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What If?

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Views of church evolve.

For many of us church begins as the bastion of law, order, tradition.  Religion then plays out as morality, as codes, as creeds, and as attendance.  What if though church, like our faith, was designed to evolve?

Christian New Church theology is filled with numerous references to what can be described as “mutual indwelling.”   In the Gospel of John, Jesus offers a wonderful prayer of oneness, or as one theologian phrased it, of “cascading unity” that speak to mutual indwelling – unity with Him and the Father, with us, with those who will know Him in the future.   The unity literally spills out of the prayer.

In our faith system, that very unity spills out again into areas such as marriage, work, service – all areas where the unity can be experienced.  It is also experienced in our connection with the spiritual world, not a connection of soothsayers and swamis, but a connection of heart and thought.  When experienced, “belief” in a dogmatic sense becomes less a priority and caring and the wisdom growing from it gains its rightful seat.  Morality, codes, creeds, and attendance follow a similar path – giving way to compassion, simplicity, intuition, and engagement.  Divinity becomes grounded in our humanity.

What if?  What if church evolved to a celebration of the mutual indwelling we have with God and with one another?  Such a shift is not without pain – I am absolutely convinced that opening to God and to others actually opens us to more synchronicity in terms of pain.  Likewise it opens the joyous space for co-creation.   And such a shift may be just where the Christian church is headed.

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First Coming, Second Coming

Friday, October 8th, 2010

For many of us, theology around the concept of a Second Coming is far removed from the concerns of everyday life.  As a pastor, it does not often come up in questions.  Important though to think about it.

The First Coming was Jesus’ birth into the world.  For several Christian denominations, the Second Coming will be the end of history and Jesus’ glorious return to earth.  (Important to note that for some it is a return in love, for others a return in wrath as seen in the “slaughtering Jesus” of the popular “Left Behind” series.)  For those who subscribe to the Christian New Church angle on the Second Coming, it is seen as the deeper understanding of the poetic sense of the Word, a description of which Emanuel Swedenborg wrote extensively.  The key difference – in the New Church it is a Second Coming of ideas, not of Person.

And what is the key idea?  As Swedenborg noted, and as we celebrate on the 19th of June, it is the proclamation on earth and in heaven, “… the Gospel that the Lord God Jesus Christ reigns as the one God of heaven and earth.”  Critically important stuff and topic I wrote of several posts earlier.

By allowing God in as Jesus, we do live into eye-level Christianity.  Want to walk as God walked, in His image and likeness, in other words, as He intended from creation for us to walk?  Follow the steps of Jesus, the Divine Human.

Follow those steps – walk the walk -  and what we experience is the most significant of Second Comings, the Second Coming of the Lord into our lives.

This in no way denigrates the theology around the Second Coming.  It is a fascinating, engaging, and fresh perspective on the Christian message that returns Christianity, I believe, to its roots.  If you struggle with the idea that of the New Church as instrumental to the Second Coming, so be it.  Focus on what the Second Coming is in your life is – where, with the help of the Word, the church, your community, your own experience – God can be born in your heart anew and you will find yourself in the most important place, the most blessed place – where God is.

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Is there Life before Death?

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

As is well noted, for most of us the burning question is not if there is life on the other side of death but is there life on this side of death?  As Thoreau noted, most of us live lives of quiet desperation.

One way to hold the choices this presents is to understand repentance as the gentle nudging by God to change our view of happiness.  In that sense the death in this life – the quiet desperation – can actually become one of the most life giving forces in our life if we use it to recast our vision our happiness.  As one author phrased it, “Sometimes we must cry in the wilderness, even when no one is listening, even when it is not changing people, just to keep the common untruth from changing us.”

I take that to mean that we need to be rather serious about not allowing the “untruth” to change us.  We are not American Christians, or Democratic Christians, or Republican Christians.  We are Christians, period.  The other identities are secondary.    That is not to re-break the world yet again into “us” and “them” but to simply say that Christianity is entirety – that we rest in God – that our secondary identifications are to be held within the primary model of identification – Jesus.   Much of the power of what Swedenborg called the universal church grows from that place.

If exclusivity, snobbery, clubishness grows, we not only missed the Christian message, we warped the Christian message.  The Christian message is that in surrender to that greater identity we will know life, we will respond with life, we will give life.

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Lord God Savior Jesus Christ? So What.

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

The core of Christian New Church theology is that the Lord God Savior Jesus Christ reigns.  This statement of faith is far more than just a dreary theological construct.  Within it lies a remarkable paradigm – that knowing God is knowing the Man, Jesus.  That walking the path of God is walking the path of Jesus.

Historical Christianity unfortunately warped this message into one of denominational exclusivity – a “club” as it were in which the world is readily cleaved between the saved and dammed.

