Lent 2

Lent 2 (Mark 8:31-38)

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering”.

In Jesus, God experienced directly the human condition.

Most forms of religion teach that God is so pure, so perfect and so transcendent that He does not and cannot experience the world as we experience it. Certainly, Peter and the other disciples were shocked when Jesus gave them this teaching. In their minds, Jesus was anointed by God to establish the true religion, the true government and the elite nation to rule the world. In their minds, the anointing of God protected the person from pain and suffering.

Most atheists I’ve listened to share one experience in common. What they share is personal pain and suffering. They have told me that they stopped believing in God when tragedy struck their family or they themselves. Usually this tragedy involves an illness and death. Sometimes the tragedy is failing out of college or being jilted by a romantic partner.

The line of reasoning is that if God is real then He would not have allowed my loved one to suffer and die. On a broader scale, some say that the level of evil that exists in the world is incompatible with the theistic concept of a personal God. Since there is ample evidence of evil and little to no evidence of a benign deity then the only reasonable conclusion is that God does not exist.

Our Heavenly Father’s answer to this very real and insistent objection is Jesus.

The answer is not a book. The book (the Bible) records the observations of many people over the course of many centuries that helps us to understand the human condition. The Bible also points to the answer. But, the Bible is not the answer,.

Neither are Law or ritual or spiritual discipline the answers. They have their place. But, they are not the answer.

The answer to the pressing question of pain, suffering and evil is Jesus Christ.

Peter and the other disciples thought that Jesus would bring the answer. They believed he would bring the answer in the categories of knowledge and power. They were unprepared to receive the answer in more personal terms. Jesus just does not bring the answer, He is the answer.

Jesus fulfills the fourfold aspect of the Law. Those aspects are the civil laws that governed the nation of Israel, the ritual laws that governed the priesthood as well as Temple worship and Synagogue study, the moral laws, and the pattern of natural law.

The fourfold aspect of the Law confused most people in Jesus’ day and most people today. As the rightful King of Israel, Jesus fulfilled the civil aspect of the law. As the great high priest of Israel Jesus also fulfilled and completed the ritual laws. Those aspects of the Law are no longer in effect.

Jesus also fulfilled the moral law within the context of natural law. Moral law is part of the fundamental design of our species. Natural law is part of the fundamental design of the universe.

In some ways it is obvious how people violate the moral laws. In other ways it is not so obvious. As in Jesus’s day different religions and religious sects focus on different aspects of the moral law. Generally, the more self-described conservative groups focus their concern on who kisses whom. The more self-described liberal groups focus on who is helping whom. The moral law encompasses both polaries and much more.

Jesus just doesn’t reaffirm the moral law. He tells us that left to ourselves we will fail to fulfill the basic principle of the moral law. He lived the perfect life we cannot live. He experienced all of our sins and rebellion on the cross. He suffered the consequence of those sins. Then, he transformed sin back into virtue. Now, he offers to fill us with the Holy Spirit to help us appreciate the value of the moral law so we can seek divine assistance to live by the principles of the law.

Jesus does something similar with natural law. The very essence of original sin is the appeal to human pride. Human pride is a self-inflicted distortion of the virtue of humility. Humility delights in the law of God in all of its forms. Pride distorts delight into critique. Pride asserts:  I can do better. These laws do not apply to me. I have the right to burn down the forests, build cities below sea level, exterminate thousands of species, build weapons capable of destroying all life on this planet. The attitude of pride is: it’s all about me. The aspect of pride is the individual will to power. The action of pride is to cheat natural law. Sadly, the consequence of violating natural law reveals the fatal deceit in pride. At that point, pride morphs into despair.

Jesus lived his life and brought forth his mission in alignment with natural law. The three aspects of natural law that most people ignore are; self-responsibility, cause and effect, and justice.

Much of our suffering is a result of our tendency to violate these three aspects of natural law. Most of us inherit a false belief that the moral and natural laws are an impediment to our individual happiness. Most of us at some level attempt to cheat life by ignoring the laws or subverting the laws. And most of us assume that either God does not care about or should overlook our transgressions.

Jesus shows us that we can live a happy and abundant life within the framework of the laws. Jesus also acts as a perfect mirror to our souls to reveal to us how violating the laws only defeats our desire for happiness.

In Jesus, God embraces and experiences the fullness of the human experience. That means that the infinite, eternal and transcendent God knows from personal experience what it means to live in the world of time, space and duality. He knows human pain and suffering first hand by personal experience.

