SERMON: A Ladder Connecting Two Worlds...July 20, 2014

                                         Genesis 28:10-18      Matthew 13:44-45

This is a sermon I'd ask you to think of as the preacher thinking out loud. I suppose that is what every sermon actually is. But I ask that you take my words in the spirit of  being for  your consideration and questioning.

This Genesis story of Jacob's Ladder, and the gospel reading today, are like a 'dream' (no pun intended) for me for they give examples of some of the ways I have come in recent decades to view the nature of scripture. And ways I think Sacred text can be more successfully used as a resource-- to open up opportunities for experiencing the Divine other, or God. So I will seek to share how, especially the story of Jacob's ladder dream, strongly supports some of these ways of hearing and using scripture; ways which I think are being rediscovered in many quarters. Such changed perceptions I think are more likely happening in faith groups like the UCC for many of our pastors have pointed out to our people that much of scripture is symbolic rather than literal , inspired  mythical story rather than historical. So we can have this kind of conversation in a UCC church whereas I might not be invited back in many other places. But I hope these topics are being more discussed in many places in recent years.

                           

1. The text clearly shows that ordinary human nightly dreams, even when a stone is one's pillow, are potentially a rich source of spiritual transformation. After the dream Jacob declares, "Surely  the Lord is in this place, I just did not know it." The dream gave him needed wisdom he did not have before. If you read through the Bible time and again a person is led to an elevated spiritual insight, a genuine repentance, a transformation by a dream. A few whose lives and commitments were transformed by dreams include Joseph and the youth prophet/king Samuel. Interestingly, Eve is spoken of metaphorically as coming from Adam's rib while he slept. So for Adam we might say, Eve is pictured as his dream come true. In the NT both Peter and Paul were converted and transformed by dreams or visions. The whole book of revelation claims to be a dream like vision. So many of the major players in the Bible story were given wisdom and direction by their dreams. 
   
   
   But I think we all know that no prominent church today, conservative or liberal , shows signs of taking dreams seriously as a spiritual resource for transformation or enlightenment. This is primarily because our materialistic , over rationalistic culture has actually influenced us more than the Bible on this subject. When someone says 'I had a dream' most people even if interested are saying to themselves . 'Well its only a dream' so should not be worked with conscientiously. Fortunately many people were able to believe the prophetic Martin Luther King Jr, that his dream was substantive, an agent of social transformation. But where is the church that advertizes a 'dream class' where people are empowered in their effort to receive their dreams? That would be a very sound Biblical kind of class to have would it not?
   
   
2. I believe the word 'inspired' means that someone has written words or music or done art that is timeless in its application and its potential to transform persons at the level of their soul, spiritually transformational.  This is because it comes from the deep well springs of inner collective unconscious energies. Creative persons often confess that something came out of them that was more than their hard study, training or thinking. Something from another place was moving them as they worked. Break through scientists and mathematicians  often give such reports. If the creative minds who wrote scripture knew what we know now they would surely write a very different story and so must we in order to be faithful in our time.  We learn from the inspired giants of the past but we should not copy them.  For that is not truly us. With inspired material ,whether the Bible or Dante,it  thus means we are free and maybe obligated to find meaning that was completely foreign to the author and its first readers.
   
   It perfectly fit the ancient Hebrews' world view for Jacob's ladder to reach heaven , for heaven to them was just right there, the other side of the clouds, just beyond those tiny stars. But you and I distort and abuse our post-modern personal and collective knowledge to think of it that way. We understand the universe continues endlessly. And that heaven is not a physical place but a reality that is a mesmerizing state of mind and heart. So we distort this text if we fail to ask ourselves, 'What , for us, is the ladder connecting the earth to?"  I'd suggest that we all do have convincing reasons that there is a 'great unknown', a world beyond the world of our senses, an 'other world.' The best word I have heard to describe all that we do not yet know, that we are unaware of, that remains undiscovered is the Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious which is a term from analytical psychology. The idea perfectly fits our now expanding mentality and is not in conflict with our present day minds. Thus the Collective Unconscious can be as real and mysterious and as close to us as 'heaven' was to Jacob and his friends. 
   
   
3. So for the dream to have living application for us it can be saying , ' The known world and the unknown other world are connected, not split apart from each other, not strangers to each other. And just as angels have always been depicted as messengers of things otherwise unknown, we too can receive urgent hints, intuitions and dreams carrying to us important personal and collective natural wisdom. Wisdom so needed in our confused and hostile world. This then becomes a living dream and when we let that sink in might just cause transformations in us.. Suddenly our dreams, our hunches and intuitions become valuable and looked for treasures of wisdom. We begin to realize we are not only connected to all that is in this seen world but also to that unseen world. This might cause us to have our own spine tingling sense that , ' The Lord is truly in this place but I just did not know it. How awesome, this dream is the gate to the Unknown.” God is not only in majestic nature though God is there, God is not just a part of the unknown world though God is there, not just in temple , synagogue, mosque , church or cathedral -though God is there. God, because there is rich communication happening continuously now( the angels on the ladder never stop their information process) between this world and the unknown world , is always right here, right now. Such is the potential power of a transforming dream, hunch or intuition arriving at just the right time.

