and permeates the entirety of the cosmos.”

I know this has been pretty technical but I needed to show that there is this concept in the Bible that God is not just “out there” somewhere, either watching every little thing we say and do and tallying up our brownie points, or just kicking back and occasionally sticking a toothpick in to see if we are still only half-baked. The idea of God’s nature that I think is shown in these two well-known verses is that God is fully present in everything that is.

If, as Paul Tillich said some fifty or more years ago, God is the “ground of all being,” then this idea of God being the “one,” the echad, or the altogetherness, panton, or even cosmic everything, pasin, is more than just a mystical metaphor for God; it is a reality that is actually physical in nature but which we have simply not yet found a way to demonstrate empirically. Physicists are just realizing that we are still unable to perceive about 90% of all the matter that must exist somewhere in the universe. This missing material is called “dark matter” and the principle that may animate it is called “dark energy.” We know it must be there because we can take measurements of some kind that show it’s missing. But it is absolutely invisible to us with our current methods of perception.

I actually find that somewhat comforting. We mighty human brainiacs are still unable to explain more than about 10% of reality which leaves plenty of room for us to play around in and discover and imagine and create.

Last week I talked about the story of the original sin in the Garden of Eden and I suggested that our fault was not so much disobedience to God’s commandments as it was a choice to go seek our own knowledge and to form our own perceptions and opinions about all we can discover for ourselves. This has a tendency to lead us away from God and from full union with God as the source of all that we can know about our universe and ourselves. This separation from the source of our knowledge illustrates the very definition of sin which is: that which separates us from being in full relationship with God. In other words, we become so seduced by the knowledge we can discover about everything for ourselves that we forget God and not only that God is the creator but that the Divine “breath” or spirit, if you will, permeates everything and gives not only form but soul to everything that is.

I’d like to clarify right here that the soul of a thing or being is not the same as Spirit. Spirit is the spiritus sanctus, the Divine Breath. In Greek the word for “wind” is anemos. Then in the Latin anima, the wind or breath, is the animating principle of all life. When the ancient philosophers talked about the anima mundi they were referring to the “soul of the world.” The Spirit is that which animates life. It is the life force, if you will. The soul, on the other hand, is that mysterious non-physical form of a thing or being, or at least one of those kinds of matter that we cannot currently perceive, which is animated by Spirit. Finally then bodies, or physical manifestations, are animated by souls. It is clear when something or someone dies that some sort of animating force has left it. From the moment the animation leaves a body that physical form begins to break down. It loses cohesion and it is literally life-less. It is generally thought that the soul is what has left the body. So what then is the soul, really? And where does it come from?

Well, if you were following my linguistic exploration a few minutes ago you know what I think, already. I think our souls are all just chunks of whatever it is that God is. The Creation account in Genesis 1 tells us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. What if what we are, incorporeally, is just little pinches of God-stuff? We already know that we share in our very cells some of the same molecules that made up stars billions of years ago.

One of the foremost theoretical physicists of the twentieth century was David Bohm, who applied the majority of his time to something called quantum field physics. Barbara Brown Taylor was a working minister and college professor when she encountered David Bohm’s work and wrote the following about his impact on her theology:

…in [his] study [David] caught a glimpse of reality in which the universe neither occupies space and time nor contains many different things.. Rather, he says, it is one interwoven thing that takes time and space seriously but not too seriously -- perhaps by treating them as idioms that the universe finds necessary in order to communicate itself to observers.


I have no more than a glimpse of his glimpse, but what it suggests is that the universe has a memory that predates the Big Bang. Back before that explosion sent energy racing every which way at speeds faster than light, there was the egg of the universe in which all places were one place and all things were one thing…. The beauty of this reality I have no image for was its unity, its total coherence. Mind, matter and time were not different yet. They were all floating in the same yolk. Then the universe was born and the one became many. Quantum particles became planets, galaxies, clusters and superclusters. Atoms became blue-green algae, toads, palm trees and swans. Space became here or there, as time became then or now.


