“Evolutionary Christianity"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Sept 16th 2007

 Luke 15: 1-10, Psalm 14

Religious movements historically boil down to a couple of basic types. The first could be called the Perfectionists. Jesus contends with them in today’s parable. They are disgusted that he hangs with “tax-collectors and sinners”. According to the Perfectionists, God is only interested in the righteous ones. This group sets very high moral and ethical standards for themselves and others. Because God is perfect, we also should be perfect. This means keeping your distance from the great unwashed. Religious practice consists of rituals to purify the messiness of the body –after illness, menstruation, and contact with outsiders. In Jesus’ day, this group was typified by a Jewish group called the Zaddokites, who lived in communities separate and apart from the hoi poloi in the city. In the New Testament, the Pharisees get a bad rap for being perfectionist, but compared to the Zaddokites they were liberal. If you think that you shouldn’t take communion, or that you’re not really good enough to belong to a church, you probably have internalized the message of the Perfectionist.

Let’s call the second type of religious movement is the Salvationists. They also believe that God wants us to be perfect. But they realize that this perfectionist standard is unattainable by our own resources. We’re flawed in some kind of essential way. The Psalmist writes that God looked down upon the world and couldn’t find a single human being that measured up. We all fall short of the glory of God. But there’s hope. We can be saved. Unlike the first type, they don’t believe that the great unwashed are beyond redemption. God is not disgusted with us. Rather, he takes pity on us. We may be powerless to lift ourselves out of our depravity, but God can – and does. In the Christian religion, our evangelical and fundamentalist friends comprise this type. The main difference between Salvationists and Perfectionists is that with the latter, God can’t even be bothered with sinners. With the Salvationists, what matters is that you attain this state of salvation, by believing and confessing that God has done this for you. Christian Salvationists believe that God accomplishes this through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

So, one way to understand the parable this morning is that it’s a clash between these two types of religion – the Perfectionists and the Salvationists. In this corner, the Perfectionists (represented by the Pharisees and the scribes) who are disgusted that Jesus is having anything at all to do with “the sinners and the tax collectors” – wherever you see this phrase in the New Testament it’s shorthand for unclean or impure. In the other corner, is Jesus of Nazareth who tells a parable about lost sheep that are found, and how much joy there is in heaven when they repent and are returned to the fold. There is more joy over one of these reunited souls than there is with the Perfectionist who has no reason to repent.

When the Salvationists hear this parable they are certain that it supports their worldview of God intervening, through Jesus, to seek out and save the lost. They read it through the lens of subsequent generations of interpretation of the meaning of Jesus death – namely that we are saved by the sacrificial death of Christ on a cross and that it is his shed blood that redeems us. The problem is that Jesus told this parable before one drop of his blood was ever shed. All he’s saying in the parable is that the Perfectionist model of religion excludes a whole bunch of people and as far as Jesus could tell, God didn’t approve. God loved these so-called “sinners” – the impure and unclean – and saw no reason to condemn them. So, the parable doesn’t support either the Perfectionists or the Salvationists, which brings us to the third type of religious movement.

This type is just emerging on the planet. It doesn’t even have a name, yet, but we could call it Evolutionist. It’s just emerging because it’s only in the last half century or so that we’ve been able to integrate Darwin’s biological insight that life is evolving, and apply it to the spiritual realm. Evolution occurs at all levels – geological, biological, cultural and spiritual. Spirit is involved at all these levels as the evolutionary impulse to evolve towards increased complexity, consciousness, and compassion. Spirit is the connecting braid between all these various levels. Here’s the important piece. As a species, humans are very young relative to the age of the universe. We’ve been around a couple of hundred thousand years, which in universe years is about a millisecond. We’re adolescents – still acting out, still trying to figure out who we are, still rebelling, and still very much in formation – not unlike the rebellious teenagers in our own homes. Yes, there is a lot at stake. Those of you who have parented adolescents know how treacherous the passage can be.

As a species we’ve not yet found a way to stop killing each other; we’re in the process of destroying our planetary home, along with most species; the gap between the rich and the poor is still unconscionable; the future is at best precarious. Perfectionists build themselves a monastery or a Temple and separate themselves from the rest and try to rise above it. The Salvationists go out and try to convert everybody in sight as though what really matters is personal salvation. Both chalk up what is happening in the world as the result of fatal flaw in the human being, often called “evil”. Both imagine that there is an attainable end point or state of being for humans – one thinks it’s perfection and the other salvation.

