SERMON: Encouragment Along The Way... John 14:1-14 May 18, 2014

INTRODUCTION. The phrase 'the way' is our central image this morning. In your mind consider life as a path through a dangerous woods where one could easily get lost or harmed. One could lose awareness of what their life is about. Such a tragic loss that would be. The author of John has Jesus saying there is such a path or way for each of us and Jesus has found it and shown us how he walked it. I grew up the youngest of seven boys. The summer before I began first grade, one day at the dinner table my Dad said to one of my brothers, ' Gene, take Jimmy today and show him 'the way' to school, show him  'the path' to take.' So that afternoon George showed me the literal narrow red earth path that went off an alley, through a heavy thicket, up a hill and opened up on a main street where the grade school was. It as less than 200 yards from our back door. But till then I had never noticed where the school was or how to get there. Five year olds are not that aware of their extended surroundings. But now I knew 'the way' to school and had an image of 'the path' from my house to the place I'd be going many times for the next eight years. This gave me a sense of security, foundation, groundedness about that part of my life.

You now hold a hard stone in your hand. Of all natural earthly things nothing is so certain, solid and dependable as the hard rock of the earth. The timeless  imagery of such natural  dependability  fits the deep meaning of  Jesus assuring his friends that he had found 'a way', a way to be, a way to live, a way to behave as a human being in this life. “ I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” This statement can help us know what Jesus was doing for his friends as he also says,' Let not your heart be troubled.' ….You can know and feel confident there is a 'a way' that is given to you to make your way meaningfully all the distance of your human life. Jesus wants all people to have that kind of assurance.

Yet this passage became a problem for me about the time I hit midlife. This full passage should encourage Christians to be free to accept people of other backgrounds and faiths but has notoriously been used to claim that one's religious faith is the best or only faith that assures being accepted by God. Many Christian people have not yet found a way to own their own assurance without suggesting others are rejected by God. This way of thinking of our faith contradicts the spirit of Jesus' other teaching. For example he informs his followers to 'not judge others, lest we be judged negatively also' and he practiced accepting people as approved by God whom his own religious group rejected. It is said of Jesus that he came to “save, not to condemn the people of this world.” Hopefully our own traditions and interpretations help us to not be caught in such an embarrassing intellectual trap in our use of scripture.

I. It is somewhat common for one's religion to become something that makes them feel superior to other humans and judge them as not saved, less related to God or as perhaps not as moral, or ones who have not performed necessary sacraments etc. This is an interpretation problem in the Christian religion today. Recall the warning in Jesus' story of the Pharisee and tax collector. The religious Pharisee judged himself as right with God and the tax collector as not. The tax collector knew and declared his imperfections without any judging of the one who judged him. Jesus said this less respected person was the one who was finding the meaning of heaven , thus was walking 'the way' we are discussing. There are honest and responsible ways for this passage to be fully embraced without leading us to imply the condemnation of others.


II. We can hear these words in the gospel as highly symbolic rather than literal or historic. Some of the very best biblical scholars explain that much language in the Bible is symbolic, not literal. This does not make the meaning less real or authoritative. This writer is likely using symbolic language here to explain how the Christian community years after Jesus died interpreted his life and how it had captured for them the very presence of God. We might consider that this includes the same God that other World religions are also describing in their view of the Divine. Just as Jesus especially imaged God as a Heavenly Father he would not have likely said that is the only way to image God. He also referred to God, in this same gospel, as a Spirit which is how many non Christians describe God, including most native American religions. That is that God is not ever fully definable and predictable but is like the 'wind that blows where it wishes.' So we can hear Jesus saying that to follow his way of life, trust and action will lead one to think of and experience God in the same way he did...as a loving Father. But he would not have said this is the only path to relating to God.

III. Let me ask you to consider  this at yet another level. When we speak of walking Jesus' way. Just think about it; we know so little actually of the details of how Jesus himself handled the many situations of his personal life. He likely did much that would surprise us? One story says he sent a herd of someone's swine over a cliff to die; and it does not imply he took responsibility for it. Don't we have something very general in mind when we ask the good question, ' What would Jesus do?' Much too general to think we can copy it in any consistent way. It seems to me 'the way' Jesus, and other spiritual giants,walked is even larger than Jesus, yet also as small as any single person's unique 'way' of living life responsibly and as fully as has been placed within them. John's gospel's author's goal is to make Jesus uniquely 'the way.' Many sound scholars doubt that Jesus of Nazareth thought of it that way personally or placed himself in that light? It required his admirers to see that in him. And they really did begin to see him that way, especially after he died and as several generations reflected on the remembrances of him. Such a development led to these statements of who Jesus was, what he did and what it meant to following generations ?

IV. Finally, followers of Jesus, as in Acts 9:2, were referred to as people of 'the way' before being being called Christians. So to think of Jesus being 'the way' did not at first refer to a formal church, organization or creed but to 'a way', a way of trusting, valuing, acting and living. 'The way' refers to Jesus' values and his willingness to follow those values. He said that every human person should be seen as a most important thing in the world. And when he saw humans being cast aside, abused, mistreated, marginalized, held back from the full use of their gifts or discounted by higher powers he was disturbed. The gospels all finally describe Jesus' way as the 'way of the cross.' The 'way of the cross' was the way of serving others, of standing up for the underdogs and mistreated of society, of being willing to give of oneself for such a cause. The 'way of the cross' was the way of trusted resurrection. Symbolically that can mean that any Good done which appears dead always eventually comes back to life. Resurrection spiritually speaking can only follow some death experience. So when Jesus' way' is what we choose to follow, we are agreeing that the way of God and the way to God is one of service to others, standing up for the value of other humans even, if need be, to the point of sacrifice. And we believe that even if this effort looks like a total failure it will in ways we can't anticipate bring about the good that God approves and supports. This 'way' certainly implies we would never indicate that someone is not presently acceptable to God. Such lack of value and trust in another person is the opposite of 'the way of Christ.'

