Still Thinking – Easter Love

Recent scholarship has shown us that there was a great diversity among the Christian gatherings and communities after the death of Jesus.  The central debate among those communities was between Jewish and non-Jewish (Hellenistic) beliefs and practices.  These were expressed through a diversity of rituals, symbols and practices in those first Christian communities. The writings of Paul to the churches were often a response to the question, “how should we follow Jesus in our gatherings,” rather than just specific questions about belief.  Some have argued that the early church was more concerned with orthopraxy - right action, than it was with orthodoxy – right belief. And of course this was motivated by the view that Jesus had initiated a movement of radical inclusive love not just a system of belief.  The following quote for Wikipedia is helpful:

Christians proclaimed a God of love who enjoined them to share a higher love with one another. Some interpreted the Old Testament as revealing primarily a God of justice, whereas the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John, revealed a more loving God. Parallels are found in Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism. Paul of Tarsus is represented in Acts 17:22-33 as equating the Unknown God of the Greeks as revealed in the Christian God. Early Christian communities welcomed everyone, including slaves and women, who were generally shunned in Greco-Roman culture…

Oh dear, where did we go wrong? Perhaps it was in our (the early Christian Community’s) embracing of Empire.  It is difficult to find anywhere, where the church and the state have come together, that the church has been able to maintained its commitment to radical love.  When the Christian church no longer wants to be the salt, but instead become the salt shaker, it tends to lose it unique savour.  Maybe this evolution from Christian community to state sanctioned church is built into the very message of the early church.  The more successful we are at making disciples, the greater the desire to make the whole society in which we live, Christian.  And so the community that practices this form of radical inclusive love must bow the knee to what our society or nation tells us.  Therefore the enemies of the state become the enemies of our Christian faith.  We can no longer love our enemies because the state to which be give allegiances forbids it.

However, the most subversive Christian communities have always been willing to love and include whoever they choose.  While love is a belief of the Christian faith, it only finds true expression in action.  It is said of the infant Christian community by those outside, “Oh how they love each other.”  While that was in the first century, the same was also said of the Methodist/Wesleyan communities that gathered around the Wesley brothers in the late 18^th and early 19th century.  It seems that these gatherings of people lived, as the early church did, in a time of exceptional grace. And such times encourage a spirit of welcome and hospitality.

Do we live in such a time today? Is there a movement of open and welcoming hospitality in our age, in the 21^st century?  As we unshackle ourselves from the oppressive aspects of our society and culture and practice what we preach, will we experience a time of exceptional grace? When we stop trying to be like other Christian churches and communities and become authentically ourselves drawing from the well of inclusive love, will that shape and reshape us into the kind of community where our words and actions are in harmony?  I believe so. That’s Easter love!

Christopher

Still Thinking – Soul

Over the last few years I have been involved in a “Circle of Trust” which is a contemplative group developed by Quaker writer and scholar Parker Palmer.  Those who have read Parker’s writings will know that there is a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the soul.  The word soul has been used in many different ways throughout history.  Stretching back to Plato and Aristotle philosophers and theologians have attempted to understand and explain what the soul is.  In Parker’s writings the soul is the heart; the true self; the inner life; the centre of our being.  But most of all it is a metaphor that names a way of being and a way of life. It is not an object that you can find or discover by searching rather it is something we experience in times of struggle or in solitude. It is the real you.

May Sarton in one of her poems expresses it this way:

Now I become myself. It has

Taken many years and places

I have been dissolved and shaken

Worn other people’s faces.

That becoming myself has something to do with the soul and our soul is the gift God gives to us.  It is in fact me or my life.  Throughout the centuries theologians have suggested that the Imago Dei, the Image of God which in Genesis is the imprint of God on humankind, maybe marred, suppressed, distorted or neglected but it can never be obliterated. The centre, the inner life, the soul, the God-self in us is permanent, resilient and tenacious. 

Parker in his book A Hidden Wholeness says that the soul is like a wild animal and I want to add to that that this wild animal he calls soul is the mark of God in our lives, the Imago Dei. We often interpret wild animal to mean vicious or frightening, but look at how Parker uses this metaphor:

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient...and knows how to survive in hard places. I have learned these qualities during my bouts of depression.  In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always relied on collapsed...But from time, to time deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive...