Jesus never sinned. He never sinned because he never separated from Divine love. His suffering was not from the anxiety of choosing between good and evil, or a lesser evil over a greater evil. He always chose the good because he is the incarnation of universal unconditional love.

Nevertheless, Jesus did experience pain and suffering. Certainly as a human being Jesus knew hunger, thirst and loneliness. As a human being Jesus experienced the duality that God designed into the universe. That duality involves hot and cold, sweet and sour, pleasure and pain.

Suffering is recycled pain.

People recycle pain by adopting a belief in Dualism. That belief states that life is either all good or all bad. If life is all good then God is good. If life is all bad then either God is bad or doesn’t exist.

Peter and the other disciples rejected Jesus’s teaching about his rejection, pain and suffering. They could not imagine a salvation that included such things. For them, and for almost everyone else who saw Jesus and heard his teaching, salvation meant the triumph of the human will to conquer duality,

Jesus preserved the very pattern of the universe and the essential nature of our being by working within the laws of the universe. It took the apostles many years after the resurrection to appreciate this.

Jesus reminded his disciples then as he reminds us now. The more you struggle and fight against the pattern God designed into the universe, the more you will magnify pain and recycle it into suffering. The more you assert your will to be your own savior the more you lose yourself. The more you can accept the salvation Jesus brings the more you will discover yourself in Him.

Jesus suffered so he could transform suffering for us. In this world of matter, energy, time and space there is both pleasure and pain. There does not need to be suffering. Jesus transformed suffering by the infinite and eternal power of divine love.

In union with the Father, through the Son, by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, God offers us a new way to be human. It is the way of original grace. It is the way of duality transformed by the real presence of the divine in our world in and our lives. It is union with infinite and eternal love present to us and for us in Jesus.

Lent 1

Lent l (Mark 1:9-15) “He was tempted….”

Temptation comes to all. Temptation is the invitation to make choices from the place of separation from God.

There are three sources of temptation: the world, the flesh and the devil. The world is the surrounding culture. Culture is a set of inherited customs and values. The culture of First Century Israel was religious, legalistic, xenophobic and tribal. That was the default set of values and customs people at that time and place lived by.

The culture of 21^st America is secular, self-indulgent, prideful, materialistic and individualistic. That culture forms the default values and customs for those of us who were born and raised in the United States.

A default set of values and customs has the power of being self-evident. We grow to believe “this is just the way the world is” and “this is just who I am in this world.” If we live by the defaults of our culture we no longer respond to God, the world and other people as they are. We react from the demand that they should be a certain way.

The long history of the Bible is how God invites people to question these assumptions about life. Moses issued a set of values and standards everyone agreed to follow and then ignored. The prophets called people to remember the standards and to repent of how they ignored the standards or rebelled against the standards.

Jesus grew up in the context of what the prophets described as a stiff necked and rebellious society. The people did not make choices in union with God. They made choices from the values of their customs and traditions. The two are not necessarily the same. Jesus came to observe very early in his life on earth that what we say, what we believe and what we do are frequently inconsistent. Not only are we inconsistent in our thoughts, words and deeds we also ignore or resist God’s principles for life.

During Lent it is important to hear the word of God with new ears. It is important move into a fresh understanding of what God revealed through Moses and the prophets. It is important to see Jesus for who he is and not for who we want him to be in our secular, materialistic, self- indulgent culture.

The flesh refers to our desires. More specially, when the Bible speaks of the flesh as a source of temptation it refers to the distortion of our desires. Human desire is good. Human desire is also distorted by the pain of original sin we all inherit as human beings.

And so the desire for food is good. The distortion of that appetite to obsess with the quantity of food or unhealthy food like substances creates short term and long term problems. The same pattern holds true for all of our desires from the desire for love to the desire for self-preservation. The flesh tempts us to follow the distortions into short term immediate self-gratification at the expense of long term pain and suffering.

The third source of temptation is the devil, Satan. Most of us will never encounter the personal presence of Satan. He is a fallen Seraph class angel who through pride sees himself as equal and opposite to God. We as a species are beneath contempt for Satan. Nevertheless, Satan knows that God loves us and Satan hates what God loves.

Satan works in the world through deceit. The more carefully crafted the deceit the more effective it is to keep human beings lost in separation from God. If Satan cannot keep us from accepting our Heavenly Father’s Plan of salvation in Jesus Christ, his default strategy is to keep us frustrated, confused and in a state of conflict.