CONCLUSION: We can recognize and give God thanks when we see such a way being followed whether by a Christian, Jew, Buddhist,Hindu, Muslim or nonreligious person. And we can rejoice that the same way which Christ found has likely been found by other deeply spiritual persons as well. As Christians, Christ's way is always our chosen way. We are, as our text says, always encouraged by the Living Spirit of Christ. Because of 'the way' our hearts are not overcome by trouble or fear, and we are enabled to value the many ways God opens 'the way' of life to others.

SYMBOLISM ...THE MORE POWERFUL LANGUAGE OF RELIGION March 17, 2014

I think we are seeing competent scholars who are sincere believers such as Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg moving to what many admirers of Jesus are prepared for: the realization that sacred text, including most of our New Testament, are primarily symbolic- not literal and historical. As long as we read these materials as presenting a literal history such  familiar words as ' death , burial, resurrection and forgiveness' remain attached to one historical person, the man Jesus of Nazareth.

By Raphael  @ 1500

But when death , burial, resurrection and acceptance are seen as symbols that lie at the base of humanity's common collective unconscious(which contains the whole spiritual/psychological development of humankind similarly as how our physical bodies contain the entire history of our physical evolution) these internal dynamics become potential real life changing experiences for every human everywhere.

We might begin by realizing that 'the Christ' is a collective eternal symbol for something far more than the amazing human Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus the man is a barely provable historic person but 'the Christ' which that human life had appropriately, because of his dazzling spiritual excellence, projected onto it was and is an eternal truth and goal embedded in every human psyche(soul). I should add that only the Christian tradition will call that ultimate symbol Christ but others will contain a God image similar to it. 

Imo valuing symbol as the language of religion is what we are moving toward individually and collectively in the development of religion, certainly in the West. Only symbol can carry such a dynamic force of development for the individual or the collective. It has always been this way but we have lost awareness of such symbolic roots, they have become unconscious to our dominant conventional collective points of view.

This situation speaks to us of how the universal power of symbol(the true language of the origins of all authentic religion) is in a different and higher category of language than anything we humans can try to convert into a one time event in history. But this is what popular Christian teaching and emphasis has tragically tried to do for several hundred years. I've noticed how religious dialogue on Facebook is nearly all about interpreting words of texts rather than desiring and asking how we might more practically experience being  influenced by the eternal symbols of truth which  words can only point to. In my strong conservative religious heritage we had public debates where 'your' own man always won. Word splitting and text quoting , especially the words of the Bible, is not using the Bible as a spiritual resource but as a rather materialistic ego driven process.

The best I can tell from scripture Paul uses highly symbolic language when speaking of 'death, burial and resurrection.' We generally read Paul through our literal interpretation of the gospels which we should not do to get Paul's intended message.  For one thing the gospels themselves are primarily symbolic. And also, of great importance,  because all of Paul's authentic writings and likely his death preceded the gospels being written.

Paul's conversion and witness of Jesus is described in Acts as a 'vision' which  no one else even saw though some were present with him. 'Vision' by definition is a symbolic language, as is 'dream', and  neither refers to literal or only once in history type events. So all of Paul's witness is based on his being impacted and transformed by symbol. That is just how powerful living symbol is. Paul surely can still say that 'If Christ is not resurrected' he is miserable etc for it would mean the symbol which he was confronted with did not adequately effect his internal being. From the quality of his life it obviously did.

Saul's Conversion

We can miss much if we make too much of supposed history retrieved from ink and paper, however sacred, and too little on eternal living symbol which inspired words are able to point to or describe. Each of us, as Paul, when effected by living symbol 'is indeed in our own time and space' but we are not left to being affected only or primarily by someone else's time-space experience. I hope my reasoning is clear even if it is strikes you as a very different way of 'seeing' these essential realities.

Western culture has been fully trained for about 400 years to view all things materialistically and not spiritually or as symbolic. We act as if vision and dream are 'nothing' today even though the scripture plainly describes Paul's whole conversion process as being based on the power of symbol. Peter's primary character transformation is described as  accomplished by a dream which came to him well after he was associated with Jesus. There are good and necessary reasons we have got ourselves into this blind alley but hopefully we are seeing our way to a fuller appreciation of scripture by realizing its symbolic nature. That is a hope of mine.

Most people when they hear symbol think 'only symbol' as if symbol is an inferior kind of communication or way to understand deepest reality. It is quite the opposite. I will return to the important example of Saul of Tarsus' conversion experience...According to what is said about him in Acts his whole conversion is based on experiencing a 'vision' or a symbol of the Christ-not something or someone historical or material. Let's let scripture speak to us about its own nature. All Paul says himself about his encounter with God is that he was 'taken up into the third haven and told things that he could not and would not repeat.' Can anything be more overtly symbolic than such a description? We have dismissed the central meaning of such passages and their importance as to how religious transformative message is originally and uniquely conveyed.

