"Creatri-bution: Our Life In Christ"

A Sermon Preached by Bruce Sanguin
March 7, 2010

Luke 13: 1-7

 

One of my favorite sayings from the Talmud, a central text of mainstream Judaism, is this one: “Every blade of grass has its own angel whispering in its ear, Grow! Grow!”  This was written long before there was any scientific evidence for evolution. But, of course, all anybody had to do was to carefully observe life to see that this impulse to grow is fundamental to the universe. In fact, it is the essential characteristic of life itself. We grow. The universe develops. And I’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating, if God or Spirit has anything to do with reality as we know it to be, then God must be involved in this growth impulse. And it’s not simply an impulse to grow. It’s an impulse to evolve – from simplicity to complexity, from parts to wholes, from unity to diversity, from simple forms of consciousness to the capacity for conscious self-awareness, from chaos to coherence and self-organization.

 

But growth in the human realm is a matter of choice.  When it comes to religion, many stopped growing because of a belief that the revelation was complete. Most religion is like the tree in this morning’s parable. It’s distressed. The leaves are falling off. It hasn’t born fruit for too many years. These religions, including Christianity, were once healthy trees, providing shelter for the birds of the air and shade for humanity. But somewhere along the line, religion stopped bearing fruit.

 

The so-called “great” religions of the world – the Axial religions – came into being at a time when the world was in need of a moral compass and an orienting purpose for life that could curb the more violent and base instincts of the human species. The evolutionary need was for stability, fixed truths, and unifying sacred myths that could bridge tribal rivalries and unite far-flung ethnic loyalties.

 

These truths were revealed to great men, who then passed these teachings on to communities, who in turn wrote the teachings down in Scripture and taught them to future generations.  The original teacher, then the Scripture, and then the traditions that developed around both were believed to be sources of divine revelation – revealing the mind, heart, and will of God for all time. If you believed in these teachings and the original Teacher you would be reward by enjoying eternal life with him in the next life. If you didn’t you would receive some kind of punishment.

 

These noble traditions, including Christianity, have served an important function for society. They contain many deep truths and time-tested practices for connecting with the divine. However, when religions stop listening to that angel’s voice that bends over every blade of grass and whispers “Grow! Grow!”, then they become an impediment to the life of the Spirit.

 

The irony of the Christian tradition, which is the only one I can speak about with any authority, is that when you study the New Testament closely, Jesus was that voice urging his own tradition to open up to growth in God. The reason I call this “ironic is that in the last 150 years or so with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity, Jesus has been co-opted by traditionalists and fundamentalists, who believe that Christianity is at core a set of unchanging truths and beliefs.

 

Jesus didn’t trash his tradition. He simply encouraged the tradition to allow the “new thing” that God was doing to emerge through it. The way I read my Bible is that Jesus caused a lot of conflict because he was more focused on the future – which he called the Kin(g)dom of God – than he was on the past. He located himself within the lineage of the great prophets like Isaiah who wrote on God’s behalf, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. It is springing forth. Do you not perceive it?” And: “Those who put their hand to the plough and look back are not fit for the Kingdom of God.”

 

Jesus was always more concerned with what was in the process of being revealed about God, and our role in that, than what had already been revealed. What had already been revealed could be carried forward to form the foundation for the new thing that was springing forth. In Jesus’ consciousness, tradition could be a very good thing. But, and here was where he got into trouble with the keepers of the tradition, it could also be a very bad thing (when tradition becomes traditionalism)– and it is up to every new generation to determine what is worth carrying forward and what needs to be respectfully left behind.

 

For example, in today’s reading, Jesus teaches his disciples that the theology of rewards and punishments needed to be left behind. The disciples hear about Pilate’s execution of some Galilean peasants who had no doubt organized a revolt against Rome. Jesus has heard the story as well, and adds another story about a tower that fell on some innocent people, killing them all. The traditional theological interpretation of such events is that the victims must have done something to deserve their fate. God is in charge of history, after all, so God must have had good reason to allow Pilate to execute the rebels and let the tower fall on those people.

