RethinkingOurStory

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As we have seen, two strands of Christianity have been standing side-by-side, almost from the beginning of our faith. One drew a dualistic distinction between the physical and the spiritual. The other saw body and spirit as a unified whole. The former taught us that it is necessary to rise above our bodies, to rise above the physical, material world if we would experience God. This strand of Christianity taught us to shun our bodies and physical, earthy things if we wanted to grow spiritually. It taught us that there is a split between piety, devotion, and spirituality on the one hand, and secular, physical, worldliness on the other.

The latter, the integrated strand, rejected the idea that we have to escape or suppress the physical world if we want to experience God. In this approach to Christianity, we sense and experience the divine within the material, physical world. In this way of being Christian, we assume that we will experience God in nature, in human society, in art, literature, science, politics.

St. Francis talked about communing with God in solidarity with the birds, the insects, the sun, the moon. For him, and the non-dualistic way of seeing our faith, the best place to look for God is in the material world. At its best, our religion has taught us that we can sense the Divine in the food we eat, in the trees that give us air to breathe, in the bodies of our lovers, and in the smell of our children. The sacred is to be found in our bodies, in our senses, in our muscle, and ligament, and bone, and blood. God inhabits those very material parts of our humanity.

At NRCC (our spiritual community), we frequently say God is as close as close can be. This includes our lungs, legs, and the dirt we walk on.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this poem…
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
and every common bush afire with God.
Only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

It has been difficult, influenced as we have been by Gnostic dualism, to see every-day, common bushes as being afire with God. But as we see our Story more clearly, we sense that God is present in the material, that we are made physical and spiritual; and that the two are not at odds.

We belong on this earth, and God is experienced in the very physical material-ness around us. We belong on the earth, and we are spiritual. We belong in the material world, in society, and in nature. These are places we expect to encounter God, places we expect to sense the Divine.

The material-spiritual split was never Jesus’ idea, never part of our tradition. Jesus, Paul, and the Hebrew origins of our faith all reject the idea that we don’t belong in the physical world. Rather, they teach us that we are in league with Creation.

One of the most well-known passages in scripture is Romans 8. It has a decidedly un-Gnostic view of the earth, and of our human place in the earth. Listen to how Paul frames the world in Romans 8:19-21

All of creation waits in eager expectation for the sons [and daughters] of God to be revealed.  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the one who subjected it, but our hope is that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom that we, the children of God await.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

This passage of Paul’s suggests that there is a cosmic adventure afoot for the whole of creation. It tells us that the entire created order waits with eager anticipation to be ’set free from its bondage to decay.’ It tells us that the groans of creation are the groans of labor pain, the anticipation of a new birth, not those of a terminal disease.

This vision in Romans 8 is not a vision of the material world destroyed and dispensed with, but rather, of humanity and creation journeying together toward the Divine future purpose. Creation is not a departure point for the human spirit, but a traveler with us on the journey to Divine eternity. The earth is not a booster rocket we leave behind as we soar off into our spiritual-but-not-physical future. No, Creation is coming with us! Whatever it is that happens to us in eternity, whatever redemption, restoration, or remaking awaits us, it awaits all of creation as well. The world, the universe, physical “stuff,” has booked passage on the same voyage we have. Like us, the earth is moving toward the great mystery before us, the unknown and transcendent future we can only see faintly.

Like us, Creation began in glorious wonderfulness. In the beginning, all of it was pronounced good by God. But also like us, our Story tells us, it fell into corruption and illusion, just like we did. Throughout history there have been divine whispers from prophets, sages, poets, and saints, all pointing toward a future for us, and for Creation. It is a future filled with hope, redemption, and restoration.

All of creation groans in eager anticipation that we will all be set free from decay. Paul’s expectation, Paul’s religion, Paul’s Christianity, does not speak of the human spirit alone inheriting the purposes of God. It does not see the rest of creation, the rest of the material world condemned and destroyed while the human spirit ascends to heaven. No, rather, Paul’s idea is that humanity and creation are on this journey together, both, on their way to the fulfillment of a Divine Story, both on their way to a new Reality. We’re in this thing together, God’s Creation and us!