For me that is the Image of God imprinted on my life.  It is where I find courage to match fear; hope to match despair; wonder to match busyness; and peace to match confusion.  It is the centre of my being, and while I may image it as a strong wild animal, like all wild things that are undomesticated, it is shy and will only appear when it is safe.  My soul, the centre of my being survives by being aware of the dangers around me and seeks solace in safe communities where I can both be myself and grow toward wholeness.  May TUC be such a place where the soul in each of us is nurtured, nourished and cherished.

Christopher

Still Thinking – The Atonement

There can be in our journey to Easter quite an emphasis on suffering.  Because the resurrection of Jesus is preceded by his violent death, many have argued that even in the new life the Christian is called to accept that both healing and suffering are woven together into their lives.

Throughout Christian history there has been many theories put forward in an attempt to explain and promote the relationship between Jesus’ death and its relationship to the Christian.  Most theories of what has been called the “atonement” are shaped by the world view of their proponents.  Many of the authors in the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures rely on a “blood sacrifice” view of atonement and reconciliation. 

Most hold the view that a price must be paid in blood, the blood of a perfect and innocent sacrifice, to a Holy God who is distant and often vengeful.  Many passages in the Bible are drawn from this world view.  However, that world view does not exist in our culture and time.  It is in fact both repulsive and abhorrent.

There are other views in the Bible about how the death of Jesus is understood and related to the present experience of Christ among us. It was in the twelfth century that the controversial theologian Peter Abelard began to argue that the death of Jesus was not about blood sacrifice, it was in fact, about love. This came to be named the "moral theory of atonement."

It the twelfth century, the common view of the atonement was that Jesus’ death paid a debt, either to God or to the Devil, that humans could not pay ourselves, but Abelard approached the matter from a more subjective angle. He explained that Jesus’ life and death were such radical demonstrations of the love of God that we are moved to love God in response, and God then forgives us on the basis of that love. He wrote

Our redemption through the suffering of Christ is that deeper love within us which not only frees us from slavery to sin but also secures for us the true liberty of the children of God, in order that we might do all things out of love rather than out of fear - love for him who has shown us such grace that no greater can be found.

This view of the atonement became popular during the Enlightenment, a time of intense scepticism towards anything transcendent or supernatural.

It was Peter Abelard who also made significant contributions to Christian thought in the areas of ethics and sin. He controversially taught that humans are not born with original guilt, as no person can be guilty for the sin of another.  He argued that there is no guilt until we have agreed with or acted upon our “sinful” inclination. Whether an act is good or evil depends entirely on one's intention.  And finally, Abelard insisted that no person can absolve another person of sin, so the function of confession can only be to instruct the sinner in the proper penance not to absolve the person from their sin.

While much of Abelard’s language and this theological constructs are foreign to the twenty-first century, he did give a fresh approach to the stale theology of the scholastics and their dogged ascent to time worn doctrines.  As we move toward Easter our hearts are fixed on the love of God demonstrated in the life and the death of Jesus; a God of love who is seen in the capacity to receive the violence of our world and not retaliate with violence.

Christopher 

Still Thinking – Death and Dying

I never thought much about my own death when I was a young person even through at the age of 13 I was in the house when my mother died.  While I had an awareness of what death was I was too much immersed in life to dwell on it.  I recall a real feeling of irritation as a teenager when a travelling evangelist came to Upper Mt Gravatt Baptist Church and at the conclusion of his sermon told us, “As you leave the church tonight and walk out into the street you could be hit by a bus and killed.  So if you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour tonight you will spend the rest of eternity in hell!” As a “God intoxicated” sixteen year old whose mother had died when she was 32 years old, I truly felt that I knew more about life and death than this itinerant preacher did.

While my mother’s death left an indelible mark on my life the only time thoughts of my own death would pass through my mind as a young person was when I was engaged in something dangerous - like diving off the rocks into the surf at Currumbin beach and then the fear was more about being injured than actually drowning. However, life and aging does change our reflections on death and dying. 

At the ripe old age of 59 I do think more about my own death today than I did ten or fifteen years ago.  But, and I suspect this is true of most in the second half of life, my concern is not so much with death, that final terminus, but with the “process” of dying.  What can be worrying is the manner in which I will die.  I don’t lie awake at night fearful that one day I will die, neither do I want to live forever, but I know that dying often - not always - takes some time.  Perhaps it’s the fear of the loss of control when doctors or my wife or adult children make decisions for me; or the loss of dignity when forced to wear those hospital gowns designed to display ones rear end to the world. I don’t think I fear the pain or the discomfort and while I don’t want to be euthanized, I do want to have the right to both pain medication and the final say about the end of my life.