 

This is nonsense according to Jesus. Yet still today it gets trotted out by the likes of Christian evangelist Pat Robertson, blaming the Haitians for the earthquake. The Haitians and the Chileans did nothing to cause the tectonic plates beneath the earth to shift and cause an earthquake. The fact that the recent tsunami in Hawaii was so mild was a result of natural processes, and not the moral quality of the lives of Hawaiians or the tourists. (Although, Ann and I would like to be able to take credit). And still today, when something is going wrong, there is an instinctual part of us that whispers, “What did I do to deserve this!?”

 

God doesn’t cause towers to fall or tectonic plates to shift. But their shifting happens within the totality of reality that takes place within God who is the center and circumference of the cosmos. In other words, God doesn’t cause disasters, or illnesses, or tragedies, but all of these are held within the providential and benign Presence of God. God is the Presence of a hidden order or pattern who weaves from life’s circumstance a tapestry of beauty and order and elegance. Disaster and tragedy and illness are but three threads from which this tapestry is in the process of being woven. And, remember, the weaving takes place over vast expanses of time. Sometimes it requires millions of years for the patterns in the tapestry for these patterns to become clear. In fact, it’s taken 13.7 billion years for the universe to awaken to it’s own sacred patterning. Religious mystics and modern day scientists are those who see this patterning activity the clearest.

 

So Jesus parts with tradition, and teaches the disciples that those whom Pilate executed and those upon whom the tower fell were no better or worse than any of them. Religion is not about rewards for being good and punishment for being bad. That was part of the tradition that needed to be shed. Religion is about learning to see the hidden order within life’s circumstances, good and bad, and then practicing a radical trust that our own lives, personally and collectively are an expression of this order and meant to reflect this order.

 

Religion that is thriving allows the sacred evolutionary impulse to influence one’s beliefs, worldviews, attitudes, and behavior. In the example I just used, this evolution was from belief in a God who keeps order by threatening and rewarding, to a God who is the intrinsic presence of an ordering pattern, despite appearances to the contrary.

 

But then the reading for today gets confusing, doesn’t it? Because Jesus goes on to say: “Unless you repent, you will likewise perish”. Sounds a lot like a threat to me. But I’m interpreting what he’s saying as a kind of transitional teaching tool. He’s using language that the disciples have at their disposal within their tradition. Their motivation for right behavior is still steeped in the traditional fear of punishment. He’s going to help them transition from one theological model to another. He’s about to shift the motivation from an external source – fear of punishment by God – to an internal motivation – the intrinsic reward of growing in the Spirit. So the language is transitional. He’s warning them: Just because we’re removing the threat of punishment as a motivator doesn’t mean you are off the hook. And the parable that follows helps to make to make this clear.

 

Jesus then tells a parable about a grape vine that is not bearing fruit. The owner tells the gardener to cut it down. This is only natural, since bearing fruit is the objective. But the gardener intervenes. He wants a year to do some root surgery, add a little manure, and a little TLC. See if he can’t get it to thrive. But he agrees that if it doesn’t bear fruit, he’ll remove it next year. This is a conditional contract. Grow or perish.

 

The gardener in this parable helps to define what Jesus means by repentance in the new theological model. It’s not feeling bad and making promises to change – although there’s nothing wrong with this if it’s followed up by action. But repentance in this parable suggests a specific focus for change – namely, do whatever you have to do to create the conditions in your life that will align you with a natural evolutionary impulse to grow. The gardener commits to digging around the roots. Etymologically, the word radical comes from “root”. So what we’re talking about here is a radical reorientation of our lives. Repentance is the radical reorientation of our lives around the evolutionary impulse to grow and produce fruit.

 

I conjectured earlier that Jesus was using familiar language of threat, not to reinforce a traditional belief that God rewards and punishes, but rather to convey a sense of urgency that has nothing to do with fear of punishment. What is that urgency?  Jesus is saying is that there exists in the universe a moral imperative to evolve, and that if we are not consciously creating the conditions in our lives that will facilitate this sacred process, we are living in the kin(g)dom of death, not of life. We are, to use the words of the parable, in the process of perishing, not living – even though we may still be standing upright and breathing. There is an urgency in this teaching that is undeniable, an edge that we ignore at our peril. Either we are thriving and producing fruit or we are wasting the fabulous opportunity of this life to further the evolutionary purposes of God – the Kin(dom) of God.