When someone shows me how that Paul's conversion was not fulfilled entirely by symbolic language to him, only then can I agree that the whole group of 'gospel' words including 'death, burial, resurrection, salvation and ascension' etc were not themselves once the living symbolic language by which Christianity was given birth. To hold 'death , burial and resurrection' hostage to a one time place in history event rather than something that lives always in the human psyche, awaiting to become conscious, is a loss beyond measure.

I think and hope we are on the cusp of breaking out of that very materialistic way of limiting how the ultimate God gets known most fully in the hearts and minds of humans. 

I'm very aware of how different this sounds to many of my friends and acquaintances but different is not always less or inaccurate, and sometimes is extremely redeeming. This is how I have come to see our religious texts over the last three decades. They are not generally seeking to relate historical 'one time' only verbal information but something that is too deep and profound for such words. Symbolic language is able to do that and has done so forever. Symbol both ancient and present is the language of the soul, dream and vision.

I bet Moses would have something to say today about the 'burning bush' we so repetitiously figure was a literal event outside of him rather than a living symbol that changed his life from within. And we can go right through the Bible with this transformed symbolic awareness... from our materialistic bias for everything that is 'real' to an awareness of the transforming power of symbol that 'comes ' to the human soul /mind.

Let me stress I do not resent at all anyone who does not share this changed understanding of approaching Sacred text. But I share these thoughts in earnest for anyone's careful consideration, especially those interested in the messages of the Bible and in how we humans connect with God. I cannot  speak with or for such Bible scholars as Spong and Borg but I think what I am describing fits with how the changes they confess from their first literal/historical  understanding of Bible themes can more consistently be explained and more easily come alive in any of us today. And I know this is the case in my own developmental process.

SERMON: TRANSFIGURATION... WHAT CAN WE SAY? Matthew 17:1-9 March 2, 2014

What can we say? Perhaps it's best to close ones eyes and simply be open to the impact and mystery such a dazzling image can deliver from out of the ancient past. Here Matthew does not just use reasoned words of persuasion that Jesus shines brighter than Moses and other past Heroes, but he ventures into an imaginative style and creates a strong mesmerizing image- a dazzling Jesus with the ghosts of Moses and Elijah. The author creates a scene where the disciples have what can be called a numinous experience of Jesus. This is Matthew's effort to put in words what is completely beyond words or reasoned explanation. Numinous refers to the dazzling, fearful , joyful and overwhelming sense of the presence of the 'utterly other' or what has always been called God.

Transfiguration   1824 CE.

Numinous experience has always been the foundation of every living religious heritage. But 21^st century persons influenced by science and our trusted use of strong reasoning skills may leave little way remaining to take the transfiguration story seriously. It easily becomes a yearly read story at church which we think must be thoroughly 'made up' with no real experience behind it. Or we go the other extreme and say. 'It happened literally just as it says'        ( Some might even claim if a video camera had been there it would have recorded both the images and the sounds just as we read them. But embarrassingly those taking it so literally would likely hesitate to report having had or expecting to ever have such an encounter with the Holy themselves. Such a claim destructively splits off Biblical times as if it were a different world than where we live now.And in the process splits our human  head from our heart.)

Yet I remain convinced there are ways by which modern folks can find it comprehensible that there is real life changing human experience, inner if not outer, being spoken of in this story and many others like it. The kind of experience which leads one, without claiming a 'split world' supernaturalism,   to ' know' they have been in the presence of that which is beyond our materialized world. I choose to refresh your awareness today that such dazzling numinous experiences have been handed down from all cultures by all kinds of people throughout human history. I offer these for you to mull over, consider their meaning and how you might also be strangely moved by such images. I'll read several of these.

On the face these are reported as if they are literal happenings in the real tangible outer world. Yet they also always include a misty, uncanny, foggy, ghostly atmosphere. And they involve a holy fear as well as an indescribable joy and often invest the observer with a grand inclusive love for others and the whole creation. These examples come from among the highest functioning people of their times. Don't we need such numinous experienced people today?

Moses : Exodus 24: 15-18 Notice Moses' encounter with the Sacred is pictured as something going beyond any straight forward command-obey relationship between human and God for it so convinces Moses of a Sacred reality that he naturally seeks harmony with the source of such a vision. The question of belief becomes moot after such an encounter. One senses this kind of powerful motivation for living in such numinous experiences. Is this not greatly needed in our day?

Transfiguation  12th Century CE

Disciples with Jesus. Matthew 17: 1-9 Clearly, Matthew is taking the Moses story as a model and saying that Jesus' connection with God was confirmed by a similar but even brighter event. Even the exalted dead approve. So mesmerizing that the disciples fall down in fear. I have no question that persons present with the human Jesus, as they meditated on their times with him and grieved his death found themselves having dreams and visions of the numinous Holy being fully present in Jesus. Also it is reasonable to ask if the author of this story , as he contemplated his inherited Moses story, found himself drawn into a state of ecstasy and revelation as these word images flowed from him. So the inspired writer has his own numinous experience. Just because something is not in the literal physical world but in a human's inner world takes nothing of the reality and authority from it if one has a broad and solid enough view of reality to begin with.

Falling in Love: The fairly common experience of 'falling in love' should I think be taken as a strong sense of Sacred experience. Charlie Chaplin, like millions of others, writes ' Why are me feet so light? Why are the stars so bright? Why is the sky so blue? ..from the hour I met you?.. The world cannot be wrong if in this world there's you.” Such out of the ordinary ecstatic experience by so many probably says much more about a God of love in our hearts than it does about the beloved partner.

