"Stumbling Blocks Into Sign Posts"

A Sermon Preached by Bruce Sanguin
September 27, 2009

Mark 9: 38-50

This morning we’re dealing with stumbling blocks. Jesus uses the term to describe attitudes, behaviors, processes, and systems that trip us up. But the first thing to notice is that if we’re getting tripped up, it implies that we’re on our way somewhere. So, where are we headed according to Jesus? To the kingdom of God, or the realm of God. The journey has at least four basic dimensions: it’s inward to a dimension of our consciousness that is one with Spirit; the journey is relational, toward a way of being with each other, with the planet, and with God that is deeply compassionate; the journey is outward, towards ethical behavior and practices that more closely reflect the heart of God; and the journey is systemic – what our social, political, and economic systems would be like if Spirit, not greed and corruption, prevailed. Stumbling blocks are interior and exterior challenges that both impede and catalyze our awakening and entrance into Spirit in each of these realms.

 

This, then, is the religious path for a Christian – moving into and toward the ever-evolving realm of God in these four dimensions and learning to deal with all that stuff, inside and out, that gets in the way. If you are following Christ, you are committing yourself to a disciplined life with your deepest intention and desire to manifest Spirit in each of these four dimensions.

 

Jesus is making an impassioned plea to let nothing stand in your way – to make this conscious intention the center of our lives. The disciples encounter somebody who is healing in Jesus’ name and they want to stop him. But Jesus stops them: “Whoever is not against us is for us”. Did you pick up how President Bush turned that biblical injunction on its head post 9-11: “Whoever is not with us is against us”? But Jesus pointed out to the disciples that in trying to stop him they were acting as stumbling blocks to the Kingdom of God. What mattered was not membership in the Jesus club. What mattered was that people found their way into the realm of God. So the first level commitment is to make sure that we’re not ourselves unwitting stumbling blocks. Make sure that our own attitudes, behaviors, and thoughts are not tripping anybody else up on their journey.

 

Stumbling Blocks and Levels of Consciousness

 

Let’s look closer at Jesus’ teaching. It’s a little scary at first reading:
“If you hand causes you to stumble, cut it off…” (Mark 9:43). The same goes for the foot and the eye. I’ve mentioned before that human beings function at different levels or waves of consciousness. These levels of consciousness determine how we see the world, what we believe, what we value, how we interpret our experience, and the actions we take. So you can imagine somebody reading this text from a Mythic/literal level of awareness. They just might write this in a moral and legal law – think the Taliban in Afghanistan. The punishment for stealing a loaf of bread is to cut off the person’s offending hand. The hand was the offending part, so remove it.

 

But if you hear this from a Traditional stage of consciousness, you’re probably not living in a theocracy, so nobody is going to take literally cut a poor, hungry boy’s hand off. This stealing behavior is still a very serious problem – a stumbling block – revealing a lack of moral order and caused by sin. The boy may be punished, grounded for a couple of weeks, and if the parent’s belong to a church, they may ask for the community to pray for his soul.

 

If you hear what Jesus is saying from a modernist or rationalist level of consciousness, you’ll want to analyze the boy’s behavior, break it down into discrete choice points that led eventually to act of stealing the bread. You might call in a behavioral therapist to help the boy walk home by a route that doesn’t involve passing by the tempting scent of the bakery. You’ll want to modify the boy’s behavior, but you won’t conclude that “sin” made the boy do it. The behavior is certainly a stumbling block to responsible citizenship, but it has nothing to do with religion.

 

If you’re hearing Jesus’ words from a Postmodernist, “sensitive” worldview, you may do an analysis of the root causes of poverty and end up writing your MP a letter, and then you might put the boy in a support group for boys who have a problem with stealing. You will listen compassionately to the boy’s story and take on much of the blame yourself for not being attuned deeply enough to the boy’s emotional needs.

 

At this point, we need to leave our poor young boy to the care and keeping of his support group, because the analogy is very close to already being strained. But when we move into an Integral or evolutionary level of consciousness, the very meaning of “stumbling block” undergoes a transformation.

 

Stumbling Blocks as Signposts

 

In an evolutionary model, stumbling blocks become signposts, bearers of essential information about where we are stuck and catalysts for the emergence of a new future. Let me give an example of how stumbling blocks are transformed into signposts – intimations of our emergent future. The example is from evolutionary biology.

 

We got to where we are this morning, sitting here in church, 14 billion years after the Big Bang, precisely because of stumbling blocks. The universe evolves through the successful negotiations of stumbling blocks. Early in our planet’s life, to give but one example, bacteria started giving off oxygen! For us oxygen is a good thing, but 3 billion years ago it was lethal. The planet’s future was literally threatened. But then an organism evolved to meet the challenge by learning to use oxygen for it’s metabolic processes – oxygen was transformed from a deadly gas into the elixir of life, through the adaptive intelligence of this little organism. The earth learned to breathe. We may rightly pause for a moment to give thanks to this little creature, without whom we would not be here this morning.