Satan tempted Jesus by offering him a set of problems and a set of solutions. The solutions all involved making a choice from the place of separation, which is to say original sin. Jesus did not commit actual sin and indeed could not commit actual sin because he did not inherit Original Sin. Jesus is the original pattern of human nature before Adam and Eve chose separation.

Within his own being Jesus is the unification of human nature and divine nature. In that union Jesus made all choices from the place of the divine nature. That place is universal and unconditional love. Jesus never had to ask himself: what’s in it for me? Jesus always prayed: Heavenly Father, not my will but Thy will be done. The source of that prayer is the sacred heart of Jesus - human love set free in the vast ocean of divine love.

This is the model for us to meet the temptations of the world culture, the appetites of the flesh and the subtle deceits of Satan. It is not just enough to have the Law of God written in a book. We must also ask the Holy Spirit to write the laws in our hearts.

Our goal during lent is to identify how the world, the flesh and the devil use the distortions in our mind, heart and will to choose sin. Once we do that, our next step is to ask for the divine grace to repent. When we repent we simply affirm that we agree with God in the matters of sin and virtue. We accept God’s definitions of reality. And then, we ask the Holy Spirt to help us make better choices.

Be assured, that sometimes this will mean contradicting what our culture expects. Sometimes this may seem like giving up a desire for a perceived benefit in order to enjoy a greater good. And, at all times this process requires a courageous commitment to truth to counteract Satan’s clever and subtle deceits.

Jesus was tempted yet never sinned. He live in union with Divine love.

We can overcome the temptation to sin and the pattern of sin we inherit as we make a real choice to enter daily into the Real Presence of God the Father, through a personal relationship with God the Son, by the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit.

Adh Wendesday 2015

Ash Wednesday 2015 (Matthew 6:1-6;16-21)

“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”

All people choose what we most want at the moment of choice.

Many religious people have traditionally identified sin as a problem of the will. Religious debates once focused on the supposed conflict between free will and determinism. Those debates have largely ended in the self-indulgence of sentimentality that defines modern Western religious discussion.

The assertion from modern theologians is that God would never exclude anyone from the Kingdom of Heaven for any reason therefore either everyone enters into Heaven or no one enters into Heaven. The latter assertion is a nod to secular agnosticism.

Jesus, as the co-eternal Son of God incarnate, has a very different perspective. Jesus looks at all people everywhere with the eyes of love. His arms are wide open. His invitation to receive the gift of grace is universal and unconditional.

Jesus also looks at all people everywhere with the eyes of truth. There can be no love apart from truth. There can be no truth apart from love.

The truth is that God the Father designed our species and each of us according to the pattern, plan and purpose of God the Son by the power and presence of God the Holy Spirit.

The truth is that the essential nature of God is love.

The truth is that when created beings embody love we hold that love by a real choice.

The truth is that humanity as a species chose to separate from love.

The evidence of that separation is the Biblical and historical record and the current events of our time.

The truth is that people want or demand the supposed gifts of God in the perceived attributes of God.

The truth is that when God reveals himself in Jesus Christ most people most of the time turn away, rebel or ignore Him.

The truth is that God’s love never waivers.

The truth is that our love has grown cold and self-absorbed through pride and self-will.

The truth is that we choose what our hearts most desire and value at the moment of choice.

The truth is that left alone to our own devices we choose to perpetuate separation from love today, tomorrow and forver.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is that He himself as the incarnate co-eternal Son of God has made it possible for us to make a different choice. Jesus offers us all a second chance, a third, fourth even  thousands of  choices in the course of our lives to make a real choice to say no to separation and yes to God.

We choose what we most desire at that moment of choice. We choose isolation as we remain in separation. We can make a different choice. We can choose Jesus.

To make that choice we must value that choice. Choosing Jesus doesn’t mean we are then perfect. Choosing Jesus doesn’t mean we now have a single set of values grounded in truth. Choosing Jesus means we have allowed ourselves to be found in the love of God by the personal presence of God.

From that place of reunification, God the Holy Spirit works with us gently, persistently and patiently to transform our desires so we can make wise choices.

We cannot just say no to sin. We can say yes to Jesus Christ as we allow ourselves to be found in Christ. As we make that choice, God the Holy Spirit will help us make other choices that build and strengthen our desire for universal unconditional love. In that life long process of transformation we will yield our particular sins to God to be transformed by love, in love and through love back into their original virtues.