Dante's poetic experiences in Divine Comedy.(13^th century)

Other personal reports of ecstatic experience by famous and ordinary people from Marcus Borg's book ' The God We Never Knew”

Dear God of all that is and can be. Grant us an open heart and mind which can at moments catch a strong sense of your glory that was impressed upon those who walked with Jesus. Amen

GOD AND LOVE: A learning curve for me. February 19, 2014

Two quotes of C.G. Jung came up on my Facebook screen today. I've been familiar with both of them for many years. But it came as a reminder of the two most fundamental and far reaching changes in my perception of things most important over the past 30 years. Like most of my changes, which to me are of the nature of the meaning of the Greek word 'metanoia- 'to perceive something very differently than one once did', they came quite suddenly in the 'vision' experiences I had strongly for several years beginning es

 in mid August 1985. I was  working full-time  during all this except for a couple of months before the visions started. It was only after such ideas had been integrated into my mind that I found writers who were able to give me ways to understand this process of inner transformation. The one writer who helped more than any other was Carl Jung. Since those initial changes I have benefited from many of the things he wrote coming out of his amazingly wide range of study, both from outside sources and what he discovered in his own depths. 

As I have crossed the 70 year mark of life and am being encouraged by my doctors to have surgery on my neck to prevent more serious spinal cord and nerve damage, I feel prompted by the appearance of these two Jung quotes to state afresh the two themes that appear to me as ones fate had wired me to become more informed about. And to live out the implications of them as much as possible. I did not become significantly aware of these themes and how central they are to me until I was close to forty years old. And then quite quickly they both were calling for my attention from the outer events of my life and from the inner stirrings as well. The two themes have to do with the 'nature of God' and the 'nature of love.' These are not new to anyone and the world is full of words and ideas about them both, maybe more than any others. But I've come to believe that our conventional ideas and images of these two realities is far from being completed in the personal and collective development and of humankind. I think the new perceptions I came to have and am still working with point to changes in both that our Collective Consciousness is on the threshold of beginning to embrace. 

 If one went through my blog posts it is obvious that God and Love are central in the dreams and essays recorded there. So in this little essay I'm not going to repeat what I have learned or described of how my perception of these have changed. I will simply place here the two quotes of Jung with a simple preface to each of them. It is significant to me that on January 6, 2014, without any initial plan on my part, I stood for an hour and a half in the room where Jung, 60- 80 years ago, first wrote these things.

I. The first has to do with the nature of love. What Jung does here, written in the last years of his life and in the last pages of his quasi autobiography, is to confess his conviction that love is beyond any formal definition, though we must try to find the best metaphors for it and seek to observe its effects. And that the power of love can potentially still awaken humanity to a higher quality of living and consciousness which is beyond anything we have even imagined. This expresses my own estimate of love. A strong notion I carry is what the fullness of love would look and feel like in individual and collective human life , in ways I can't explain, is palatable in my deepest being. Some have felt I have romanticized love. I think I have simply taken it very seriously and been open for its living reality to teach me something of itself and about myself. I apologize for the Latin and Greek phrases. But you won't miss the general picture.

“In classical times, when such things were understood, Eros was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in any way.

I might as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abyss of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love.

Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. …. In my medical experience and my life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is. … No matter, no worse expresses the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful.

Love “bears all things” and endures all things” (1 Cor. 13.7)

These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and instruments of cosmogonic “love.”

I put the word in quotations marks to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring wishing, and similar feelings, but as something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a part , man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy.

He may assent to it, or rebel against i; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it.

Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see.

“Love ceases not”-whether he speaks with the “tongues of angels,” or with scientific exactitude traces the life of a cell down to its uttermost source.

Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions.

If he posses a grain of wisdom, he will know, ignotum per ignotius-that is by the name of God.

That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”
(Carl Jung – Memories, Dreams and Reflections p. 354 )

II. The Second theme that underscores the not consciously planned goal pursued by my life has to do with the nature of God. We should know as obviously true that no human thought or words can capture a full meaning of what our consciousness bearing species has always called God. For, similar to love, God is a whole of which we are only a part; a part can never grasp the whole. But we are an important part, for we bear the capacity of an ever widening consciousness through which to better know God. As humans we are the one thing in the universe, we yet know of , that can create any 'knowing of God.' If not for us(or conscious ones like us somewhere in the universe) God would not, could not be 'known' at all and in a most real sense not exist. It is a general fact that humans had from most ancient times carried the intuition that they might come to 'know God.' To know God fully would to be fully conscious which is impossible but it is reasonable that we could 'know' God more fully than what God has been known before, simply because we are potentially more conscious here and there than were our ancestors. As you listen to Jung speak of God from a very deep place within himself you hear him describe a reality that is far more present and real than any orthodox image has allowed. He sounds much like the N.T. description of God being that in which, 'we live, move and have our very being.'

The most troubling aspect of God that I came up against, and I think that any human could come up against, is that God is not morally perfect, not perfectly good. This for sure is the big kicker which seems to be the last idea any believer in God wants to even consider much less to claim. When the subject is raised most any orthodoxy leaves the room in an emotional disgust. The perfection of God is that last bastion that any orthodoxy or prejudice is willing to surrender for fear of losing God. It is the greatest taboo of all. Some would say that such an estimate of God's nature is to render God not God anymore, but I would say that is not true. It is even quite the opposite. 