 

This is why I believe there is so much potential in evolutionary spirituality. What appear at other levels of consciousness as unwelcome stumbling blocks become opportunities for growth – that we might simply want to get rid of – at this wave of consciousness are harbingers of what’s next in our journey into the Kin-dom of God. That’s not to say that they are not challenging, and that sometimes we wish we were a little less challenged by life. But without these challenges we don’t grow. In fact, what these stumbling blocks are telling us is that we’ve been so successful in meeting the existing challenges of life, that we are now ready for a whole new and more complex set of challenges. Stumbling blocks become signposts in evolutionary Christian spirituality.

 

I’m not saying that God literally puts these stumbling blocks in our path to help us to grow. It’s more like a spiritual law that as we evolve in our capacity for resilience in the face of challenges, the universe throws up the next challenge that will elicit from us an even more complex adaptive intelligence. It’s like our successful negotiation of challenges actually attracts new challenges into existence. And the new challenges – the stumbling blocks – themselves require new adaptive intelligences. We evolve by treating stumbling blocks “as if” they are gifts of God.

 

Ecological Stumbling Blocks

 

Let me give another example related to ecology. We are all acutely aware that our planet is under siege. The temptation is to be very negative and pessimistic. We want to blame somebody, so we blame the corporations or the industrial revolution or we blame ignorant human beings. A whole lot of misanthropy – hatred of the human species – goes along with some forms of ecological activism folks. The most militant of the eco-activists actually wish that human beings would get wiped out by a virus, and then the planet would be able to thrive without us. This attitude ignores the tremendous cosmic achievement that the human species represents.

 

Now, I’m not saying that the challenge facing us is not enormous. It is, clearly. The stumbling blocks to a sustainable future are legion: ignorance, greed, poverty, overpopulation, dependence on fossil fuels, etc. But let’s remember that the modern period has ushered in an explosion of creativity in the human species. It’s our very success as a species that has called forth these new life conditions that are now threatening our future. That success has generated those very stumbling blocks I mentioned. But they also contain the information we require to move forward, and they have the potential of evoking the adaptive intelligences we require to deliver a healthy planet to our children and their children. The potential is directly proportional to the depth of the challenge. We do have reason to be confident about our resilience. There is precedence for our confidence  – we have 14 billion years of cosmic resilience built into our very being!

 

I don’t want to be pollyannish about this, and I know that it can feel like we’re too far gone to be very hopeful. The morning I was preparing this sermon I was reading through the Globe and Mail and came across an ad by BMW. A glossy photo of the latest model was accompanied by the caption: “Joy Is Teaching Mother Nature Who Really Wears The Pants”. Yikes! If we are going to transform stumbling blocks into signposts, then we must listen to the information that is embedded in the stumbling blocks. Mother Nature is telling us: You must learn to mimic my processes, not dominate over them.

 

So BMW is functioning in this ad as a stumbling block in my opinion – employing an outmoded paradigm of masculine domination over all things feminine – including the planet. But, there is no point in trashing BMW. We could stand up on our soapbox and call for a boycott of BMW. But I think it would be much more helpful to be invite them into a conversation. I could let them know that that particular ad did nothing for me – except turn me away from BMW. I might try to help them to realize that this ad is directed squarely at the Achievist stage of consciousness, the shadow side of which is human domination over nature, which got us into this mess. Why not try to persuade them to direct their marketing from a higher consciousness to a higher consciousness? Their marketers might consider a new slogan to accompany their latest model low emissions model: An image of their latest hybrid is superimposed over a silhouette of the planet, the captions reads: BMW Respects Our Mother: A Kinder Technology.

 

Addictions and Stumbling Blocks

 

Let’s apply this at the dimension of our own personal lives. Our culture of affluence is multiply addicted – to alcohol, drugs, food, work, sex, email, physical fitness – you name it. All of this stuff and all of these processes can act of stumbling blocks to awareness of and entrance into the Kin-dom of God. You can ask anybody here this morning in recovery about the process they use in recovery. For a time most need to cut the offending substance out of their life. Some need to do this for the rest of their life – if the offending substance is alcohol or drugs, for example. But at some point, you must take the blame off of the substance itself and internalize it. You must ask yourself questions: What purpose was this serving in my life? What did it promise me that was so attractive? What virtue or ideal did the substance make me feel like I could realize? What pain in my life is it helping me to cover over? The information embedded in the addiction can lead you right to the Kin-dom of God. It can help you to distinguish between the voice of fear and the voice of Self. It can transform you into a servant of God and mentor for others by internalizing the lessons of the addictions. The stumbling block becomes a signpost for your new future in the Kin-dom of God.

 

So, I read the sermon to Ann this morning, as is my habit. She kindly offered that she thought it was pretty good, but then asked, “What happened to the little boy who stole the bread? How is this stumbling block a signpost for him?” Sheesh! I knew the little boy would come back to bite me! Developmentally, the little boy probably doesn’t have a highly developed capacity for self-reflection or insight. The information embedded in his act of stealing is for his parents, not for him so much. But if the parents enjoy an evolutionary awareness, they are able to see the value of the parental interventions at all the other levels – with the exception of actually cutting the boy’s hand off! So instead of employing just one strategy, they are able to use a multi-layered intervention. They could ground the boy and ask their church to pray for him; they could employ a behavioral therapist and as well do some neural reprogramming; they could barrage him with love and affection and get him into a support group. But most importantly, they could also take a deep breath and realize that there’s a good chance that he’ll just grow out of it. I do hope we’ve taken good care of the little boy.