Prayer of Opening
Bring on,
and break through our lives,
Holy One,
with this new heaven and new earth,
that the prophets see with the eyes of their heart.
Show us this new order of love—
extended toward our beloved Earth Mother,
so that her healed presence
may in return heal us.
Show us this new order of justice,
by which all may live in dignity
regardless of income.
Give us a vision of a life
“where righteousness is at home.”
Show us how we may
show up with each other
and for each other
that we may all stand tall
and know that it is a joyous miracle
this life we’ve been given.
We open now
to the advent of the Christ
into our hearts and our community. Amen.
Advent is a season to take stock of our spiritual journey. In keeping with the natural rhythm of decreasing sunlight, we can track an impulse to hunker down, find a warm place to burrow, and gather in our resources in preparation for the next season of our life. I realize that this isn’t what actually happens for most of us. But perhaps this could be the year that we intentionally slow down when the whole world is speeding up; when we summon our inner contemplative in a world drawn into an unconscious vortex of busyness; when we monitor the authentic needs of our body, rather than indulge every appetite.
The writer of 2 Peter describes the yearning of the early church for God to complete what began in Jesus: “We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home” (2 Peter 3:13). We don’t need to subscribe to what was probably a belief in an expectation of Jesus’ physical return to usher in this new age. The expectation that a new divine order—this “new heavens and a new earth”—can be grounded in our own historical experiences of transformation, of the cosmos and Earth, in our relationships, in our social systems, and of course, the transformations that we have gone through ourselves.
One could, for example, describe the universe as essentially a process of transformation. Over time, matter and energy emerge from a Big Bang, life emerges from matter, and consciousness arises from life. Similarly, in the realm of self, we go through a series of irreversible developmental transformations, from baby to adult to a consciously creative and responsible self. Social systems evolve from bands to nomadic tribes to villages and cites, to nations, and today a single global village. This is what the reality we’re involved with does. What’s different today from when the author of 2 Peter was writing is that we’re not expecting an extra-terrestrial Being to interrupt natural processes to make this happen. The pre-modern Being who intervenes to make things better is still sometimes called “God”. But to me, this Cosmic Meddler is enfolded into the process of cosmic transformative becoming—in the very processes of evolution, fashioning from chance and order, randomness and patterning action, novelty and laws, the exquisite dance of Self-revelation.
Each transformation feels as though the “old heavens and old earth”—the very foundations of our world—passes away, and a new habitat is born. God is in that process of dissolving (vs.2) and reconstructing these habitats and in the unceasing desire to lean into what is next.
What the author imagines is that the new heavens and earth become a habitat or a home “where righteousness is at home” (vs.13). Think about “righteousness” as being in right relationship with Reality, and the personalized form of Reality—“God”. It includes, of course, as a fruit of being in right relationship with Reality, a moral dimension, which is how we usually interpret righteousness. If righteousness is going to be at home in us, then our very lives will reflect —that is, be a manifestation—of the Heart of Reality. But this morning I want to offer the 1-2-3 of getting in alignment with Reality.
Step 1. Embrace Transformation
We exist within a living, learning universe. There is an unfathomable intelligence at work in the universe that appears to be realizing itself by continually transcending itself. It is doing so within you. You are first and foremost a transformative process. When we get too attached to an idea, a self-image, a particular pattern of relationship, or a political ideology—the list is endless— righteousness does not have a home. Remember, righteousness is right relationship to Reality, and Reality is a transformative process. Continual transformation for the good of all can be understood as the purpose of our lives.
You are a living, learning system. How do we know this? Because the universe is a living, learning system, and you are the universe in human form, evolving. As a learning system, you love correction. “Rebuke a wise man and he will love you. Rebuke a fool, and he will scorn you” (Proverbs 9:8). The whole cosmos exists as a self-regulating, self-correcting information feedback system, and this is a pretty good description—if a tad impersonal for the moment—of what you and I are. New life conditions that can seem overwhelming rise up to challenge us. Admittedly, they are not always pleasant. Sometimes they are downright painful. The impulse is strong to complain, and that’s natural. But if all we do is complain, righteousness does not have a home within us. If we can learn to step back from these circumstances, and ask ourselves what new intelligence is being called for here? Is it heart intelligence? Is it the wisdom to let go of the illusion of control? Am I being challenged to ask for help? And in this process of adapting to the ever-shifting circumstances of life, personally and collectively, new heavens and a new Earth breakthrough our lives. It is the Advent of God. Learn to embrace transformation and not fight it, and righteousness will have a home in your heart. This is as true for churches and institutions as it is for individuals.