 

While on holidays, I read a novel by Sebastian Faulks, A Week In December, and one by a French Canadian writer, Nikolsky by  Nicolas Dickner,  which is on the Canada Reads list for this year. Both Ann and myself were impressed by the similarity of the lives of the characters in the stories.They are perishing while they are still alive. Lost souls wander the country, having given up even on the search for a place to call home; many inhabit virtual or parallel realities on the internet where they find all their excitement, while their real lives are empty shells; in the absence of any transcendent purpose, or ethical compass, some of the characters exist solely to make money, but have no idea of what the money is for; one returns to fundamentalist Islam and terrorism to find meaning in a world devoid of utopian ideals. Each author is describing a world in which religion has lost legitimacy, and with no transcendent vision of life the ego has become unmoored - floating directionless in a vast and uncaring universe – filling in time with pointless activity. In a soulless world, the characters choose alternative realities to inhabit.

 

If the authors are accurately describing the malaise of modernist culture, the treatment does not lie in returning to the religion of our fathers. Whereas Jesus challenged a culture that was so steeped in tradition that it had stifled Spirit’s impulse to evolve, we live in a time that has voided the cosmos of Spirit. Our challenge is perhaps greater than the challenge Jesus faced because nobody in his day and age questioned the existence of God. There were different Gods, to be sure, but the cosmos was animated by a sense of divine purpose. Today, the cosmos has been emptied of divinity.

 

Evolutionary Christian spirituality is a way forward. It takes the empirically grounded fact that the entire universe is animated by one fundamental dynamic – evolution – and makes the claim that Spirit is intimately involved in the process of growth and development. It says that Jesus’ own impulse to challenge his tradition to open to the new thing God was doing was born of this fundamental evolutionary impulse. It says that to follow in the lineage of Jesus is to do likewise in every age. This process of continually opening to the sacred impulse to grow is the primary act of faith in evolutionary Christianity. Evolutionary Christianity enjoys an organic mysticism. In choosing to consciously open ourselves to this evolutionary impulse we have an immediate experience of being in Spirit. It is far less esoteric than you might imagine.

 

Every new insight is an expression of Spirit yearning to grow: every step you take to deepen intimacy in your relationships is Spirit desiring to experience love; as you grow in your capacity to take ever-increasing levels of responsibility for your own life and the larger community of life, you are manifesting Spirit; as your fear lessens and you grow in your capacity for vulnerable self-disclosure, Spirit shines through; as your love for the world and this planet expands, as your capacity to appreciate beauty expands, as your moral and ethical intelligence develops, as your identity expands beyond our various roles and responsibilities into an awareness of being one with All of Reality, Spirit shines out; every time you risk serving the world out of the sheer joy of expressing your unique self, every time you ask yourself the question, “what is the new thing God is bringing into being in and through me in this moment?”, you are directly connecting with Spirit and realizing your Christhood. You are a mystic.

 

Why would we choose alternative or parallel realities? Why would we choose to metaphorically perish in a cosmos that is so alive with Spirit, when all that we need to do to know God is to cooperate with the gracious and intrinsic impulse to evolve?

 

This is why in evolutionary Christian spirituality there is no need for threats of punishment if you don’t obey an external God. There is a requirement, yes, that we do some gardening – or that we ask for help from experienced gardeners – if we are not experiencing the sap of the Spirit flowing through our veins. If we’re not producing fruit, then perhaps root surgery is required. The intrinsic reward of feeling your soul come alive in God motivates our actions. The pleasure of bearing fruit animates us. Once you are fruit bearing it’s the most natural thing in the world to want to share that fruit with the world.

 

On CBC Radio’s North by Northwest, an articulate artist, Chantey Dayal was interviewed yesterday. The fruit she offers to the world is art. But it could be a listening ear, a helping hand, or carpentry – as long as it comes from this deep joy in our identity as manifestations of a living, evolving universe. Chantey set up a web cam to watch her in the process of painting and talking about her creative process. When the painting is finished, she will auction it off and give the proceeds to an organization called Imagine1Day – which educates children in Ethiopia (www.imagine1day.org). This organization calls what Chantey is doing “creatribution” – contributing with your natural creativity.

 

We have a moral imperative as Christians to be as healthy in body, mind, and spirit as we can be so that we can first bear, and then share, all our blessed spiritual fruit with each other and with the world. Our lives are meant to be a creatribution. This is our soul’s calling in Christ – the distinctive future that cannot be born without the fruit of your creative self-expression. This is the Kin(g)dom of God and it’s coming through you.