But deep down in the being of these things remains the memory of their being one, which makes them behave in ways that torture scientists. Space and time are not separable. Light is both particle and wave. A particle way over there responds instantly to a particle way over here, as if each could read the other's mind.


If I understand my glimpse of Bohm's glimpse, then our mental torture comes about only because we insist on conceiving reality as many when it is truly and deeply one. All appearances to the contrary, "the universe remains as it was in the beginning, when all places were one place, all times one time, all things the same thing."

Rupert Sheldrake is one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers and is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. During the 1990s he collaborated with Matthew Fox on a series of forums in which the two discussed reality and the meaning of all life in the universe. One of Sheldrake’s most interesting contributions to this conversation is the idea that the theory of the “field” has replaced the concept of the “soul.” For instance, the anima mundi, the soul of the world, of ancient philosophy has only within the last few centuries been replaced by the earth’s gravitational field. Sheldrake and Fox like the idea of “field” as a metaphor for the soul because fields are fluid and permeable, they contract and expand, they respond to other fields and attract each other. Their animating principles are largely those of habit, but they also seem to be influenced by the apparently random, surprising and sometimes even whimsical workings of the divine breath blowing through the universe, or the spiritus sanctus. Of course, Matthew Fox’s favorite aspect of fields is that you can play in them.

Fox’s most important contribution to this conversation, as far as I am concerned, is his knowledge of the writings of the Christian mystics like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart. The most fascinating consensus arises between these three visionaries which is that they all declared the human body to inhabit the soul. They all considered the soul to be the dwelling place of our bodies. This means, most emphatically, that our souls are not limited to the confines of our bodies! Fox and Sheldrake talk about our perceptions as occurring not inside our brains, as cognitive psychology suggests, but that we actually encounter each other, soul to soul, energy field to energy field, somewhere outside these bone Baggies we call skin. So our souls could actually be considered the fields of our beingness; which our philosophers and theologians might consider to be some form of the divine energy, and scientists and theoreticians are only just exploring in quantum physics and referring to as the creative and utterly unpredictable vibrations of the universe.

Last January I attended the Earl Lectures at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. The title of the lectures was, “Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience.” I really like that phrase because I have long known this about us, that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience. We are spiritual beings; that is, our most fundamental essence is animated by the life force we call Spirit and it is not only “immaterial” in so far as we understand the nature of matter but it is also indestructible. Why? Our souls are made of the same stuff that God is, of course. But now, finally, we come to the big question, what is God “made” of?

Well, we already know! We declare it all the time; God is…Love. Yep, our souls are composed of that substance we refer to as love. The life force itself is love, as well. Whoops! Wait a minute! We already determined that Spirit and soul are not the same thing. But Love, God’s very being-ness, is like light which is both particle and wave. Love is both the substance of our souls as well as the life force which animates the souls of not only people but all living things and even those objects we consider inanimate. Love is the force that binds everything in the universe together. This makes sense if we think of all matter as some sort of physical expression of God’s self, which is love.

In our single-minded insistence that this planet and our short lived little bodies are the extent of what is really “real” in the universe we often consider love a weaker force than fear, out of which come anger and hatred and all of the other states of being we deem so destructive. But love is the very medium in which we exist, just like water is the medium in which a fish lives and air is the physical medium in which our bodies exist. Love is the spiritual equivalent to gravity, only greater and more suffused. We actually exist in a suspension of love, like amoeba in a drop of salt water. Our souls float around in love and bump into each other and join up with each other and split off from each other, growing and shrinking, depending upon how well we nourish them, and these bodies we imagine are so solid and so relatively powerful in comparison to that which we cannot perceive with our five major senses, are just the tools our souls use to express themselves in the material world.

Now, ordinarily we keep our souls fitting pretty closely to our physical bodies but the mystics tell us that our souls are actually infinite “fields,” just like love is an infinite field, and that we can actually “grow” our souls. What sort of things, do you suppose, might be so nourishing to our souls that they would grow?