Step 2. Identity Transformation
If righteousness is to have a home within us—that is, if we are going to live in right relationship with Reality—then we are going to have to make a fundamental leap in who we imagine ourselves to be. This is a question of identity. Of course, at a personal level, it is possible to identify with our various roles in life—mom, teacher, wife, daughter, amateur photographer, minister, etc. These are all important ways to define our self. But we’re more than our roles, aren’t we? Identifying with our roles potentially leaves in place a fundamental error in our thinking—that we are separate individuals, eking out a living in a hostile, or at least, indifferent universe. If this is our belief, then life is not much more than survival, and we live out a very small expression of our self.
If I were to define the nature of the coming order of a new heavens and a new Earth I would say that it will involve the dissolution of this belief, and that this is going to happen on a collective level. This small and isolated identity will eventually be dissolved in the fire of Reality that we call “God”. Just as it happened 150,000 years ago that homo sapiens sapiens acquired the capacity for self-conscious awareness, so the day is near when collectively we are going to awaken to unitive consciousness—that is, the awareness that we are all expressions of a single, seamless process of transformation that has become aware of Itself in us. Some call this Oneness consciousness. This stage of consciousness has a distinct advantage of being empirically true. We are not separate from the processes that created us. In truth, we are the presence of that process wearing a body. And while the body is a beautiful, magnificent, and elegant system, it is our early, biological inheritance, wired exclusively for survival, that causes us over and over again to reduce the self to a survival machine.
But this is easily remedied, by remembering that science shows empirically what the mystics have intuited for thousands of years now. Our bodies are a microcosm of the entire evolutionary macrocosm. Our minds hold the entire history of the universe. Your mind is a luminous reflection of the mind of the universe. Although some days I wonder how this can be true of my own mind! If righteousness is to have a home in us—that is, if we’re going to live in right relationship with Reality—we will need to shift up a gear and immerse ourselves in this expansive, unified and unifying identity. (I’ll be posting soon a great song by Peter Mayers called O, My Soul, who writes music from the perspective of the universal or unitive self.
Incidentally, this is the foundation of compassion and the passion for social justice. Only a consciousness that is stuck in the illusion of separation can construct a life of unconscionable wealth without a thought for how the wealth was generated, at what cost, and with little thought for the suffering of the world. The Bible often imagines God punishing those who live this way, but I think that living this kind of isolated existence, unaware of our deep connection with everything and everybody, is hell itself. It is it’s own punishment.
3. Consciously Accelerate Transformation
Righteousness will have a home in us, when we intentionally situate ourselves within the universe’s impulse to transcend itself. If this is what a universe does, and you emerged as an expression of the universe, then doesn’t it make perfect sense that this is happening in you as well? You are the process that is in the process of transcending itself.
But by bringing conscious awareness to this impulse, you become a catalyst. You embrace this transformative process as a moral imperative. In the 21st century, I would say that this is what it means to be a disciple of Christ. When Jesus selected his disciples to follow him, he was the embodiment of this divine imperative. He was leading them into a future he called the Kin(g)dom of God. But the key to realizing this divine realm on Earth was helping them to assume responsibility for its arrival, in the same manner that he assumed responsibility.
Jesus was looking for people who wanted to be “all in”. First, he lit up their Big Self or soul, and then he recruited this soul in the service of revealing and realizing a realm of love, justice, and compassion. Our souls want to do this more than anything else, and our deepest suffering is caused by hedging our bets and resisting where our soul wants to go. We know that surrendering to this desire to transcend the endless distractions of ego is what our life is for. Our soul yearns for Reality, wants to be in right relationship to Reality, and will fly to the Divine Heart once awakened. We know that when we are not enacting this divine yearning with how we live, and when we do not have a spiritual community that validates and helps us to actualize what it is we’re yearning for, we get sick. Sometimes it takes a lifetime before we relinquish the fantasies and illusions of our small and frightened selves.
But this is the only way that we righteousness will have a home in our hearts.
A story is told of a pessimist in a prenatal state. There he is the womb, in complete darkness and intuiting great turbulence on the horizon. The prenatal pessimist inside the womb looks around and predicts the end of the world. There will be blood he proclaims, and he prepares himself accordingly. There will be cataclysms as the whole world will be choked by cataclysmic contractions, this darkness will surely be unending; a tipping point is coming, he predicts, at which time there will no going back to the relative tranquility of the womb. The point of the story is that if you haven’t experienced being born, again and again, birth can seem like a nightmare, and not the dissolving of the old heavens and Earth, so that a new order can emerge.
Advent people are those who are willing to undergo the turbulence, to embrace the crises as the harbinger of new possibilities. We are in a season of contraction to be sure on our planet, and perhaps in your own personal life. But the Christmas story is all about a birth that is an affirmation a new order is in the process of arriving. And when we gather around the manger, it is this mystery of transformation more than anything else that takes our breath away.
