Last week I introduced a new word into the lexicon of spiritual language, a word that is destined to shape the history of the planet. OK, I admit, people broke out in laughter when I first introduced the word. But I will not be dissuaded. This may be my one shot at spiritual fame – or infamy as the case may be. The word is formed of the conjunction of the two words “being” and “evolutionary” – bevolutionary. One smart aleck thought I said Beaver-evolutionary, and took it to mean a Canadian who believed in evolution. Again, I will stay the course, trusting that this word was channelled directly from intermediary angels of light. Either that, or I’m spending way too much time in my head!

 

All kidding aside, the word does capture what I believe will be the shape of an authentic spiritual practice for the 21^st century – a practice that is grounded in both the mystical traditions of all major religions and in modern science. For those of you who were not here last Sunday, I need to bring you up to speed about what I mean by the word.

 

We were considering what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. I have concluded that when Jesus taught that we must enter the Kingdom of God, he meant that we need to experience the Holy personally and directly. He intended to help ordinary people understand that they didn’t need a priest or a minister, and or an institution – like the Temple or the church to mediate this experience. It is an unbrokered Kingdom, available to all.

 

Historically, mystics have tried to describe their experience of being one with God. They weren’t real popular with the authorities, especially the Christian church, because they thought of this as their exclusive domain. Controlling access to God gave them a lot of leverage. So they reserved the experience of unity with God to one human being – Jesus – and then claimed to mediate access to him. This meant that genuine mystics were forced to tap dance for the priests and bishops and assure them that they loved Jesus and that he was the only Son of God, and no, they weren’t trying to say that they were themselves God.

 

But, and it’s a big but, they had in fact tapped into the deepest part of their own being that was unchanging and eternal – and that this deepest part of their own being was in God. Through various spiritual practices, most of which involved careful observation of their thoughts, feelings, and desires as they arose in the awareness, they experienced what we call “God” – by learning to identify, not with the things in their consciousness, but with consciousness or awareness itself.

 

A simple illustration may help. I was in my hot yoga class this past week. I was tired and not thrilled with being in 115- degree room for 1 ½. Very early in the class I started to have thoughts like, “I hate this teacher. She’s stupid. She’s making us hold the postures too long. In fact, I hate this yoga. I’ve been doing it for almost three years and I’m not getting any better.” At this point, I had just enough awareness to understand that absolutely none of this is true. So, I began to simply get curious about these thoughts. I smiled at how I do this to myself. I stopped fighting them. They came. They went. Then, I returned to my practice, without the chattering of my mind. I stopped judging the heat as “intolerable”. I found stillness in becoming one with my awareness. From this stillness, my yoga was neither easy nor difficult. It just was what it was.

 

So, this is what Eckhart Tolle means by being in the now – being in the eternally present moment. And this is one way to, not only connect with Ultimate Reality (or God), but to experience unity with the ever-present, formless, Awareness from which all form arises. To be able to achieve this kind of awareness on a permanent basis, in waking, sleeping, and dreaming states is to be enlightened.

 

So this is the Being side of the equation – experiencing God’s Being by identifying with the part of us that is unchanging and eternal. Sometimes we begin our services with an introit, Be still and know that I am God. It’s not the stillness per se. The stillness simply provides the opportunity to detach from thoughts and desires and notice the One who is noticing.

 

But it’s not simply about being, or being in Being. We’ve all heard the famous new age mantra – Be Here Now. As Andrew Cohen points out in a recent article this needs to be supplemented by another mantra – Do Here Now! But we need to understand, from a sacred perspective, that it matters how we understand what exactly we are doing. Again mystics like Jesus in the Jewish tradition and Hafez and Rumi, in the Sufi tradition of Islam intuited “what” we are doing when we are not being. Science has confirmed their intuition. We are evolving along with the rest of the universe.

 

From the Great Radiance 14 billion years ago to this moment here this morning, we are a part of a singular, evolutionary narrative. We are part of an ongoing story of creativity. We are the creativity of the universe in human form – centers through whom the universe is fashioning a more beautiful, elegant, and compassionate future. We’re not simply human beings, we’re humans becoming. We are here to do evolution. and as human beings we have the distinctive capacity to consciously evolve – to grow, to develop, and from these higher levels of development to make a difference in the world.