This is not the place for me to go into any defense of this significant change in my perception but in a way I'm convinced; that one day in the life of any human taken with full seriousness and without anything to defend would teach this to all of us. Or a perusal of a few Old Testament stories, heard objectively with nothing to defend but the truth would send us away with some need to 'tell on' Yahweh for his immature and obnoxious ways at times. But because of the metaphors of God developed over time immemorial our resistance to such a notion is the very last aspect of an ultimate God that we would ascent to. It has been no different for me. And like the other rediscoveries I've made on my journey, this was through a direct raising of consciousness, not by academic discussions or reading Jung or anyone else.

There are many posts in my blog that work through this alarming aspect of God along with suggested readings of some of the finest minds of the human family. These quotations about God from Jung's mature work remind me that Jung experienced, as many others have, that what is actually God is far nearer and real than most dare to imagine and that God can be as terrifying and amoral as God can be a radiant expression of all that is good, light, faithful and loving. God is not a simplex of perfection to be defended but a complex to be discovered, as it is in reality, in the center of human life and consciousness.

Far from lessening my conviction of God's reality, crossing this threshold of perception brings God to greater constant reality and to my surprise leads to a strong and tender empathy for God. For it has made me aware that God suffers precisely the same kind of ways that I and my fellow humans do. For, after all, we are made in God's image. One N.T. Writer speaks of the Sacred as being one who knows suffering and disappointments (I would add imperfections) as well as us humans, thus making it possible for us to actually identify with each other. And it is from such suffering, and the raised consciousness it gives birth to, that both God and the creature human move to higher levels of consciousness, bringing to my mind a grander hope for a bright future for humanity and for the our planet than I ever could have had with my previous conventional perceptions. Here are some  words for your consideration about the nature of God from C.G. Jung.

Jung 1. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

“For the collective unconscious we could use the word God. But I prefer not to use big words, I am quite satisfied with humble scientific language because it has the great advantage of bringing that whole experience into our immediate vicinity.

“You all know what the collective unconscious is, you have certain dreams that carry the hallmark of the collective unconscious; instead of dreaming of Aunt This or Uncle That, you dream of a lion, and then the analyst will tell you that this is a mythological motif, and you will understand that it is the collective unconscious.

“This God is no longer miles of abstract space away from you in an extra-mundane sphere. This divinity is not a concept in a theological textbook, or in the Bible; it is an immediate thing, it happens in your dreams at night, it causes you to have pains in the stomach, diarrhea, constipation, a whole host of neuroses.

“If you try to formulate it, to think what the unconscious is after all, you wind up by concluding that it is what the prophets were concerned with; it sounds exactly like some things in the Old Testament. There God sends plagues upon people, he burns their bones in the night, he injures their kidneys, he causes all sorts of troubles. Then you come naturally to the dilemma: Is that really God? Is God a neurosis?

“Now that is a shocking dilemma, I admit, but when you think consistently and logically, you come to the conclusion that God is a most shocking problem. And that is the truth, God has shocked people out of their wits. Think what he did to old Hosea. He was a respectable man and he had to marry a prostitute. Probably he suffered from a strange kind of mother complex.”
 
Jung 2. “The absence of human morality in Yahweh is a stumbling block which cannot be overlooked, as little as the fact that Nature, i.e., God’s creation, does not give us enough reason to believe it to be purposive or reasonable in the human sense. We miss reason and moral values, that is, two main characteristics of a mature human mind. It is therefore obvious that the Yahwistic image or conception of the deity is less than that of certain human specimens: the image of a personified brutal force and of an unethical and non-spiritual mind, yet inconsistent enough to exhibit traits of kindness and generosity besides a violent power-drive. It is the picture of a sort of nature-demon and at the same time of a primitive chieftain aggrandized to a colossal size, just the sort of conception one could expect of a more or less barbarous society–'cum grano salis."

“This image owes its existence certainly not to an invention or intellectual formulation, but rather to a spontaneous manifestation, i.e., to religious experience of men like Samuel and Job and thus it retains its validity to this day. People still ask: Is it possible that God allows such things? Even the Christian God may be asked: Why do you let your only son suffer for the imperfection of your creation?

“This most shocking defectuosity of the God-image ought to be explained or understood. The nearest analogy to it is our experience of the unconscious: it is a psyche whose nature can only be described by paradoxes: it is personal as well as impersonal, moral and amoral, just and unjust, ethical and unethical, of cunning intelligence and at the same time blind, immensely strong and extremely weak, etc. This is the psychic foundation which produces the raw material for our conceptual structures. The unconscious piece of Nature our mind cannot comprehend. It can only sketch models of a possible and partial understanding.”

jung3“It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with this special content of it, namely the archetype of the Self.”

“God is reality itself.”

“God is a psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved.”

“All modern people feel alone in the world of the psyche because they assume that there is nothing there that they have not made up. This is the very best demonstration of our God-almighty-ness, which simply comes from the fact that we think we have invented everything physical – that nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea and it is an extraordinary assumption. Then one is all alone in one’s psyche, exactly like the Creator before the creation. But through a certain training, something suddenly happens which one has not created, something objective, and then one is no longer alone. That is the object of certain initiations, to train people to experience something which is not their intention, something strange, something objective with which they cannot identify.