Most importantly, the spirituality that is built on this strand of Christianity is very different from the spirituality built on the dualistic one. This Christian spirituality honors Jewish heritage more than Gnostic. The spiritual-material split was never a Jewish way of seeing things. Jewish scriptures, interpreted by Jewish people fostered a voracious appetite for life in all of its material expressions. The material world is to be savored, enjoyed, and in it, one can expect to find the sacred, the Divine.

Listen to the writer in Ecclesiastes 9

I’ve looked at life from every angle, and this is what I come to…  Enjoy the life you have.  Eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do.  Always be clothed in white, (ie. Stay cool in the hot sun), and always anoint your head with oil.  Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this… life that God has given you under the sun.

This way of living, this way of being spiritual, this way of following God, is very different from the Gnostic-influenced way. It is very different from a “matter-is-so-bad-it-can-only-burn” way. It is not at all, about having to rise above the earth we live on. It is not a view that begrudges nature it’s sometimes niceness, while maintaining that it is really corrupt to the core. It is not a declaration that if we want to commune with God, we must rise above the physical realm, or, suppress it, or, overcome it. No, it is a spirituality that acknowledges the sacredness of the earth, the sacredness of our bodies, and the sacredness of Creation.

It is a Christian spirituality that walks on this earth, looking expectantly for the glimpses of God that are ever-present. It is a spirituality of belonging, not of alienation (recall last week). It is a spirituality at home in culture, at home in nature, at home in commerce, at home in politics. It is a spirituality that does not disdain human society, but seeks Divine life and breath in the midst of it. It is a spirituality that sees the broken and fouled parts of culture, of media, of society, not as the inevitable outcome of corruption, but as parts of God’s beloved Creation in need of redemption.

This Christian spirituality isn’t about Jesus changing us from the badness that is our intrinsically corrupted ugliness. Not at all.  It’s about helping us find way back to our true selves; a spirituality of realizing that which is already, that which has always been within us. It’s a spirituality of restored awareness and realization that we are made of wonderful, majestic, Divine essence. It is a spirituality of becoming once again, more truly human, more truly in the image of God, more truly awakened to the Way, the Truth, the Life.

And thus, it is a spirituality of recovering what has been lost. As we reawaken to our true selves, we sense built right into us, the impetus to be redeemers in our own right, to be repairers of the earth. Built right into our sense of connectedness and belonging, is a kinship with the planet, a kinship with the people of the planet.

In the affirmation that all of Creation exists and throbs with the energy of Divine Spirit, this spirituality grounds us in the physical-spiritual and it gives us a part to play;  a contributing part, a repairing part, a healing and restoring part. Our world is full of pain and injustice. For us to take the role Jesus outlined for us in his teachings, we must share a sense of connectedness with all people. When we see people whose lives are afflicted by suffering, pain, inequality, oppression, hunger, poverty, we realize that we belong to the earth; we belong to one another. Each person is my brother, my sister. Each person is mine to care about because I belong here.

I’m not escaping this planet to my true spirit-not-flesh heaven out there in the distant realm, in the distant future. No, this broken earth belongs to me and I belong to it. I’m an owner here, not just a guest. Consequently, when something is broken, to the extent that I am able, it is to me to fix it. I belong on the earth, to the earth, and to the people of the earth. I belong to the businesses and the families and the neighborhoods. I belong, and I have a mission born of that belonging.

Here on this sacred earth, belonging as I do, when I see the plight of those who hurt, it is never my Christian place to say; “There, there.  It will be better when you get to heaven.” No, it is to me to say that our God is redeeming all of the cosmos; that our God has entrusted to us all, and to me in particular, some small role in the redemptive process; that our God has placed me here and made this my home, and that God is redeeming me and at the same time employing me in the redeeming of the earth.

So quite naturally, we followers of Jesus take up the business of our God, take up the family business, going about our days, repairing and redeeming the earth. Of course we do!  We’re owners here, we’re family. We take care of our home. We are salt, spread on the earth to preserve everything, for everyone. We are light, shining on the earth for so everyone can be free of darkness.

Historically, those who have seen their humanity this way, those who have seen their Christianity this way, have been the leaders and instigators of many, if not most of the major movements for social change and healing in the West. Those not influenced by the Gnostic virus, have been able to hear and resonate with the teachings of Jesus, and with the imperative Jesus gave us to engage with our society, to heal our society, to care for our society. To these, repairing the earth was not an afterthought, but the very centerpiece of Jesus’ message on the Kingdom of God.

