I want to begin this morning by celebrating your decision to approve the proposal of your Joint Needs Assessment Committee (JNAC) last Sunday. This truly opens up a space for us to realize our vision of teaching and practicing Evolutionary Christianity. It also has the potential of invigorating the congregation with new energy, vitality, and a fresh perspective.
As well I want to thank you all for your courage and trust. I could name on one hand, I suspect, the congregations in Canada who would be willing and able to go forward with the intention of plumbing the depths of our tradition with a new lens—an evolutionary lens that science has offered the world in the last two centuries, and which extends beyond the physical level of nature into the interior depths of culture, relationships, psyche, and Spirit. This new exploration is grounded deeply in our tradition, and yet is born of the question, “What is the new thing that Spirit is doing today, in us, through us, and as us? What is the future that is already embedded in the present when we are willing to inhabit the present moment with such depth, integrity, and transparency that it opens us to the influence of the field of infinite possibility that we call “the future”? What is, in the words of theologian, scientist, Ilia Delia, the “emergent Christ” for our age?
I confess to having displayed a somewhat muted response at the congregational meeting to the good news. To be honest with you, it’s taken me a week or so to appropriate and integrate what this means to me. Allow me to preface my remarks by saying that I know that this is not about you giving me what I wanted. There is, you should know, a perception in some throughout Presbytery that this is exactly what is going on here—that this is “the church of Bruce”. We don’t need to worry ourselves about that too much. Unless a person is within the culture of CMUC, it would be impossible to understand the depth of trust that has been achieved in our culture. It is unusual. Unless one experiences what has been going on here for the past sixteen years, it is also not possible to understand that what we have actually been about is the empowerment of lay ministry. We have been very intentional about promoting in multiple ways the principle of Ministry Anywhere, Anytime, by Anybody. What is unique about this culture, contrary to the perception of some, is precisely that it is not about me, and never has been. If I have been given the grace to inspire some, I make no apology. If what truth that has been given to me to share inspires others to taste into our collective potential, and to be Christ’s light for a new humanity that is struggling to be born, I thank God. But, this is not about me and never has been.
This principle of Ministry Anywhere, Anytime, by Anybody is what led to the Townships Project, Streetmeals, In from the Cold, Meditation, Reiki and Healing Touch, Spiritual Pathways and the lay leadership of our educational programs, the various ministries associated with Pastoral Care, the Taize service, relationship courses and workshops. You, the body and heart of Christ, by exercising your gifts with joy and passion, initiated these ministries.
Having unambiguously established that fact, I hope, I turn to my somewhat muted response. At the deepest level, I did find your embrace of this next step of the journey profoundly affirming of our journey together these past sixteen years. I did feel like it was also an indication of your trust in me. And dropping even deeper, it was a sign of our love for one another. I’ll spare the gory details, but I have this historical pattern of shutting down a little—ok, a lot—when confronted with the possibility that I am loved and that I love. So, friends, I “felt the love” and then made up goofy rationalizations for why I was so cool about it, none of which made much sense.
So, let me as clearly as possible offer my heartfelt thanks to those of you on the JNAC who put in so many hours this fall into the final report, and thank you to all of you for saying “yes” to this bold new vision. I am excited. I am inspired. And I am in unambiguous service to you and this vision.
This is, in my opinion, the new discipleship. Epiphany is all about discipleship, about saying yes to following the light that animated Jesus, and following our own inner radiance into the future that cannot be born without our deep consent. Jesus spots Nathanael under a tree and what Jesus saw was a man in whom there was no guile, or in the vernacular no b.s. Unlike me, he told it like he saw it, and so when his friends were muttering under their breath that this hillbilly was from Galilee, he said it straight, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
By presenting Nathanael as a man in whom there is no guile or deceit the author is suggesting that his consent to discipleship effectively reversed the curse of Eden. You will remember that Adam and Eve’s symbolic exile from the garden was precipitated by systemic deceit—the original lie. The snake’s invitation to the first couple is grounded in deceit. They are manipulated to follow a path that is not of God, not grounded in truth. Symbolically, it is the counterpoint to Jesus call to discipleship. His is a transparent allurement to the divine life. Symbolically, the serpent’s call is the temptation to live focused on the small self and not the divine Self.
Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the snake. The snake finesses the truth. This original act of deceit in the legend is a symbolic, poetic, way of trying to understand and describe our proclivity for deception and the ensuing state of disconnection. It depicts a primal separation, a felt unity with God, each other and Earth. In a culture of deceit, responsibility is shirked. A predilection for victimhood that causes us to blame others reinforces the alienation. A long history of violence arises from the perceived state of separation. This cycle of constructing a self, a culture, a worldview, and our institutions on the foundation of a belief in separation, victimhood, shame, and violence gets played out in every age, We are destined to repeat it unless we bring conscious awareness to our lives.
The dynamic between Jesus and Nathanael reverses the curse. It’s interesting that Jesus sees Nathanael standing under a fig tree. Does the author mean for us to connect this with the tree of life, the scene of the original breach in humanity’s connection with God? “Come and see,” says Phillip to Nathanael. And, indeed, they do see each other. They see into each other’s souls. Jesus sees a man who is deeply tired of living in deceit and ignorance of his true nature, a person ready to take full responsibility for his life. Nathanael sees his future—the future human among us. He sees a man who is transparent. The heart and the intelligence of pure Spirit shines through. In evolutionary language we would say that this so-called hillbilly from Nazareth has transcended obedience to the merely biological animal inheritance, and realized his divinity. This is the new human, what Jesus called “the son of man”. This is what Nathanael had felt in his bones as the promise of life. And there it was. There he was, standing before him—the embodiment of the promise that we don’t have to live with the illusion of separation from God, from each other, from Earth. In this Nazarene, the whole cosmos coalesced into a singular expression of our original unity before the curse of the illusion of separation.
The Tree of Life is an ambitious film by Terrence Malick. He sets the story of a Texan family in the 1950’s within the context of the epic of evolution from the Big Bang through to emergence of biological life on Earth, eventuating in this the O’Brien family. They become the particular fruit of this evolutionary tree of life which Malick wishes to explore.
The film centers on the complicated relationship between the eldest son, Jack, and his father. Early in the film, the adult voice of Jack tells the viewer that we must choose between nature and grace. By “nature”, he means the behavior of the father, who is a deeply conflicted human being. He is both authoritarian and yet strangely tender toward his sons. He is both a creator—an inventor and a musician—but controlled by his early, creaturely impulses. Like many men, he works in an uninspiring job, playing by the rules of the gender template of culture, and takes his unconscious frustration out on his sons and his wife. He teaches his boys how to fight, because the world is corrupt and exploitative. In other words, “nature” according to the film is the human being deeply conflicted—a creature stuck between his evolutionary instincts for survival, status, security, and sustenance and his destiny as a co-creator. “Nature” is fallen nature, post-Eden, and pre-redemption. Nature is us.
By “grace”, the scriptwriter shows us the mother. Her tenderness, empathy, and forgiveness, coupled with her joy and capacity for ecstatic enjoyment of life represents the redemption of nature. She is the possible human, the feminine Christ, the counterpoint to nature/father. Whereas nature tugs at her sons to re-enact their father’s script of the human deeply alienated and anguished, grace exerts a pull into the promise of a future animated by love alone. Grace reverses the curse.
This makes The Tree of Life a deeply religious film. Many of the musical tracks are taken from Christian requiems. One of the most touching scenes in the film involves Jack, the troubled eldest brother, and his younger brother, whom he betrays violently. Jack expresses remorse to him, and his brother lays a forgiving hand on his shoulder. It is as though this subtle gesture effects a transmission of grace. It turns Jack around, effects his metanoia—his conversion to the way of grace. In subsequent scenes, Jack in turn, lays a loving hand on the shoulder of his suffering and lonely boy deformed by a house fire. The closing scene is an eschatological banquet of love and reconciliation. An original unity is restored. The curse is reversed by the touch of love, and we see images of a new humanity walking in peace along the seashore.
This is what Nathanael sees in Jesus. He sees Jesus as the endgame. He is where humanity is already headed. He is the touch of love upon the shoulder of our human species struggling to find our redemption, struggling to consciously evolve from creatures to co-creators, from competitors to cooperators, from deceit to transparency, from exploiters to lovers. Jesus is what our species can become if we give up the lie of taking as ultimate reality the state of disconnection and all the forms of violence it breeds.
Grace is us. We are the grand epic of evolution bearing fruit in a community willing to follow the light. The story continues to be told in us and by us. Will we say yes to consciously becoming the promise that Jesus embodied—a new humanity? This is what discipleship asks of us in the 21st century. Will we be the touch of love upon the shoulder of all who are lonely and lost living out the cursed illusion of separation and disconnection? This is our destiny and our calling, to be a foretaste of the glory that is coming.