“This experience of the objective fact is all-important, because it denotes the presence of something which is not I, yet is still physical. Such an experience can reach a climax where it becomes an experience of God.”

http://thesethingsinside.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/carl-jung-says-god-is-reality-itself/

Jim Hibbett

SERMON: "YOU'VE HEARD IT SAID,,,," Matthew 5: 21-32 January 16, 2014

This sermon is about a giant step in spiritual development and challenges me as much as it may any of you. The creative believer who wrote the gospel of Matthew's purpose was to convince Jewish people that Jesus was superior to Moses and other Old Testament Heroes. He was also establishing the idea that the final authority in an ethical human life lies in Jesus and what he taught. Chapters 5-7 is called Jesus' Sermon On The Mount and is considered the central teaching of Jesus and a guideline for living the most ethical life in harmony with God's will. Coming from a strong Conservative tradition, which usually takes the Bible quite literally, I once saw these things as straight forward and meaning 'what they say.' But I came to believe that is not the most informed way to view them. I wish to share with you basically where my process of reflection has led me.

"You have heard it said from the ancient past...."

We see immediately that Matthew is urgent to establish a high and ultimate authority to use in making the most important ethical and moral decisions in life. Here he has Jesus speak about what are still three of the most emotional, disturbing and controversial issues in private and public life. Murder, Adultery and Divorce. Matthew approaches each topic with ' You have heard it was said in the ancient past' ….such and such . But I tell you now... such and such.' So he has Jesus getting people to acknowledge that what they have till now viewed as final authority in the human life simply isn't, not in the way they had always thought.

Now, do you and I fully escape having to surrender what we have taken as absolute truth and authority as not being that way nearly as much as we thought? If the gospel is a timeless connection to life that is applicable afresh to each age of human development the answer must surely be 'No.' We too have likely taken on conventional handed down statements as fully true and final that we would be wise to reexamine. The human condition requires us to also hear Jesus saying, “You have heard it was said in the past... But not anymore. There is a richer, more grounded  source of ethical truth.'' It is so easy for us to think ,  "Well sure those people had to accept a new standard. But we have had that new standard now for 2000 years so all we need to do is do and believe as we have been told by the church and how we've interpreted Bible.” This, I fear, is the overly simplistic trap that every age and every church tends to fall into. It continues to be the human condition of an insufficient moral standard. I don't think it is just my ultra conservative heritage that has decided with too much certainty what Jesus is saying here about Killing, Adultery and Divorce but also much of the teaching of our so-called mainline churches as well.

We tend to hear Jesus saying, “The laws given by Moses, including the ten commandments, say to not kill, commit adultery or to divorce but I am putting these laws into a new framework and creating a new and better and higher written law.” I'm believing we need to challenge that. The more open minded, usually get it that Jesus is pointing the emphasis away from the the outward acts of these dangers of life and advising that we look to the heart and its intentions. This is surely a good and sound direction. Not only is murder wrong but to want to murder or harm another is wrong, not only is adultery, or breaking intimate covenant, wrong but even the desiring thought of that is wrong. And canceling the intimate relationship of marriage was never God's intention but a make-shift plan  because humans were just not up to making a monogamous love relationship be permanently alive. (Please keep in mind that people Matthew is writing to believed that it was nearly always a woman who committed adultery. Men were permitted to have multiple wives and the only way he committed adultery was to 'take another mans wife which was legally the other man's property. So Our American view of marriage is higher and far more monogamous for men than the Hebrew law was. Yet our divorce rate of over 50 % is far higher than many cultures.)

My main point is that to think Jesus is discontinuing one written, literal, for all -people for all times law about murder, adultery and divorce and replacing with another  is to widely miss the much greater and radical change in authority to which he is actually pointing. If we see Jesus as giving a new external law then Jesus' approach for a higher ethical standard will be fully missed. We, in our childlike need to always be told what to do by a rule or law, will miss 'where' Jesus says the final authority for life's most personal decisions is to be found. And I think this is what most orthodox Christianity has often done. If these words of Jesus are taken as 'new law' then he only makes the law more impossible to comply with. How much guilt has been heaped onto people by their thinking that their divorce, even their sadly confessed adultery, has so blackened their lives that they see themselves as spiritual failures. In some churches divorced persons are seen as not fit to serve in positions of leadership, sometimes being told they can never be married again or that a new marriage is not as holy as if it were their first? How many have grieved that they find themselves admiring the attractiveness and appeal, of someone other than their spouse and feel a load of guilt and distance from God for a very natural and innocent, possibly appreciative and respectful, inner awareness ? This all demonstrates the need of hearing Jesus' words not as any 'new law' but as pointing the way to the place where the ultimate personal authority can be found. That unlikely place is our own human heart, our very own inner being and its multifold processes. Jesus' teaching has said all along the human heart is the place where the image of God , the final authority, lives; not in any written or spoken law.

"But I tell you now...."

I believe Jesus taught that in the questions and decisions of life we are not to go primarily first to the outer act or event and with 'will power' say, “I am or am not going to do that.” This has been tried and found wanting. Will power is not spiritual power. We are a nation of well intended marriages with some 50 percent ending in divorce in spite of well intentioned will power. Jesus saying to go first to our hearts to find a judgment, a direction, an attitude seems to be a dangerous thing, but is it not the spiritually mature approach to the issues of life? Is it not where Jesus was always pointing people? 

I'm not suggesting this as a quick or easy way to 'know' what the highest ethical answers are to our complicated issues but I think Jesus points to a process that may be different and surprisingly helpful. I will give one general example of how going first to our heart might feel and look like.