For these, ours is not the Christianity of the short-term outsider, just passing through, but of the owner, the stayer, the engager, the caregiver. For these, our starting image is that God made the earth, stated clearly that it was good, and not Evil, not the Devil, not the Fall, not pollution, not corruption, nothing, undoes the essential and intrinsic goodness of the material world that is our home.

So…
As we finish this section on rethinking human nature, let us not forget that the very image of God is vested in our deepest being. Let us not forget that our bodies are of God. Let us not forget that our earth, the rocks, trees and animals are of God, and that we belong here. Let us not forget that as such, when the earth is broken, it is to us as followers of Jesus to be repairers of the breach.

Be it so in our souls; be it so in our lives. Amen

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Last time, we were rethinking human nature, and specifically, we were looking at the historical origins and implications of dualism. The particular kind of dualism we were looking at is relevant to the Christian Story, it is body-spirit dualism, or physical-spiritual dualism. We saw how another religion, Gnosticism, began to emerge at the same time Christianity was beginning, and we saw how this religion was heavily influenced by the Greeks, by Plato’s philosophy of the theory of forms.

Gnosticism’s idea was that there were many layers of God, and the God Jehovah, the God who created the earth, was a second-layer god. The first-rung God, “Pleroma God” would never have had anything to do w/ matter, w/ the physical world. Matter was seen as too base, too inferior to the spiritual world to be worthy of God.

And, we saw, that even though Gnosticism as a religion has passed away, it has remained tucked away, like a virus, within Western Christianity, coming and going through the generations. It had some wonderful insights that led to the Christian contemplative tradition, but it had some toxic effects on Western Christianity as well.  In particular, it has led to deep sense of human alienation from Creation.

If matter is bad, if flesh and blood are bad, and if only the human spirit, the Divine spirit are good…  And if human beings are so clearly made of matter, made of flesh and blood, it is easy to see why we view ourselves very much at odds with our own existence. We have been taught that the very stuff from which we are made is a toxic poison.

And sure enough, Western civilization, and Western Christianity in particular, has been extremely uncomfortable with the physicality, the carnality, of human nature. We are at odds with our bodies, with our earth, with our world.

In the 20th century, the term “alienation” was a key interpretive grid for those w ho would analyze history, philosophy, or society. It has become the lens through which scholars look at the 20th Century. Wherever we look at Western thought or experience, that word seems to pop up. As a by-product of this body-spirit dualism, modern people have, for the last 150 years, been asking these fundamental questions:
- What’s wrong with me?  Why am I so separate, apart, isolated?
- Why are we so estranged from our world, our work, our people?
- What’s wrong with us?

Here in the West, there has culminated over centuries under dualism, a loss of connectedness to ourselves, to one another, to society, to the earth. Our instincts have led us to economic, political, and social structures that imbed in us a sense of dislocation from the earth. The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution gave rise to an all-encompassing sense of individualism, life became a marketplace, and we became competitors with one another. The village disappeared, the clan, the tribe, and the neighborhood. As competitors, we are divided from one another, and were no longer in this life together. It became instead, a dog-eat-dog world.

Further, the Western Christian mind could no longer see the sacredness of the world. We looked for sacredness only in the ethereal, only in far away. And when we did, we became increasingly disconnected

from the spiritual that is ever-present in the earthiness of the earth, in the earthiness of flesh and blood, in the earthiness that are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers; in the physicalness that is our food, the rocks, the grasses, the animals, the birds, and the sky.

Matter never stopped being sacred; Western Christians just stopped seeing the sacred in the material world. And when we did, ours became a culture of estrangement. We became stranged from the earth, estranged from one another, and estranged from the sacred that is present in the very earthiness of our bodies.

And what were the origins of this estrangement? It came from the insertion of Gnostic body-spirit dualism in the second century. It came from divide put between the physical and the spiritual. It certainly did not come from our Hebrew origins. It certainly did not come from the teaching of Jesus. It came from the Greek view, the Gnostic view that matter is worthless and spirit is invaluable.

