Ears Or Mouth?

I had a very interesting Thanksgiving week.  

I found out how Jesus must have felt in the middle of the world he came to live in.

Two opposite poles of existence. Opposite opinions, theological understandings, political philosophies, social justice and economical savvy.

I stood in a similar place as I lay in my bed, Tuesday night, wondering how I was to live in such a  position.

It is, to say the least, uncomfortable.

I was thinking about all of that again this morning; and I recalled something I heard long ago:   “God gave us two ears and only one mouth; because it is more important to listen than to speak.”

Now,  I will admit that my God-given-gift of listening has sometimes felt like a curse to me.

  

However as I lay there in my bed, on Tuesday night, I was thinking that what the world truly needs is more listeners.  People who are willing to hear what they disagree with; and not try to convince the speaker that they are misguided.

Because of my gift of listening, I have learn to treasure different opinions through the years.  

I have also learned that my way of thinking was stuck in old cultural conditioning.

This new way of listening has free me up to venture into new areas of thinking; and yes, living.

I have been given a much broader view of life’s possibilities.

My prayer for the near future, and on into forever, is that we all begin to use our ears more and our mouths less.

19 You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; ²⁰for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. ²¹Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness,…(James 1)

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ²For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. ³If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. ⁴Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. ⁵So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.  How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! ⁶And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. ⁷For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, ⁸but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.(James 3)

Happy Thanksgiving

1 Praise the LORD, all you nations; extol him, all you peoples. 2 For great is his love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the LORD.(Ps.117 NLT)

Short and sweet and to the point this morning!  Praise the LORD!

Good words to begin or end our day.  What better, and grace-filled, thing can we do but to give thanks for God surrounding our lives with his love? 

Can you imagine your life being completely guided and sustained by God’s love?  

Well, I’m here to tell you that it is!!!   

We may fine ways to resist the truth of that thought!  

But once God has hold of our hearts his will is done and is being accomplished.  We may not be aware of it at the time.  

We may not realize it for months or years.  

We may slow the process down with our small human ways of thinking and doing.  

But in the long run God’s purpose is lived out through you and me.  And it will often only be in hind sight that we understand this divine process.

What a wonderful thing to give thanks for!  
                                                             God faithful and active in your life!!

Some Big Wondering Continue

Here are some things that I have been reading that have clarified, my otherwise conflicted, former theology.

First this:  “…  shift our focus to consider Jesus’ life itself as a teaching.  By “a teaching” I mean a model, of course; all authentic teachers walk the talk.  But more than just a model, I want to consider his life as a sacrament — that is, as a spiritual force in its own right.  The traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  But what to my mind this definition does not make sufficiently clear is that a sacrament does not merely symbolize a spiritual reality; it lives that reality into existence.  

Jesus life, considered from this standpoint, is a sacrament: a mastery that draws us deeply into itself and  when rightly approached, conveys an actual spiritual energy empowering us to follow the path that his teaching have laid out.”  (p. 91 Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault)

Now try this on for size: 

“The divine Word, which has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, is source and ground of the order and intelligibility of the universe.  It is this Logos that maintains all created reality in being (that is, in the light of order, of “form”) holding it from falling back into disorder and nothingness, back into the primeval chaos (see Gn. 1:2).  It was the divine word, the Logos, that brought all things out of the darkness of nothingness into the light of being.”(p.55 Second Simplicity  Bruno Barnhart)

Let me see if I can tell you what has become very new and enlightening to this chronically advantaged mine.

To put it simply, we human beings are meant to be included in The Three -- The Trinity.

That is, in the round-pie-of-life you and I are the fourth slice of the whole picture of God’s world.

We are meant to be fully apart of the whole.  Active participants within the realm of God’s purpose.

And we participate actively because Jesus’ Spirit has been gifted to us.

I know I am probably leaving you with a lot of questions.

Well thats where I have been living for weeks(;

Even though I am sometimes baffled by what I am reading; I find great joy in the fact that what I am reading has unlocked a door in my thinking that has often been muted.  Muted by the narrow understanding of the church fathers; who have so logically laid our a theology that seems to limit the extraordinary promise that lived in the physical man of Jesus.

Jesus is so much more than a man — a human being.

  

He was, as Cynthia Bourgeault suggests, a true sacrament — “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace…. a spiritual force in its own right.” 

When we really pay attention to what we read in the Gospels; most especially in the Gospel of John. We begin to see a Jesus that is certainly not just the skin of God. But God.

John’s Gospel get to the very death of Jesus' true nature.

God’s genuine being, Spirit, love, mercy, forgiveness, grace, gentleness, tenderness and unconditional acceptance.  The Bread of life, The Light of the world, The Gate, The Good Shepherd, The Resurrection and The Life, The Way, The Truth, And The Life, The Vine.


There is not a whole bunch of physical person in those definitions.

Well, maybe The Good Shepherd.

Some Big Wondering

I am glad that this is the time of year when we celebrate Advent and Christmas.  I am glad because the things that I have been reading lately have very much to do with Jesus coming to live on this human ground called earth.