Jesus said to not murder or even have the wish to murder. From an outer law perspective I know I(and I question the one who says they can) can't promise that, especially the second part. Might as well ask a rabbit to not hop. So you ask me, "Jim, are you a total pacifist?" From Christian teaching would you for sure refuse to kill another person, even if that person were about to kill another innocent, maybe your own child? I think I would be following Jesus' teaching by taking that to my most inner place and pondering it; putting aside any 'law' I 'must obey. If I fail to take an inner focus the more creative spiritual solutions are likely blocked from consciousness. We become 'stuck in law', not 'freed by Spirit.' What do I honestly find? I  presently find that I do not ever want to take another life. I am aware of my truth that such would be a most deep, sad heartbreak for me. That is for this moment the 'final authority' on the subject for me. What Jesus says about the heart being a place where killing can be seen for the horror it is I find to resonate with my heart and head reality. Beyond that I can make no oath or promise that in all circumstances I would choose to not kill a person who was threatening to kill another or myself. My heart's strongest desire-prayer would be that life would not require that of me. If I did kill, out of a sad heart, I  trust I would not see myself as turning away from God or Jesus. For I was doing the spiritual inner work of preventing this horror as much as I humanly could. This is a simple example but how I see Jesus pointing to an authority that is above all law , an authority that may even require a person at special times to move against all other conventional law whether it be civil , criminal or church law.

Determining to focus inwardly rather than on outer law  is  how we can see Jesus  directing us to the final authority  in our day to day , moment to moment living, in our decisions great and small. This then must also be the basic process which Jesus is saying is the path of humans finding  the way to  more fully love and be loved in this world.

Sermon: The Kingdom Of God Is At Hand....Matthew 4:12-23... January 26, 2014

The author of the gospel of Matthew uses the phrase 'Kingdom of Heaven' thirty times, three times saying, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” So for Matthew's first hearers to have a real feel for what Jesus had taught his closest followers was for them to have a heart felt experience of what 'kingdom of heaven being at hand' means. Surely if the Jesus story is to stay relevant it can mean something like that for us now. And, because Matthew says we enter it through 'repentance' or metanoia we potentially can claim that state of mind and reality by experiencing our view of life and living being turned on its head in some significant ways. Repentance for Matthew is not so simple as to, by our personal will power, stop some bad behavior and start good ones. No, it meant to have ones deepest evaluation of inner and outer reality transformed from whatever cultural and conventional point of view we have inherited.

Finding Treasure In A Field.

One may say, “But I’ve inherited my Christian faith. I was taught it. So surely I have the mindset of the 'Kingdom of Heaven is at hand' in blood, in my soul already. I need to expect nothing more or different.” To some degree just being around the stories of Jesus may result is some measure of a 'kingdom of heaven' attitude being absorbed into who we are. But we all likely have something still to look forward to if we have not had those moments when we are aware of the stark contrast between 'the kingdom of heaven' state of mind compared to our cultural, including church culture, point of view we have so deeply drunk from. Many devout persons of various Christian traditions are learning that much of our inherited Christian world view has become instead of a 'Kingdom of Heaven' mindset yet another conventional, materialistic and often moralistic point of view---much as we often find our assumptions about marriage, politics and nation are often as much un-pondered fantasy as fact. The Kingdom of Heaven being present, on the other hand, is something that the author of Matthew is saying we are invited to and can come by grace to experience authoritatively deep in very own being. And it comes not primarily because we have been told we should believe something but rather have had some convincing personal experience.

We find that Matthew believes himself to be in touch with a deep and truthful authority when he says Jesus taught and believed that the 'Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.'  In this narrative Matthew illustrates  how strongly a genuine inner religious authority can strike a human being in his/her depths. He illustrates this kind of unconventional authority by saying that those who were called by Jesus 'immediately left their belongings, occupations and parents' when they were face to face with such genuine authority. Is leaving our livelihood, belongings, and even family the way we would ever properly advise someone to respond to some conventional change in life? Of course not, we would rightly say, 'Examine it further. Sleep on it for goodness sakes. You may be being misled.' The kind of thing we say when one is car shopping. But surely still today when one comes face to face with the deeper inner spiritual forces of life, such as some did who were near Jesus, the need to obey this higher voice and its call is so authentic and authoritative that one would have no reasonable desire but to follow at nearly any cost. This is the nature I believe of what has always been referred to as 'call' and its not reserved for only prospective preachers. It is a natural phenomenon of the human soul.  And an experience of such authority is the nature of what it means to come under a fuller awareness of the reality that the 'kingdom of heaven is truly at hand.'

Off The Beaten Track

What might it mean and feel like to be moved by such a truth that Matthew says is so central to what it meant to be a Jesus follower? It would mean that as many questions as one may have and as imperfect his/her pattern of loving themselves and and others is, to trust the Kingdom of heaven is near means nothing less than: the potential of loving and being loved as the ordinary and expected experience of being human in this world. It means being given permission by the highest authority that it is appropriate and customary for a human being to live with an incomparable hope that life and the world is headed toward a better condition, not worse. And that each of us has something significant to do with which way it goes. The Kingdom of heaven being a hand means that no mater what other realities and disappointments are observed in life that there are means and forces beyond our present mortal comprehension whereby unsolvable political/social/family/moral issues may be transcended, even at a mass level. And to bring us all to a far more glorious view of just who we are and how each is part of the whole of reality and connected always to the Sacred foundations of all this is. This means that we can, without discrediting or splitting off our intellectual capacities and our latest technologies, be confident that life and love may be experienced on a scale far grander than any of our forebears were able to imagine. Such conclusions as these I think are natural to the state of mind that trusts 'the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'

A Fig Tree

May I leave you with Matthew's grand belief: Each of us is capable of coming to a new and broader point of view which affirms in us the right to trust that the very best of God and humanity is potentially yet to come. Even better, it can always be viewed as just around the corner, giving one a consistent 'stay tuned' attitude toward life. When we are open to and blessed with such a mindset we will be living our days and situation very much the way the first and closest friends of Jesus lived  theirs.... trusting that the 'the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'

SERMON- CROSSING THE GREAT PIT...Luke 16:19-30...Sept. 29, 2013

To many scholars this story is the climax to how the author of Luke presents the good news or gospel

of Jesus. Luke's primary emphasis is on bringing justice to human  life and our capacity as human participants to foster more just environments. His thesis Luke 1:52 says,  “God hath put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the humble and meek.”