That was NEVER Jesus’ message.  His message was one of looking out in love, a love powerful enough to hold all experience, including His own unjust execution, without lapsing into anger, hatred or revenge.  It was a love that enabled salvation ranging far beyond belief, far beyond any claims of exclusivity – and thus the consistent warnings about the demonic influence of salvation via faith alone.  Many of those whom Jesus “saved” were far from fitting into any belief paradigm we hold today and of which much of modern Christianity lays claim.

As goes Jesus, so goes God.

The New Church then is about reclaiming that core truth not from the pulpit alone but most importantly within life.  What else is a life of useful service, of loving kindness, of engagement if it is not a life of relationship growing from consequential faith? The relationship to God then is about the relationship with the other in circles that spiral outward ever-larger environs.

God of course is there all along – the omnipresent Father.  We are not separate from Him though we may spend a great part of lives asleep to that most core of connections.  We awaken to it at much the same pace that we awaken to one another, to the connection that is life.  Imagine the disciples awakening to the Divinity of Jesus – to a God who sought to arrive not as the Son of God – the same term used for the Roman Emperor – but as the Son of Humanity – our son.    If God’s highest desire was sacred worship, He would have chosen a far different vehicle than the person of Jesus, a Man who personified relationship, meaning, and connection and who eschewed the sanctimonious, ceremonial puffery of the Pharisees.

The “So What” is pretty big.

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Seek First the Kingdom of God

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Ministers are trained to go out into life with a “pocket full of answers.”  Easy to hold that as the job of clergy.  What one comes to however is a realization that we seek relationship far more than we seek answers.   The questions then gain precedence.  Life becomes about curiosity – going out into life with a “pocket of full of questions.”

In that journey, we travel together.  The line disappears between “expert” and “novice”, “teacher” and “student.”  There is no monopoly on answers.  What is left is openness to the questions that inform and open our lives.  There is a movement into the sacred mystery, into paradox, into wonder, into oneness.

That is the Christian journey.  Emanuel Swedenborg, who shared that prophetic imagination, penned the words from the Bible “Seek ye first the kingdom of God…” as he began the task of authoring the books that would form the theology of the New Church.  Seek.  Seek. Seek – one of Jesus’ consistent messsages.  The kingdom of God is all around us though we may remain asleep to it.  Maybe that is why often the experience of God is written of as an ecstatic experience having far more in common with the rising sun than a fixed point of reference.

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What does it mean to say Jesus was the “Son of God”?

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

For the New Church, the figure of Jesus is THE central religious image.  Often referred to as the Divine Human, Jesus is seen as the very embodiment of God.  His life was a life of moving more and more into that power, a power of His Human being made completely Divine.

Interestingly, Jesus never says, literally, that He is “the Son of God” preferring instead the phrase that He is “the Son of Humanity.”  Why is that?  It is my best understanding that Jesus consistently focused on the unity of God, the unity of creation, the unity between the spiritual and natural.  We are the one’s who broke it apart, creating a paradigm where the sacrifice of a son atoned for the sins of masses to avoid the world’s destruction by an angry God – the Father.  That is more a human story unfortunately, a human paradigm, than God’s.

Reading the text can yield that position but a deeper reading appears to support a Man whose primary concern, primary love was people, was compassion.  Christianity then turns from being a belief system – “Do you believe Jesus died for your sins?” – to a creed of life, a creed of consequential faith in which love of others, includes one’s enemies, is the ultimate fruit.

Jesus used many metaphors for His life.  “I am the way, the truth, the light ….”  Few of us would take those statements literally.  We would see the far deeper poetic truth within it.  References to the Son of God are likewise pieces of poetic truth that help to unfold a deeper reality – a God who lives, breaths, and exists with us.

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Being a Christian does not mean burning the Koran

Friday, August 27th, 2010

It is always empowering to read an article about those who truly practice Christianity.  It is sad to read articles about those who in misguided ways do damage to the essential message of Christ.  Rev. Terry Jones, a pastor who is gaining some notoriety for his commitment to burn the Koran on 9/11, is an example of someone whose words damage that essential message of unconditional love.

One can view scripture in many ways.  One can create a loving, merciful compassionate God.  One can create an angry, vengeful God as well.  I recall listening to the authors of the “Left Behind” series as they discussed their view of a “slaughtering Jesus.”  Still a head-scratcher for me.

I believe deeply that is why Jesus living on this earth is so critical,  why the concept of the Divine Human is central to Christian New Church theology.  One simply cannot find the cruel Jesus in the New Testament.  This is Man who never carried a sword.  This is a Man who never set aside a foreign faith system as being “of the devil.”  This is a Man who quietly talked the crowd into putting down stones ready to be cast at a sinner, not a demagogue inciting the crowd to pick up stones in vengeful hate.

One can takes words out of context to cobble together an angry Jesus.  What one cannot do is look at the context of His entire life – words and actions – and come up with anything but a deeply loving merciful God.  This is not a God who burns Korans.  There are rooms for grey at times.  In other areas of our life there are not.  This is one of the later. Being a Christian does not mean burning the Koran.

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