Lenten repentance, self- discipline and acts of devotion are the means by which the Holy Spirit helps us make the real choice to live by grace through faith in universal unconditional love. That love is Jesus Christ.

Epiphany V

Epiphany V (Mark 1:29-39) “There he prayed.”

Communication facilitates relationship.

Just as we need to talk to each other and to listen to each other to preserve our interpersonal relationships so we need to speak with God and to listen to God.

This is one of those patterns God designed into the universe and our species. It is a pattern Jesus himself entered into and embraced.

It is important to remember that Jesus is fully human. The co-eternal Son surrendered all of his divine prerogatives of knowledge and power when he united his divinity with our humanity in Jesus Christ.

Jesus prayed because he was fully human. Prayer is  conversation with God. Prayer is a practice we cultivate, ignore or distort.

Jesus sets the pattern before our eyes as he rises early in the morning, goes off alone to a deserted place with minimal distractions and then enters into a conversation with God.

Do you ever have trouble sleeping? That may be your invitation from the Holy Spirit to enter into a conversation with God through prayer. Are you ever frustrated while stuck in traffic? That also may be an invitation from the Holy Spirit to enter into a conversation with God in prayer.

Mother Teresa once said: God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts to us in our pain. God the Father designed us and created us by the power of God the Holy Spirit to be the forever friends of God the Son. God wants to enter into a conversation with us. He delights in our conversation with Him.

We see in this passage how people flocked to Jesus from the place of pain. Where the rich and powerful stood off to the side with an arrogant condescending contempt of Jesus, the poor, the sick and the lonely flocked to him.

Many left as soon as Jesus healed them or met their need. Others stayed to find out more. They asked: who is he? What is his teaching? What does he want? What else will he give?

Jesus withdrew from his followers, the disciples, and the crowds to spend time in conversation with God the Father. He lived as we live: day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, moment by moment. He experienced the duality of this world as we experience it. He experienced pleasure and pain, join and sorrow, expansion and contraction.

As King Solomon observed about a thousand years before Jesus came, to everything there is a season. There is a time for active engagement in life. And, there is a time for quiet reflection and conversation with God through prayer.

Had the disciples only been paying attention they might have learned more about God and accomplished more for God. They were still lost in their own beliefs about God. They had eyes but they could not see. They had ears but they could not hear. They were looking for a program. God was offering them a relationship.

That relationship is the triad of love. It is a relationship with God through worship, a relationship with other people through service, and a relationship with our true identity through growth, development and change.

That’s it. That is what our Heavenly Father was (and is) offering us in Jesus Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, few people then or now were paying attention. They were filled with inherited beliefs and demands. They were distracted by their own plans and programs. They wanted Jesus to fit into their expectations. At best, they observed the outward and visible signs of the Kingdom of God even as they consistently and willfully missed the inward and spiritual grace.

Mercifully, God is patient and persistent. He has the passion and creativity of a suitor writing romantic love poetry to his beloved. He has the consistency and loyalty of a spouse waiting to bring forth a blessing at the right time and in the right place. He has the wisdom of a parent helping a child and a teen through the joys and sorrows of growing up.

God is real. God is personal. He is less concerned about programs, policies and procedures than he is with the triad of relationships that form our identity and ground our being.

The Holy Spirit inspired Mark to record these events for our benefit. Notice the pattern of human need and insistent demand. Notice the pattern of active engagement and solitary prayer. Notice how even in the physical presence of Jesus the disciples keep missing the meaning and the purpose and the gift. The gift is the relationship.

Then, apply Mark’s observation to your own life. Ask, where am I too busy for God? Where am I looking for a program or a policy and missing the relationship? Am I making a real choice to allow the Holy Spirit to form my life according to the pattern of the life of Jesus Christ?

Jesus did not presume to live his life apart from God the Father. Even though he was (and is) the Son of God he made the time daily to enter into a conversation with the Father in prayer. Prayer is the life breath of our spiritual lives. Prayer forms the quality of our relationship with God.

In all of the details and demands of our daily lives ask the Holy Spirit to help you make prayer your first priority in the day as you aspire to make worship the first priority on the Seventh Day God designed into the universe. Prayer is an essential aspect of the pattern of our lives. It is the choice to spend time and pay attention to the one and only relationship than endures forever.