Advent, I remember reading once, is: “when God announced the divine intention to act decisively in the incarnation of the Word, everything gets turned on its head.” 

In church language: God came to earth, in human form, to bring His original message of Peace and Goodwill into the chaos of the world.

And an ethic of change was about to be enacted upon God’s people.

And you are probably sitting there saying to yourself:  “Yes, I know this.”

So, I invite you to think back at what you heard, and learned, in Sunday School about Jesus.  

In my memory it was not all that clear that Jesus was not just a man; but in actually God.

And if your experience is like mine you didn’t hear, too much is at all, about the Gospel of John. 

Yes, I was told that the baby Jesus born in a manger was Emanuel — God with us right here on earth.

On Christmas morning we alway heard — and still hear —  the Prolog of John’s Gospel “ Word of God became flesh and live among us.”

However, the confusion came with the messages we heard the rest of the year.  When everything seems to be disconnected from the realm of God on earth.

We always prayed to God above.  Separate from our physical life — real physical life. 

Don’t you remember how we were taught to pray?  We folded our hands, bowed our heads and talked to God somewhere out in space.

“Our Father who art in heaven..thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

A God separate, distant, from life of every day. 

We heard about the Trinity — God as three beings — by memorizing the Apostle’s Creed.

Who truly grasped that concept?

             I mean really understood it?

How did the Three impact our daily lives?

    How were we actually connected to the Three?

          Where did we fit in the larger picture of God?

More tomorrow.

Jesus' Truth Does Set Us Free

This morning I read this from Jacob the Baker:

“By remembering that the truth will not set us free if we honestly want to be slaves.” (p. 82 Jacob’s Journey)

Jesus once told his disciples: 

31 Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³²and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ (John 8)

I have been doing a ton of reading, these day, that I find myself not understanding.  Not completely that is.

And yet I keep reading.   

I think I keep reading because there is a truth in what I read that I need to listen to.

Have you ever found yourself reading a sentence, or a paragraph, over and over again to see if there is something you might be missing in the words?

Well, that has been my journey the last month or so. 

The books that I have been reading have a truth in them that fills my heart with such amazing joy. Because I am learning about the spiritual wisdom of Jesus.

I have had a feeling, since the mid-1990s, that there was something that the organized church was leaving out of Jesus’ person. I didn’t know what it was; but I intuitively knew something was missing.  

While I was living at my lake home, the first time I retired  in 2001-2009, I became caught by the wisdom messages in Proverbs 8 and 9.

What Lady Wisdom had to say made such powerful since to me.  However I didn’t connect that information to Jesus.  Not consciously that is.

Recently I have learn the connection.  

It has been life giving.  

This old truth, new to me, has truly set me free.

I wish I could explain it more; but I seem unable to explain it any better than what I wrote above.

I’ll work on it.

In the mean time read Proverbs 8 and 9 and see what you hear.

Also try the Gospel of John.  All of it.

A Miracle

“A miracle, is our capacity to bury hate and grow love.” ( Jacob’s Journey p. 52)

I read this line, this morning, and it caused me to completely stop reading and think.

Such a simple statement, that carries a truth far beyond its simplicity. 

I believe that Jesus would totally agree that the key to peace is the attitude of love over the temptation to hate. 

I would be interested in how that statement:   “A miracle, is our capacity to bury hate and grow love.” Moves around in you opinion bank.

Because in my truth, peace is the miracle the world needs.

God's Spirit Lives

The other day I left you with this thought:

“I invite you to consider, what Jesus meant when he announced to his disciples that he was leaving them with his Holy Spirit.”

No one responded.  So let me push this a bit further.  

If the Spirit is energy, an almost undetectable  movement, a source of all of God’s truth that, according to Jesus, lives in and through us. 

And if the Spirit is the source of all true reality, and I do believe it is, then why has this extraordinary offer been suppressed — undeveloped fully — in the Western world?

It is almost as if the Holy Spirit is suppose to be a side note in the Gospels.  Something you don’t talk about out loud, especially in public.

What if I were to say to you that it was the Holy Spirit that enabled the man Jesus to be, and do, in the totally conflicted world he was born into?

He was the creative wisdom, of God, come to earth; to recreate what God originally designed the world to be.  A world, a people, who actually live “very good.”

God’s Spirit arrived on this earth in the baby born in a manger. 

So when we leave out the Spirit’s presence, fully active in Jesus, we move way away from God’s intentions through Jesus.

Think for a minute about what Jesus taught, the things he tried to correct, the way he approached others, the miraculous things he did by raising people from death and  healing impossible physical condition.

All human impossibilities.

Now, I ask you to think, again, about what it means for Jesus to leave us with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

To give you something that could be helpful, I will suggest reading John 15 and 16.

What Does Incarnation Mean?

The coming of Christmas — Jesus’ advent on earth — is fast approaching.  And it brings to my mind an intriguing topic: God incarnation — God actually dwelling within — the baby born in a manager.

According to vocabulary.com dictionary, Incarnate means;

 “Having a bodily form.”     