This story also illustrates that the really deep questions of life are actually the most down to earth and practical issues, ones that any of us can become fully conscious of and involved in. When I was once deep in the preparation of a sermon my wife brought me me down to earth by saying. “ Jim, you ponder the really deep questions of life don't you? ' Who am I?' , 'Where am I going?' And most often, 'Where are my keys.?'

This story is truly a living symbol in that it has the capacity to grip ones whole mind and heart in a way that mere word descriptions could ever do. That is how Sacred texts are intended to work. It is the image of the 'deep pit' 'a bottomless chasm' which causes a permanent separation of persons who should be together, connected, united in life. But through negligence a pit so deep and wide has formed there is no hope of crossing it in either direction. A startling image of the potential of huge permanent losses and regrets. And this horror, keep in mind, is caused by human carelessness. This pit was allowed to grow deeper, not by cruel intention but by neglect, by carelessness, unthoughtfulness. It fits with Jesus' teaching, we truly can ' have eyes but not see, ears but not hear.' The rich man just simply 'cared less' than a human is allowed to, and get by with it. This story alerts us to our carelessness toward those around us right now in this life and the irretrievable harm it can do to our soul. We risk losing our essential humanity when we 'care less.'

One day I was careless with a skunk. Visiting my uncle's farm I was shown how to check my cousins traps and told how to handle the live animals caught. I was shown how to handle a skunk so it did not spray its stink on me. Sure enough, a skunk was in the trap the next morning. Carefully I managed to handle it , keeping it tails down. I headed to the house holding it by its tail. As I got near I began to yell, ' I've got a skunk, I've got a skunk'. I was already hearing fantasizing the praise coming from everyone about my achievement. Nearing the house in my exuberance I became 'careless' , the skunk got too close to my body, pulled itself up and sprayed me down good. The skunk got a way, my mother sent me to the barn, told me to hand out my clothes to be burned and instructed me I'd be sleeping in the barn until I was fit for human company. I had a moment's carelessness.

This story is about six well off brothers and a sick beggar man. Like most natural families the brothers care for each other but the sad thing is their care pretty much stops with their own circle. One of the brother's died. He is described as very wealthy compared to most. Lazarus is the only figure in all of Luke's parables that he gives a name. He names him Lazarus, 'God comforts.' Thus seeming to say, 'you had best take a good look at the Lazarus figures in our world' for our attitude about them shapes the person we will be forever. At first Lazarus is just a sick sore-infected beggar man. But when the two die suddenly they are both the same, both fully claimed by their human mortality. Both with no more control over earthly situations. They left behind only the aroma of how they had lived. The one who was so favored by this life is now pictured in much suffering and the one so cursed in this life experiences great joy.

The rich man and the poor man are in stark contrast to each other. They live side by side. The see each other come and go. All that separates them is the front door of the rich man's home. But they never connect because the rich man does not let his gaze, his attention, his care go toward the poor beggar. Because of his position and power the rich man had a greater obligation to close this gap, to cross the deepening pit, than did the poor beggar. But by not looking, by pretending the beggar and his suffering did not exist he turns away from him. Luke is showing us that it is here, in this life now, that the most serious chasms or pits exists It is the pits between us and our fellow humans in this life that need our attention, that we need to cross time and again. These are the chasms we can and must do something about. Luke is saying that any eternal pit of separation only exists because we have allowed pits and chasms to grow beyond measure right now in this life. The wealthy man could have easily behaved in a way that the pit between him and Lazarus could have been kept crossable. He could have crossed it by giving Lazarus opportunity and responsibility to do the same. He could have offered conversation to Lazarus. He could have kept face to face open eyed contact. He could have taken interest in his suffering and sought some ways to relieve it.

My skunk carelessness was real but not the serious moral and ethical carelessness this story is warning us about. All our close relationships.... family, children, spouses, friends, colleagues at work, friends at church have some measure of a pit separating us all the time. When we notice that someone is behaving differently, is withdrawing from normal interaction... that is our cue to step across the pit now. Don't ignore, don't wait and let it grow. Also, we are to learn that we have obligation to those groups and individuals in our culture who are different than us and maybe from the social norm. The ones we'd first prefer to turn away from. We either allow those differences to separate or we are earnestly cross the pits that otherwise become ones we can never cross. When others are struggling against being ignored in our social order or denied their rightful place, we need to offer our word and hand in support, cross that pit now. How thoughtfully we relate and gently cross such pits with honest communications and up-building words and deeds is all that prevents them from becoming eternal separations. Crossing these pits in our present lives is what our human experience here is most about. We are reminded, this kind of carelessness with life brings the greatest regrets imaginable. So our charge and warning is to keep crossing those potential pits in this life or else they will succeed in becoming separations that can never be crossed. Jim H.