Original Grace Happens

Original Grace Happens: Delivered At First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA, Oct. 10, 2010


Scripture: Genesis 3

Have you noticed that there are some words in our language that we don’t say out loud in polite company? No, not vulgar words. I mean the kind of words that are actually okay to say but only if you whisper them; like bathroom.

“Pardon me. Do you know where I might find a bathroom?”

“I know, they’re not even married yet but I think Judy’s already pregant.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not about you. Mark’s just cranky today because he started his new diet. I’ve never met a man who cares so much about what he looks like but it’s probably just because he’s gay.”

And then there are those words you know you have to whisper but you do it really loudly just to make sure everyone heard it.

“Yes, Don is doing much better and he’ll be back to work on Monday but I heard he’s going to have to start seeing a psychotherapist.”

Have you noticed we usually mean something just a little bit derogatory when we use a word in a whisper? You might want to especially notice that about the word, “gay.” I’m just sayin.’

We have words like this in Christianity, too. Words like “sin.” Oh, what? You didn’t hear that? You want me to whisper it louder, so everyone can hear? The word is “SIN!” Wo! Oops, did I say that out loud? Sounds kind of sinister when you whisper it that way, doesn’t it? It’s a little bit like when Harry Potter speaks parcel tongue, “Seth hash ekaaa!” For those who are not familiar with the wizarding world of Harry Potter, (“They don’t know who Harry Potter is? They must be muggles!”) parcel tongue is snake language. Harry knows how to talk to snakes.

Hmmm…talks to snakes…I wonder if Adam and Eve had to know parcel tongue in order to talk to the snake in the garden? Oh, probably not, but this does bring up an interesting point. Why would the antagonist in the story of Adam and Eve be a snake? Snakes don’t usually much of a sound we can perceive at all. So many of the other animals seem to almost “speak” but we rarely associate the sounds a snake makes with speech of any kind. Well, it just so happens that there were all kinds of religions and beliefs in the ancient world and some of them included not only gods but goddesses, as well. As it turns out, one of the symbols for some of the goddesses was the snake and in this guise the goddess was wise and knowledgeable. So, one of the ways to interpret this story in Genesis chapter 3 is a as a warning to stay away from the temptation of the matriarchal, or mother/goddess centered religions. If you disobeyed this commandment and took up with the heretics, which just means a person who thinks differently, you would be eternally barred from the garden where God takes care of his own.

Another way of interpreting this story, however, and the one we Christians are most familiar with, is that is a story about sin. (Can I stop whispering the word now? Good. Thank you.) I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have trouble with the word “sin” and I think it goes back to the story of Adam and Eve. It’s the first place in the Bible where we encounter the concept of sin. In fact, it’s usually referred to as the “original sin” and traditionally, it has been interpreted as a story about the fall of humankind from God’s grace into sin and more often than not, that sin has been defined as being about disobeying God which had the effect of launching us into the first sinful explorations of our sexuality.

This is one of the first stories I encountered in church and even before I fully understood the technical aspects of sex this interpretation made very little sense to me. I suppose it’s the fig leaves and the mention of nakedness that makes people think the story has something to do with sex but I never really bought into that idea. I was also full of questions about the nature of God that seems to be revealed in the story. For instance, why would God have placed two very dangerous trees in the middle of a supposed paradise? Was God trying to tempt Adam and Eve into disobedience? Furthermore, it is clearly the snake who entices Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So why did God punish Eve, not to mention poor Adam, for the snake having tricked them into disobeying God? As for punishing the snake, I thought it was pretty high handed of God to punish the snake when it was God who had obviously made the mistake of leaving those two trees where Adam and Eve could get to them in the first place. Also, how in the world were Adam and Eve able to “hide” from God and how come God had to look for them upon returning to the garden? Doesn’t God know and see everything? Finally, I was none too impressed with a story that declared me and everyone else to be made out of dirt. I much preferred the version in Genesis 1 in which human beings are the ultimate creatures God creates at the end of a long and satisfying work week and that we are so exalted as to have been made in the very image and likeness of the divine. I mean, if we are created as images of God and we’re sinful then; does that mean God is sinful?