Taken from the Latin root, the prefix ‘in’ means ‘in'.  and 'caro' means ‘flesh’.  So incarnate means “In the flesh.”…..

It can be understood as a “miraculous instance in which something that can’t normally be seen or touched assumes bodily form." 

The Christian faith is founded on the belief that Jesus was God incarnate.” 

That my friends is a most miraculous bit of information.

Think about what that must mean for you and me.

God dwelling — living moving -- and having human qualities. In us as well as Jesus.  (read John's Gospel)

The Apostle Paul puts it in these words:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ²make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited, 

⁷ but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, 

⁸   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross. (Phil. 2) 

Now with the Christmas season upon us I encourage you to contemplate this truth.

Consider what the implication are for you and your life of faith.

I invite you to consider, then, what Jesus meant when he announced to his disciples that he was leaving them with his Holy Spirit.

More to come.  So please let me know what your questions might be.

Thoughts

My mind is too deeply busy with amazing thoughts and bits of information.  

I don’t know where to go or where to begin.  

It has to do with the  entire world of people.  People and the ways we function,  and how we think,  and why we do what we do, and how we live.  

It has to do with Moses, and Abraham, and Jeremiah, and Isaiah and Jesus.

It has to do with the constant message they all brought to the people of their time in history. 

The same message (the very same message) we have all -- at least most of us -- in some way, heard from the time we were children.  That is, all the rules of kindergarten and Sunday School. 

It is about how we relate to each other and why.

It is about how we speak, and act, and think.

What I heard is that we love our neighbor — of course.  But we could then ask: How do we do that?  What does that mean?

I heard that we are to be kind.  To do what is good and caring for one another.   And we asked: “To everyone?"

I  clearly  then heard not to be greedy.  That we need to share what we have.  But,  that gets a bit too involved for our private-ness.  That gets more difficult to hear.

The one I have heard, in my last fifteen or twenty years, loud and clear is to be humble and develop a servant’s mind.

And to that most of the whole world says: “Wait a minute.  Back up a little and consider what you are saying.”

So I ask you: What is that message that most of the world finds too difficult to hear?

To be clear,  most of us like having others follow all those rules.  

                                                                                     Right?

Please, I am not meaning to be at all negative in these thoughts.

What I am is confused.  

Maybe I am sad. 

      Or maybe I am feeling helpless.

And so I am sitting here this morning very quietly; trying to remember that God has, for centuries, been dealing with all of the contradictory and paradoxical mentalities of the human ego.

And what I need to do is trust, and have faith, in his power to continue creating and recreating order in all of the chaos.

That is what is on my mind this morning.

What does ‘the Heart' and "Repent' have to do with reach other?

While I was in my intern year of seminary I was asked to take the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment.  It is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.  It offers 16 personality types.

You can google it if you want to know more.

The person assessing my results was sitting, at a desk, with his back to me.  Without turning around he said to me: “You don’t like to think at all, do you?” My response was quick: “No I really don’t.”  To which he replied: “Well you are one point away from not thinking at all.”

My personality grid was an INFP.

I can’t remember what all of the letters represent; but the I refers to intuitiveness.  Which, simply put, mean I make most of my decisions on my feelings. 

I tell you this because I have learned, through the years, that this revelation has been quite useful in my ministry and my passionate study of scripture.

As I look back over the years I see myself living with a feeling that there was something that the scholars, and church leaders, were leaving out of Jesus’ true character and purpose.

  

It had something very much to do with the heart of all Jesus bought and taught.

Then just recently I have been reading about, what I will call, Centering Spiritually.  And Cynthia Bourgeault’s writings have confirmed the feelings I have had all these years. 

I am thinking of two very specific terms.  “Heart” and “Repent.”

“The heart has a different way of perceiving.  Rather than dividing and conquering, it connects with a seamless and indivisible reality through a whole different way of organizing the informational field.  And it’s ours for the choosing…..In wisdom, the heart is primarily an organ of spiritual perception,….The heart picks up from the emotions, from our sense of proportion, from intuition, from images and archetypes…..and keeps us aligned with our innermost, with what we truly know.” (pa. 35 - 36)

So very cool!

Now this kind of information is soooooo confirming to a person who was married to a Statistician for 24 years. And to be quite honest, my intuition drove him absolutely looney.  

Now to the good news about the term repent.

She gives a bit of an introduction to the Christian use fo the word repent.  And then goes to the Greek:  

It means: “to go beyond the mind” or “go into the large mind.”  The repentance that Jesus really is talking about means to go beyond your little egoic operating system that says, “I think, therefore I am,” and try out the other one — the big one — “I am, therefore I think.”(p. 37)

Then after more discussion on the parable of rich landowner who hires workers all day long and then pays them all the same wage. (Matt. 20:1-15)

She sums it up so well:  “This parable does indeed offer fair warning that what Jesus is up to is hugely more subversive than “Jesus is once and he wants us to be nice too.” Like all good Zen masters, he is out to completely short-circuit our mental wiring so the we are catapulted into a whole new way of seeing and being.”(p.39)

So now what do you think “repent” means?