4. Finally, the best open minded Biblical scholarship for the past century informs us that this whole story may very likely not be literal history. But instead is primarily inspired symbolical story. If we emphasize or insist that it is history it becomes frozen in the past and only a 'once upon a time' event with little present relevance. The power of this story, and most others in scripture, lies not in its history but in its symbolism. When taken symbolically it can potentially live today and even be trans-formative just as the story says it was for Jacob. Interestingly, when Joseph began to have his dreams as a child (people today might say with raised eye brows.... when he was crazy.) his brothers mocked him and called him the silly dreamer. Unlike Joseph's brothers, Jacob is not shown ridiculing his youngest son. Why? Perhaps Jacob, from his own dreams like this one, had learned that the strongest and most needed wisdom does not come from rational logic and common sense(though how very important these are), but it comes from the unknown world.... like a flash, fully irrational, just like your own dreams. It comes by dreams, visions and timely intuitions or just from out of the blue. But is it not far more likely to come if we take with genuine seriousness there is a Great Unknown(How can we deny that humbling confession?)? A Great Unknown we can name the Collective Unconscious, the source of everything that has been, is or can be? And when we are convinced by inner and outer realities there are indeed messenger processors continually bringing back pearls of great price and buried treasures more valuable than the fields where they were found? 
   
   
   May God bless and strengthen our natural longings to trust that the Great Unknown seeks our open hearts and minds where she can bring the much needed wisdom into everyday individual and collective human life. Amen.

AN ADDENDUM TO 'JESUS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT' June 29, 2014. Edited July 1, 2014

This is an addendum to the post of July 23, 2011 'Jesus And The New Testament'. It is a significant enough insight, in my judgment,  that I am making a separate post of only the addendum  itself.

Addendum  June 29, 2014:  (Based on a Facebook post describing a book Notes From (Over) The Edge.. by outstanding progressive Christian writer Jim Palmer.) I think there is a need to find words as Christians that do not make the name of Jesus the center and end-all  of the human path to fuller love,  joy and  meaning of life so needed today. I think it is closer to the truth to say  that the archetype of Jesus and 'The Christ' is an example of the first fruits of humanity's evolved capacity to receive and give love in a more extensive way than ever before. Jim  Palmer's message is a great resource to those suffering the throes of Christian dogma but Jesus is only part and one opening to the path to a more embracing, inclusive human life and love. This may be missed  in Palmer's continuous Jesus emphasis? But  I am indeed very grateful for his voice and the attention it receives by those suffering deep religious transformations. It is a good and loving voice born of real experience.                                                                                                                                                

The Jesus story must surely be a great leap forward  in the unfolding  process of God becoming human , not the completion of it. Because by the time the gospel writers have finished writing about  him he is truly no longer a representative of the  pure empirical human .... but one born miraculously, existing with God from eternity, living beyond nature at his willing, whereas nature and its principles is the only true and full  home for all humans.  So the incarnation of God in man, in the Jesus story,  had its start in one who became, in the minds of the collective who followed him, far more than a human. 

The Jesus story describes what was a profound  leap  in history toward more and more truly ordinary humans  (not of unnatural miracle making  or 'eternal with God' humans ) to be the place of God becoming fully human. I think such did happen in the real and limited human Jesus of Nazareth. But the "darkness(the collective consciousness of Jesus' day) could truly not comprehend that light" and the drastic change it heralded in the meaning of direct connection and interdependence of God and Human. And so the collective human psyche protectively  backed away from  such bedazzlement by producing, in the gospels,  the archetypal hero Jesus, the claimed 'one and only ' place where God has "dwelt among us." (It's like humanity could only bear the consciousness of its evolving  mutuality with God by approaching it in historical stages, Jesus thus  being interpreted as only half human. This way humans could indirectly approach the dazzling light of the Sacred.  That light was just too bright to contain at first  for the mortals who surrounded Jesus).

The latest evolution of  God and Human drawing near to each other  is what  could be a dazzling 'numinous' image for some, otherwise quite materialistic and/or past  believers in an orthodox anthropomorphic(human like being) god, people today..... that God incarnate in the human Jesus was such a bright light psychologically  it could only be tolerated by creating Jesus into something  more than human. The split moment a person first  realizes, becomes conscious,  today that God seeks to become fully human in  ones own self can be such a leap into the beyond-space-and-time world that it calls forth in today's human consciousness an authoritative non-negotiable experience of the 'numinous' or bedazzlement  of the reality of  God. One at such a moment may become a 'believer' in the richest and most comprehensive meaning of the word. This potentially could parallel and transcend  the experience behind any  'miracle' story we read about in ancient religious texts. Jesus is  clearly  presented in the gospels  as only perhaps half human and the rest god.  But  now, two millennia  later, we are more psychologically prepared  to 'see' just what the expression 'God becoming Human' is actually saying about us all and our mutual connection to the Divine.   

 Hopefully we are beginning to see more clearly the continuation of what the Jesus story shows us in its natural  mythical symbolism, not historical recording, as the first fruits of the emerging capacity of the creature-human, in a mutual cooperation with the eternal creator God principle, to experience personally being extensively  more fully loved and loving.(The gospels have not become mythical and  symbolic in our day, they have been that from the beginning. We are just rediscovering it. ) This to me is the nature of the hope that is now available , not just to the individual but to collective humanity with all of its hostilities and threats to end itself.  

This can be a sound psychological/spiritual  understanding for the next great step for a third millennium new unfolding of the meaning of the Jesus story, making it more transparently not self-serving but collectively relevant and meaningful for our day and for humanity's  most urgent needs.

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.