Well, these are questions that have baffled the attempts of better theologians than I was as a child to understand and make some sense out of. So, quite reasonably, at about the age of 8 or 9, I discarded the story of Adam and Eve as a strange little tale that was interesting but fairly irrelevant to my understanding of who I am and of what is my place in this world.

I encountered the story many times over the years, in Sunday school classes and in seminary and eventually came to discard it again – not because I couldn’t make sense of it but – because I finally decided, in my acquired wisdom and maturity, that the very idea of human beings as sinful and in need of redemption was, in fact, the illusion and that God’s unconditional love would never have allowed us to be so humiliated. Furthermore, all human kind really needed to understand about Jesus’ was that he was the messenger of the good news of God’s unconditional love. You remember the Beetles’ song, “All you need is love.” Well, I got that message loud and clear. The pop theology of our day, courtesy of John Lennon.

Sin just didn’t make sense as far as I was concerned. No one really believes in “sin” anymore. We have psychology. We know what makes people act and behave and even think the way they do. I thought that our big problem as a society was in recognizing ourselves as essentially good; if we could just drop that 5,000 year old self-esteem-squashing rock of an idea that we are broken and fallen and just accept God’s loving embrace then all would be well with the world and paradise would be restored. That was Jesus’ real message. What I ended up really doing was turning Jesus into the ultimate feel-good, self-help guru who was peddling the product of God’s grace.

I’m presenting all of this is in a somewhat humorous manner but it’s not really all that funny. I’m trying to laugh at myself for being so far off the mark and pardon myself for being…human. You see, by denying the concept of sin I was denying God’s grace and it was killing me. I was in the process of dying because I didn’t have God’s grace. I had to interrupt my Master of Divinity in a crisis of faith because I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of sin and I didn’t know that I was denying myself God’s grace. I actually thought I had it!

So what is grace? I’ve been defining it all these years as that which removes whatever separates us from experiencing full relationship with God. Isn’t that a great theological definition? Grace is that which removes whatever separates us from experiencing full relationship with God. I got it, but I didn’t “get it.” And the reason I didn’t get it was because I couldn’t figure out what it was that separated us from having full relationship with God because the answer has always been…sin. And that was the one thing I couldn’t accept about myself or any of the other really wonderful people in my life. I and they are not sinners!

Do you want to know why I had so much trouble with the concept of sin? Yeah, I understand on an intellectual level that: sin is that which separates us from having full relationships with God but I didn’t understand what it is not. I had equated the word “sin” with the word “bad.” I read that creation story about Adam and Eve and made the same connection most everybody else seems to make; that sin has to do with morality, and that, therefore, if I am sinful I must be bad. Wow! And that idea leads to the question: How could God love me? I’m such a bad person. How could anyone love me? How could we love each other? Maybe it’s just that bad people love other bad people. That still doesn’t explain how or why God would bother to love us. Yes, God’s love had better be unconditional because otherwise God couldn’t love us, either.

That’s where most theologies leave us, with us sinners receiving God’s underserved gift of love. And that’s really wonderful but that still left me being “bad” and essentially undeserving of anybody’s love and that’s what’s been killing me. How many of us walk around all our lives with this idea that we are sinful and therefore bad and that we don’t deserve love? Yes, Christian theologians have told us that God is so great and Jesus was so full of God’s grace that they were able to overcome our sinfulness and make it possible for God to love us again. But that wasn’t Jesus’ message!

Jesus didn’t say, “After I sacrifice myself in exchange for your sins you will be made worthy of God’s love.” He said to the disciples, “You are the light of the world! No one lights a lamp and covers it with a basket, they put it on a stand where it shines because it is of such value to everyone!” He was telling the disciples that they were wonderfully made and of as much value as brilliant light in a pitch dark cave. In Genesis we are created in the image and likeness of God. How did we go, in one chapter, from being so good to being so bad?