But the Evolutionists take a different approach. We don’t deny our destructive tendencies. We don’t deny that we need to undergo a transformation of consciousness as a species. But the problem is not that we’re evil. It’s that we’re young and impetuous. This state of being is called “foolishness” by all the world’s spiritual wisdom traditions. In the Bible, Lady Wisdom – Sophia – goes out in to the highways and byways in search of the foolish, not to condemn them and not go convert them to a particular belief system. Rather, she goes out like rather like a shepherd, to gather them in, bring them home, and teach them the ways of wisdom. Jesus was first and foremost a wisdom teacher. So when he tells the parable of the lost sheep, he’s not speaking as a Salvationist or a Perfectionist. He’s teaching Wisdom, a spiritual wisdom that implicitly says that human beings are meant to grow toward the heart of God – and that this growth never stops.

He’s saying that there is great joy in heaven over one sinner – here read “foolish person” – who repents than 99 Perfectionists who are in no need of repentance. This is because Perfectionists believe that they have already attained a state of perfection. There is no room left to grow. For an evolutionist, or wisdom seeker, this is patently absurd. The very definition of the human being is one who is continually developing and growing; one in whom Spirit is manifesting more fully and completely. And because the universe is in a constant state of evolution – it never ends – there will never come a time when one reaches a state of perfect enlightenment. Evolutionary enlightenment is different than classical models of enlightenment because with these models we can reach a stage of absolute perfection. If you find a spiritual teacher who believes that she has attained absolute enlightenment, and therefore has nothing left to learn, run the other way.

At Canadian Memorial part of our core purpose is to teach a progressive Christianity. At this point, I would actually be more comfortable by defining this as an evolutionary Christianity. It’s not that we’re progressive and those other guys are regressive. It’s that we’re saying that we’re committed to the evolution of our spiritual lives, and the evolution of the Christian faith itself. We are here to grow, evolve, learn more about Spirit, expand, love more deeply, feel more compassion, and increase our capacity for taking different perspectives – not to teach an unchanging, infallible version of the Christian faith. Here are the qualities associated with Evolutionary Christianity, based in the Wisdom traditions:

1. Humility – arrogance is first sign of those who have stopped growing. Without humility we are un-teachable. We cannot grow. If we are growing toward fullness of Spirit, we attain the state of the bowing heart – we will want to bow in reverence before the gift of life. In response to this gracious gift, we desire to serve the ongoing evolution of the universe – and the best way we can do this is to engage in the spiritual practice of conscious evolution in ourselves.

2. Wonder – Lao Tzu, a Chinese wisdom teacher, once said that in the absence of awe there is destruction. Our task is to wake up to the wonder of this 14 billion year evolutionary process that we are privileged to be a part of. Science has given us many gifts, but the way it made the universe and the earth itself a soul-less, spiritless, machine, is not one of them. The person who is in wonder enjoys profound curiosity. She is more interested in what there is left to learn than in spreading ideological beliefs.

3. Unitive awareness – at one point or another most of us have at least an intuition that we are one with the universe, with the earth, and with all creation. Even in the midst of our uniqueness, we understand that we are manifestations of the Holy Oneness.

4. Compassion – when you realize this unity, your heart breaks at all of the ways that humans have found to act as though we are separate and disconnected. Your heart breaks for the animals that we are making extinct because we don’t know they are our kin. Your heart breaks at the suffering caused by war and terror, and at the injustice that is being perpetrated because we have forgotten our essential unity.

 5. Joy – One day you wake up and realize that you’ve been given a shot at life and it might not have happened and how did you get so lucky? One day you’re meditating and you realize that joy is the birthright of every human being – but our various preoccupations and dramas have stolen our birthright.

6. Creativity – We have this enormous gift of being able to create the future – the life we want for ourselves and the life we want for others. There is not predetermined future out there waiting for us to arrive at – you and I are laying down the grooves for the emergence of that future. We are fundamentally centers of creativity and when we own this gift of the Spirit we come alive with all the potential inherent in this 14 billion year universe. That’s a lot of energy friends.

Canadian Memorial Church and Center for Peace exist to help each one of us grow in these capacities. We won’t teach you The Truth. We won’t send you out to convert anybody. And we don’t expect perfection. We do want this to be a place where people come alive – where they return home after a time of being lost to the ever-expanding heart of God.