 

If the Presence we call “God” has anything to do with reality as we know it to be, then God is involved – not just as unchanging, unmanifest Being – but as the impulse and drive to grow and evolve and as that which is evolving and developing. Human beings are that part of creation, that part of Spirit in creation, who are able to consciously participate in our own evolution. When biological evolution arrived at human beings, natural selection morphed into actual selection. We are the ones able to select our preferred future. This carries with it immense responsibilities. But, here’s my point. When we do this – when we are consciously evolving and consciously making choices that shape the future – we are experiencing the dynamism of God directly and immediately. It is my experience that the more we consciously exercise this power to take responsibility for our lives, personally and collectively, the more power and vitality is available to us.

 

So you put these two ways of experiencing God – ways of being in God and co-creating with God – and you are entitled to call yourself a BeVolutionary. As Christians, the practice of this spirituality is bevolutionary discipleship.

 

Now, let’s view this morning’s Scripture readings through the lens of bevolutionary spirituality. In the first reading, we hear about Jacob on the banks of the river Jabbok. Would you say this is a story about being still and knowing God, or the evolutionary struggle to grow in God? If you answered (b), you go to the head of the class. Jacob wrestles all night long with a stranger, and ends up wounded for life. The blessing he receives is a name change – from Jacob to Israel. Israel, we are told, means “one who has striven with God and prevailed.” Which is as apt a description of the evolutionary path as I’ve ever heard.  It’s hard work. It’s a wrestling match. Nobody gets out alive, and nobody gets out without being wounded. There are dark nights of the soul. It’s an odyssey this life we’ve given, a hero’s journey, requiring us to pass through various ordeals and to confront powers, within and without, that take us into new and more complex stages of development. And the beauty of the biblical tale is that it makes it clear that even when life feels like a wrestling match, it is a sacred journey – blessed by the presence of the Holy One. It is the evolutionary path of blessed and holy unrest.

 

The reading from the New Testament balances this evolutionary striving as sacred experience with a story about Jesus being still and knowing God in the stillness. Jesus withdraws to a deserted place to be by himself. He spends the entire day on his own, away from the disciples and away from the crowds. Jesus is simply taking time to be in God. He retreats from the all the striving, all the needs of the crowds, all the buzz and dazzle and dizzying distractions to rest in a deeper identity. He’s not going to stay in that space. He never does. He has work to do, disciples to teach, crowds to heal, the hungry to feed.

 

Jesus shows us that Being and Doing are not opposite propositions. The goal of my yoga is to find stillness, not just between the postures, but also in them. Eventually we learn to remain in the hubbub and stay in touch with one’s deep, sacred Self, by bringing awareness to all the activity. But for most of us, all the drama, and emotion, and desire causes us to contract back into our smaller, more fearful selves, to the point where once again we convince ourselves that we really are basket cases, not the expansive and compassionate awareness that we occasionally glimpse. Don’t believe it.  

 

The story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes tells us what can happen when we’re able to stay connected to God, both as the Source of Pure Awareness and as the dynamic evolutionary impulse to create new futures. Where the disciples see only insurmountable limits and dead ends – there are too many people to feed so send the people all away – Jesus sees an opportunity to manifest abundance. Where the disciples experience themselves as passive victims of fate – they run like helpless victims of circumstance to Jesus and ask him to solve the problem – Jesus requires them to access their own untapped potential to shape a future not determined by their limited perceptions of what is possible. “You give them something to eat!” he demands. Make it happen! Wrest a blessing from this situation, like your ancestor Jacob! These are the life conditions confronting you. Deal with it! Jesus multiplies, not only the food, but also more importantly, the disciple’s own creative capacity. 

 

You see, it’s good to feed the poor and hungry. We’re called to do that as Christians. But it’s even better to give them an experience of the divine power within themselves and within ordinary people to make something unimaginable happen. And the next step in bevolutionary discipleship is to work with the poor and hungry to change the social systems that perpetuate hunger. Jesus begins by ordering his disciples to figure out how to feed them. But the next step is to help the people figure out how to feed each other – this is the fullest expression of Christian discipleship.

 

The loaves and fishes was just the first course. The real feast was the spiritual lesson that when we are connected with God as Source of all being and as the Stream of evolutionary creativity, all things become possible. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. There is so much potential sitting here in this congregation this morning, that together we could change the world. First though, we need to enter the Kingdom of God, awaken to the Ocean of God’s Being in which we swim and then throw ourselves into the evolutionary Stream of divine power to bring forth the future that needs us in order to emerge.