Well, here’s where I had it right because we didn’t and we aren’t. What we are is sinful. That doesn’t make us bad. It just makes us full all kinds of stuff that separates us from being in full relationship with God. So, how does this idea make it possible to interpret the story of Adam and Eve?

Here goes: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents our decisions to try to know, understand, comprehend everything about our selves and our world without filtering it through God’s love. When we decided to know for ourselves, rather than knowing and perceiving everything from the perspective that we would have had if we had stayed in full, conscious and perfect spiritual union with God, we began the process of separating ourselves from God. We separate our consciousness from Gods’ consciousness. We stop knowing and seeing ourselves as God knows and sees us; as images and likenesses of the divine and we become ashamed and we hide from God. Why the shame? Because Divine love is unconditional, it never judges but we have now separated ourselves from divine love itself, and so all we can do is judge. All we can do is moralize between good and bad because we have knowledge of good and evil but we have separated ourselves from the unique knowing that comes from perceiving all that is from a state of unconditional divine love.

What the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did was to send us in pursuit of knowledge about ourselves and the world apart from that knowledge which is wholey informed by and depends entirely upon perceiving ourselves and creation through the eyes of God’s unconditional love. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake trace this path of our pursuit of knowledge through its most recent culmination in these days which are often referred to as the age of post-enlightenment. Ever since Renee Descartes introduced his mechanistic view of the natural world and Darwin declared that every living being is nothing more than the culmination of a set of chance circumstances driven by natural selection and the survival of the fittest, God and our ultimate interdependence upon God have been increasingly regarded by many educated and reasoning persons as religious superstitions of the past, or at best, a complimentary but still supplemental explanation of how things came to be as they are.

Fox and Sheldrake insist that this is the reason society seems more and more self-destructive, disillusioned, cynical, and apathetic; we have literally dis-spirited our entire reality. We perceive all of creation to be in a state of sin, that is, in a state of separation from God. In other words, we have made irrelevant God and God’s estimation of us as priceless and infinitely valuable. We have very nearly separated ourselves completely from the love of God which is the very source of our existence. Matthew Fox says that if we are to survive as a viable species then we are going to have to reclaim our understanding that we were originally created from God’s love and that God is continually inviting us to return to this place of our origins, this state of grace, the garden of Eden where all we know and all we feel is God’s love and affirmation of our existence.

Thomas Currie says that God’s “…love can never finally be merely useful, only essential. Without it we die.” (44) This what God means when God tells Adam and Eve that they will die if they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; that we will become consumed with knowing all that we can discover for ourselves and that we will come to ignore all that God’s loving perspective tells us about reality. This is our original sin but it is also not the end of the story. For out of original sin comes God’s original grace.

Karen Kuchan notices that after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and hide from God in shame, God comes looking for them. God pursues Adam and Eve until they are finally “found” by God and despite their fear of retribution are instead clothed and taught how to feed themselves and loved. This is the relationship between God and ourselves about which we are told throughout the rest of the Bible.

Sin isn’t an action or a behavior. Sin is what causes us to think, say and do things that we then define as either good or bad because sin is a state of being; once that separates us from living our lives in full relationship with God. Jesus real message is that, yes, we are sinners but we don’t have to live in sin all the time. God’s grace invites us back into the garden, to share in that very personal, intimate relationship with our God and to join God in that place where unconditional love is all there is and that divine love is all we need to know and feel. Every moment of every day we are invited to meet God in that place in our souls where we remember that garden state of being; to rest in God’s love and affection for us, to allow God to comfort us and nurture us, to heal the hurts we’ve taken and given, to hang out with God and just be together. Grace is that state of just being with God and knowing ourselves and each other as God knows us, as God re-members us and as God re-deems us– just as we were when God first brought us into being; perfect images of the divine, perfectly loved and in perfect union with the very source of our being, our sweet, wonderful, loving, caring, compassionate, always-there-for-us God.