I am aware that such a discussion is much easier in the theoretical or hypothetical than it is when faced with the sting of death and the cloak of dying but the Christian faith has taught us that death is a part of life and that those who face their own death can then live more fully.  During my time in the desert on the men’s initiation retreat with Richard Rohr I spent a day by myself on the top of hill contemplating my death.  We all had a simple sentence we were to contemplate for 8 hours.  That sentence was, “You are going to die!” What began in the morning as a trite recitation of the sentence, ended after a day’s work with tears, longings and a love for living.  “Death,” someone said, “is too important to leave to the end of life.” 

This morning we will consider the story of Jesus drawing his disciples into the paradoxical truth that “only those who lose their lives for the sake of gospel will save their lives,” I hope that in this story we can still see the flowering of hope and life.

Christopher

Still Thinking – Jesus through the Centuries

John Churcher in his recent book Setting Jesus Free suggests that the

“Jesus of Nazareth was the breaker of barriers that separate and the final barrier to be broken was that between life and death.”

It goes without saying that Jesus still remains one of the most important figures in western civilization even as our society becomes more and more secular and materialist.  For those of us in the Christian church Jesus is far more than an influential figure his life, message, and teaching, is what shapes and forms us every day. But that only occurs when Jesus is “set free.”

The slow movement of history has a way of placing a kind of veneer over the facts and events it is carrying.  We know that the Christian Church has passed through several “reformations” and each time a different and sometimes a new view of Jesus has emerged.  Jaroslav Pelikan in his book Jesus Through the Centuries chronicles the various names and cultural identities given to Jesus through the last two millennia.  Would you believe that in English society in the nineteenth century it was common to refer to Jesus as the “perfect gentleman”? That does not sound like a barrier breaker does it?.  More common of course are the Biblical names that are attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. 

From the second century onward there was more and more emphasis placed on the divine names for Jesus as against the “earthly” names.  For example we know that the early church place a lot of importance on Jesus being a Rabbi/teacher.  In the story of the empty tomb Mary addresses Jesus as Rabbi.  By the third and fourth centuries AD Jesus is referred to as God. For some this was blasphemy for others it was the natural progression for a leader to be deified by his followers. It was left to the various Church councils to come up with some way to reconcile not only the many designations given to Jesus but to state what is the nature of this person who grew up in Palestine and was now seated at the right hand of God in heaven.  So in 451AD the Council of Chalcedon established what is called the doctrine of Hypostatic Union which states

…following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood;

It is probably not the language we would use today, but in its time it was a very successful marriage between Christian theology and Greek philosophy.  It stood until the nineteenth century when the inherent logical error that placed all of the godhead in one human being became apparent and so the formula began to collapse.

In the 21st century it seems that the most powerful way we can image the presence and nature of Jesus is in the human.  The Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer called Jesus “the man for others.”  And more recently the predominant way in which the designation, “Son of Man” is translated is as “the Human One.” That may sound strange to our ears because it is not as familiar as other names for Jesus, but it does resonate with our time and culture.

Someone once said, “…the more we worship Jesus the less we seem to follow him.”  The further we push Jesus away from being like us, the less we identify with his call to show love, justice, compassion and hopefulness.

Christopher

Still Thinking  - Choosing Freedom

I was 16 years of age when I first responded in a Baptist church to an invitation to follow Jesus.  It took a lot in me to overcome my embarrassment at claiming my private conviction in such a public way.  Some would say that that is the point.  There are no secret followers of Jesus, so overcoming one’s natural shyness catapults a person to a new and higher level of religious commitment.

After this first time, it got easier to come forward in response to the preacher’s call.  In fact, I made quite a habit of “walking the sawdust trail” as the Southern Baptists have called it.  Partly, as a deeply religious young person, I was always seeking a kind of religious perfection.  I knew that I was not as faithful as I could be; I knew that I had been sinful and failed to meet God’s standards.  But really, preaching about sin to adolescents is like shooting fish in a barrel, you know you will always hit a good number of them.

As I reflected on those experiences some forty years ago, I realize that they probably kept me in the church, but sadly truncated my experience of life and of God, Jesus and the Spirit.  It took some years to experience what the apostle Paul called in Romans 8:21, “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”  That experience came with the realization that it was not so much that I need to be “saved,” but rather what I craved was to be liberated; to be set free from that which bound and limited me in my spiritual and daily life.  And one of those things I needed liberation from, as I discovered later, was religion.  Now that may sound strange coming from a minister, but if we recognize that Jesus never established a religion and was in fact critical of binding oneself to rules, codes and religious practices, then freedom from religion is the goal of the good news that Jesus preached.