Let us pray:

“We pray, gentle, loving God, that you may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation as our mutual relationships with you grow, so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened we may know what is the hope to which we have been called, what is the wealth of the inheritance you offer us, and what is the immeasurable power of your love for transformation in our lives when we trust and believe in your abundant grace. Amen.”

Grace Happens, a Brief Bibliography


Currie, Thomas W. Ambushed by Grace: The Virtues of a Useless Faith. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1993

Dybdahl, Jon, A Strange Place for Grace: Discovering a Loving God in the Old Testament. Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2006

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science. New York: Doubleday, 1996

Gulley, Philip and James Mulholland, If God is Love: Rediscovering Grace in an Ungracious World. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004

Kuchan, Karen, Visio Divina: A New Prayer Practice for Encounters With God. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005

McCullough, Donald, If Grace is So Amazing, Why Don’t We Like It? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005

Richardson, Cheryl, The Unmistakable Touch of Grace. New York: Free Press, 2005

Toms, Justine, Small Pleasures: Finding Grace in a Chaotic World. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishers, 2008

Posting my sermons

I had not originally intended to post my sermons on this blog but it seems the best space in which to do so. If you are not interested in religious ramblings or if you are put off by discussions about Jesus and God don't read any further. If you think the Bible was written, word for word, by God and every sentance is factual and true, don't read any further. If you'd like to think about a Jesus that might make some sense in the present day and age you might like what I write because that's always what I'm aiming to find; some sense and meaning in Jesus' teachings that I can apply to my life and offer to those around me. I'm not a very good "trinitarian" and my Christology is about as low as one can have without being Unitarian or Jewish. I borrow phrases and terminology from "traditional" Christianity for the sake of communication but I usually put my own spin on the meanings, whether I tell my audience what my spin is or not. If you've been hurt by church folks or just turned off to the idea of religion by hypocrites you still might find my messages interesting if you're willing to keep an open mind. I'm not trying to convert anyone by posting my sermons here. I'm just putting my thoughts out there like everyone else who blogs. If you continue reading I hope you find something in what I've written that touches and moves you or, at the very least, offers you a different perspective.

Blessings!
Lora

Ascension Sunday 2010

Sorry it took so long for me to post this. I had a few life changes in the meantime.

Offered May 16, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA, UCC

Luke 24:44-53
Acts 1:1-11

"Was That a Threat or a Promise?"

One of the first things to know about me as a theologian and a speaker in churches is that I’m a big lectionary fan. I really like the way we follow a set of church holidays and readings every year in a three-year cycle. There’s something about the orderliness of it all that is very attractive to me but there are a couple of places in every church year that I struggle with and Ascension Sunday is one of them. I don’t know about you but the whole “ascension” part of the death and resurrection story of Jesus has always left me a bit out of sorts. I mean, we have the whole passion week; it’s filled with introspection and a living out of the expectation of the grief of the crucifixion on Thursday, the burial on Friday, the waiting on Saturday and then, “POW!” Easter Sunday and the Resurrection celebration and Easter Egg hunts and all the Spring falderal. Then we get this procession of second, third, fourth, fifth and so-on Sundays after Easter, during which we read the same stories out of the Gospels of Luke and John, until we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus on the seventh Sunday after Easter and Pentecost is finally celebrated on the eighth Sunday after Easter...and it happens in this same order of time every year. I just always feel like the ascension story is a sort of anticlimax after the resurrection on Easter and why does it always preclude Pentecost?

I have a colleague in Long Beach who likes to collect Bible story action figures with which she then illustrates some of her more lively sermons. I remember one year she very excitedly showed me an item she had acquired for celebrating ascension. Does everybody know what a “floaty pen” is? It’s usually a cheap ball point pen with a fat, hollow chamber in which there is water and some sort of scene or figure that floats either up or down the length of the pen so that when you turn the pen one direction the scene floats toward the end that’s down and then you turn the pen over and it floats toward the other end, again. Well, she found a “Jesus’ Ascension” floaty pen. Except that it worked in a rather peculiar way.

You see, when you looked at the pen “right side up” there was Jesus with his right hand up, pointing toward his destination in the clouds. In order to make the Jesus figure move however, you had to turn the pen upside down, which had the effect of dropping Jesus head-first in a decidedly downward direction. Well I didn’t find that very satisfying so when he reached the “top” of the pen I turned it right-side up so he was pointing in the right direction but then he just floated down out of the painted clouds to land on the ground again. I remember finding this arrangement to be somewhat disappointing and I spent a good half of an afternoon trying to figure out how the pen could have been designed so that Jesus actually ascended, rather than descending. I was eventually given that pen and here it is. I've never really figured out a way to make it work to my satisfaction and that’s actually the way I have felt about the entire Ascension celebration for most of my life.

I never understood the reason for this seemingly “second” resurrection-type event until I went to seminary and began to learn about how long an interval of time there was between the life of Jesus and the writing of the gospels. If the reckoning of the time of Jesus’ life is factual then he was born five or six years before the time we mistakenly labeled, anno domini, the year of the lord, and then he died some 33 or so years later, sometime between 27 and 28 of the first century. By our best guestimates, the gospel of Luke and it’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, weren’t penned until possibly as late as 65 or 70 of the first century; an entire generation – and then some – after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Bishop John Shelby Spong, a renowned theologian who has worked for the reform of the Episcopal church and for the wider Christian church body for most of his life, speculates that the story of the resurrection event itself, particularly as we read it in the gospel of Luke, is a story several decades in the making and that by the end of the fifth and sixth decades of that century in which Jesus lived there was a great deal of speculation about the reality of that story, much less the teachings and activities of Jesus. There had been talk, early on after he died, of Jesus’ imminent return and a promise that all believers would be taken up with him at the end time and would never experience death in the new life Jesus had promised. But by the time Luke was written the apostles themselves were probably either dead or dying and many of the first followers had also died.

The supposed “end time” kept getting pushed further and further away. Jesus had yet to return and set everything to “rights,” as it were. Believers were persecuted and were even hunted down and killed. They were tortured and murdered in the Roman arenas for public amusement. Where was the justice of God, now? Where was Jesus? Was his appearance after the resurrection just a story? Why was God allowing all of this suffering to continue? Jesus had taught about a new society, a new world, in which the poor were blessed and the wicked were finally punished, and he even taught that the kingdom of God was right here around us; so common and ordinary that we don’t even notice it, like leaven in our bread, or like the mustard bush. Well, bad things are still happening to good people and believers are still dying. The world is “going to hell in a handbasket” and it seems like Jesus just isn’t paying attention. He’s not here! How often do we feel like that these days?

Maybe the ascension story is about this feeling that Jesus in NOT present in the world. He’s been taken up and he isn’t with us, in the flesh, right now.

Rev. Ted Smith, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA gave an address at their denomination’s Covenant Conference in 2009. This was a conference to address the disparity in the church’s teachings and practices surrounding gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. Rev. Smith addressed the particular absence of justice regarding this group of people and what he considers to be a blatant disregard for the teachings of Jesus and equated it with a theology of the ascension of Jesus that I find to be quite gratifying and illuminating. He said:

Christians in the wake of the Ascension see both [the] presence and absence [of Jesus in the world]. They sit in the dark of absence long enough that—in the phrase we learned from Howard Thurman via Gregory Bentley—the dark becomes luminous…Such faith is a miracle. It involves seeing enough of the presence of God in the life of the church that you can’t let go, but then finding yourself broken open by the depth of the absence that presence discloses … and then finding yourself, in that breaking, bound yet more tightly to the one broken for us.

In other words, in our churches, in worship and in studying the records of Jesus in the Bible and in declaring that “God is still speaking,” we experience Jesus; living among us, teaching and preaching and performing miracles, filing our heads and our hearts with a joyous vision of the realm of God in this world that is so compelling that we can hardly wait for its manifestation; so that in our hearts we cry out, “Lord Jesus, quickly come!”