Don’t get me wrong I love the church.  I love the rich and diverse history that covers the last two thousand years.  And I am very aware that we need an institution that gives shape to the Body of Christ. However, if the church is a formal, boundary setting, belief testing institution, then we all know it is off track.  But if it is the living, breathing spirit of Jesus, alive in the world, then we are on track. 

Religious educators tell us that young people need strong, challenging and decisive institutions that give them boundaries and yet freedoms within those boundaries.  Young people want to be part of a movement, but they also want to know what the ground rules are.  As they mature they crave that strange paradox of wanting to belong and yet desiring unlimited freedom.  We know that young people, particularly young males are risk-takers and this can cause them and others a lot of heart ache.  But it really can’t be any other way and the church needs to provide for both aspects of youthful maturation.  While what we call “conversion” is an important experience for young people it should be associated with claiming the good news of life lived fully through Jesus and not the limited moralist, sin based view that many of us passed through in our teenage years.

Christopher

Still Thinking – This is your Brain of Prayer

Dr Andrew Newberg has worked for many years developing a field of research called Neurotheology. This field of enquiry takes seriously contemporary studies on the human brain and the history of Christian and religious theology, particularly the mystical approach and tries to understand why human beings as so predisposed to ideas and experiences of “God”.

Attempting to bring a coherent approach to this discipline, Newberg produced a book in 2001 titled, Why God Won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief and more recently in 2009, How God Changes your Brain.   Both are fascinating reads, albeit a bit technical at times.  Simply put over a period of years, Newberg studied the brains of people in the act of meditation, prayer and visualizing religious experiences.  Using an Electroencephalography, (EEG) machine, he gathered data on the changes in particular areas of the brain when the subjects engaged in “spiritual” activities. He found that the parts of the brain that “lit up” during these experiments were associated with the limbic system.  

The limbic system is the part of the brain that contains the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus and limbic cortex. It is found on top of the brainstem. This system as a whole is responsible for our feelings of love, fear, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, pride and elation and the emotions needed to ensure survival including sexual pleasure and memory. The cerebral cortex lies above these structures. That’s the technical part, what is important is that this area is the oldest structure in the brain and it is the location of our religious and spiritual feelings.

When a person prayers or meditations the limbic system in the brain is activated and with sustained practice the individual can have two competing experiences, either a depth sense of calm and peace or a strong sense of union or oneness with God.  Newberg is quick to remind his audience that he is measuring only the human physiological response to an encounter or experience of the “holy”. This neither proves nor disproves the existence of God in the same way that he can measure a person’s response to eating a sandwich which neither proves nor disproves the existence of the sandwich.  But what it does do, perhaps for the first time, is to show that humans are predisposed to religious and spiritual experiences, beliefs and rituals and that our brains are in fact “designed” by evolution to be open to the holy, sacred and divine.

Dick Gross picked this up in the weekly article in the National Times some months ago. Gross, an atheist refers to the recent publication of the Oxford University project, Explaining Religion. He says:

Belief in the supernatural seems to have evolved to rule humanities heart and inhabit our breast… Rituals, conscience, notions of justice may have been introduced to the species through supernatural belief systems.  Thus faith might be an ever present part of the psychological landscape…

Of course this adds little to the life of the believer and in fact many, even in the Christian tradition, have moved beyond the craving for an interventionist/supernatural being of the type the atheists are fond of debunking.  The interest for me lies more in the ways in which Christian and religious practices can be bring about a meaningful life and encounter with what we call God.  It does seem that it is important that we should pay attention to several insights gain through studying the human brain.  They are:

1.        We all need rituals that connect us with our world and the “ground of our being.”  The practices that we do together, communion, worship, prayer, singing and general attendance at church gatherings do find a receptive place in our minds, “hearts” and lives.

2.        We should think about our faith.  Most studies suggest that religious thought and experience is not static, but rather evolving.  Our cognitive process and our emotional limbic system work together to produce healthy religion.

3.        The quest of the human mind and the processes of the brain developed over millions of years is progressing toward what theologians call the mystical rather than just rule based religiously which is more often the product of religious institutions and not of religious experience.  

~      Christopher