Then we focus our gaze just a little bit over Jesus’ shoulder...and we see a world still full of suffering and strife. We see poverty and famine. We see greed and gluttony. We see blatant disregard for creation and its stewardship. We see hatred and fear and war and death and injustice. We experience betrayal and loneliness, anxiety and despair. We see dishonesty and corruption and hypocrisy everywhere, even within – and sometimes especially within – our own churches, the supposed “body” of Christ; so that in our hearts we cry out, “Lord Jesus, quickly come!”

How terribly disappointing; how dispiriting it sometimes is, to live in our reality when we know, in our hearts, what Jesus was talking about, what he was teaching, what he died for and what he now – our faith tells us – lives for; the love and the will of God realized; that is, "made real," in this world. And it is this disappointment – the same disappointment that the early believers felt – that is addressed at the end of the ascension story when Jesus says to those waiting, “I am sending upon you what my Father promised.” And in Acts he says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

What? What power? The Holy Spirit? Was that a threat or a promise? And if we read further in the book of Acts – which I strongly encourage everyone in the congregation to do before next Sunday, when we celebrate Pentecost and the birthday of the church – if we read further in Acts we might well ask, "Is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit a threat or a promise?" because it is this Spirit of God...of Christ...within us, that reveals to us the very absence of Jesus in our streets, in our schools, in our homes, in our governments, in our societies, and particularly in our churches. It is also the Spirit of God within us, the hope of life to come, that gives us the courage and the strength to endure the world as it is and to work toward its time of reconciliation with the will of God. Rev. Smith calls this – and I agree with him – faith. He says:

This is the kind of faith, I think, [to which we are called.] To say that Christ is the peace, unity, and purity of the church is to proclaim a kind of presence. It is to say that where we see only conflict, Christ has already made peace. It is also to refuse every other source of community as false. It is to say no to peace built on agreement about how to vote, or whom to ordain, or how to interpret Scripture, or what kind of worship we prefer. Ascension faith has the courage to refuse alternatives like these. It has the tenacity to wait for the peace of Christ by the peace of Christ. Ascension faith has the capacity to yearn. It knows how to yearn for the body we can see from here. (Emphasis mine.)

Our faith informs us that despite all of the trials and tribulations we see and experience God is with us. Recall last December 19, 2009; it was the third Sunday of Advent and we read from Matthew, chapter 1, verse 23 – which is supposedly a quote from Isaiah 7:14 – that “…she will bear a son and will call him Emmanuel, which means ‘God with us.’”* Even when we can’t perceive that holy presence, God is with us and that presence is right here! Right now! In this very moment we are in the presence of the divine and the ground upon which we are standing is holy!

When we invoke the Spirit of God, when we apply our faith to every circumstance, every encounter, we bring with us the presence of Christ. The Holy Spirit is our spotlight, if you will, to illuminate every dark corner where the will of God is not present so that we can manifest Christ in the world. That is the power Jesus promises. Is it easy or comfortable? Heck no! But real power never is. Sometimes we would just as soon not know there was another way. It would be so much easier to say, “Well, that’s just the way it is,” and not feel compelled to work toward “righteousness.” The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is both a threat and a promise, just as Jesus is both present and absent in our world. It is this seemingly mutual exclusivity in which we live and move and have our being and in which the story of the ascension of Jesus makes a kind of hopeful, "upside-down" sort of sense as the preparation story for the Pentecost celebration, when we celebrate the anniversary of having become Christ’s ecclesiastical body in the world and take up the power for change that we, as members of the United Church of Christ proclaim when we declare that God is still speaking. And that, my friends, is a promise.

*Epilogue: I nearly dropped my teeth in the moments during the service just before I delivered this message as the choir -- without any prompting from me concerning the theme of my message -- sang an anthem called, "Emmanuel: God is with us." How often does a choir director choose such an anthem in May? I was stunned and awed. It was one of those hair-standing-on-the-back-of-your-neck moments. I still get chills just thinking about it!