Now again, as we saw with the doctrine of creatio ex nihlo, this was a very helpful way to think if you were an imperial Roman force, trying to dominate the known world. If matter is worthless, it is quite easy to ravish the earth for its resources. If physical bodies are worthless, it is quite easy to crush them to build an empire. (and, by the way, to do so with the church’s blessing!).

And the same has been as true of any Western enterprise seeking to establish empire. It was true of the Roman empire under the Caesars in AD 400. It was true of the French empire under Charlemagne in AD 800. It was true of the British empire under Elizabeth in the 1600’s. It remains true of the American empire from the 1800’s to today, and it was true of the Nazis in the 1930’s.

Whenever a group has sought to build an empire, the sacredness of matter, the sacredness of human bodies, the sacredness of the material world, have all been subjugated to the abstract concept of empire. And the church has been there to bless the transaction, accommodating empire with doctrines that were clearly not of Jesus, clearly not of scripture, and clearly not of our Hebrew moorings.

Any Christian teacher (Pelagius, Ireneus, etc.) who said that the gifts of nature are as holy as the gifts of the cross, were declared heretics, excommunicated, or killed by the empire. So over time, in our religious doctrines, we have enshrined the goodness of the abstract concept of spirit, and we have enshrined the badness of the concrete physical world of human flesh.

Of course, we’ve become alienated from our very selves.  We think to ourselves; how could God ever inhabit me, this bad, bad fleshiness that I am? How could the divine ever inhabit me? How could the Holy Spirit ever indwell my awful, sinful, traitorous housing of flesh? I am (we’ve been taught) of the material world, and consequently, bad, bad, bad.

When we are alienated from our own bodies, our own planet, the core realities of the spiritual life are rejected. How can we think of ourselves as truly spiritual, we are so much a body? How could this world possibly demonstrate God? It is made of matter and matter will surely burn.

So over these centuries, Christians have developed a view of themselves as strangers, aliens, and outsiders. We believed ourselves not living in our true home, that place of pure spirit far, far away from here, out there in heaven…  that is our one and true home.

We tell the Story of God and of ourselves like this: We once lived in a beautiful garden, but even though the scriptures tell us we were removed from the garden, but the garden remained, we have taught one another that Evil was so powerful, that it completely undid the beauty and divine origins of the earth. Now, the universe has been so corrupted and polluted by sin, it has become so filthy, that nothing other than corruption can be expected here. The very DNA of the planet is corrupted.

Consequently, the future of this earth can be nothing else but to burn, to be totally wiped out, to be totally destroyed. Of course, different Christian groups differ on how and when that will happen, but inevitably, the only future of the planet is destruction. And when it is destroyed, then Christian people will be whisked away to a place of pure spirit, free from the ravages of matter and the physical world. Our posture on the earth as Christians, then, is to be one of waiting; waiting patiently until we go to heaven where we’ll find our heart’s true home. We are not to get too connected to the polluted garden, these are just temporary digs for us. We are not to unpack our bags or get too comfortable, because ours is the role of an alien, estranged, and outsider.

We do have a job to do while we’re here, it is to tell the Message that the garden is going to burn, and that only true followers of God will be taken away. Ours is to tell people to join us in committing your hearts to God, and to begin waiting with us for the garden to burn; to join us in awaiting our hasty get-away.

This poisonous telling of the Christian Story has evolved because our starting sense of human nature was of spiritual self trapped in an evil body; a sense that we are nothing but foreigners in a strange land, aliens passing through, awaiting our get-away from this doomed planet. With this as our starting point, Christians will have little concern for the planet. We will have little concern for redeeming the world we live in, and very little incentive to repair the earth. Why would we make things on earth as they are in heaven, if the earth is a sinking ship?

So you see; how we think of ourselves is a critical part of how we tell the Xn Story. This mis-telling began, not with Jesus, not in our Hebrew origins, but in the spiritual-physical dualism that caused us to deplore our very selves, drove us to dislike our very beings, and gave us a deep, deep sense of shame and guilt that there is something fundamentally wrong with having a body.  And being alienated from ourselves, we became alienated from one another.

This, I submit to you, was a bad thing. This, I submit to you, was not the message of Jesus, and this, I submit to you, is a mis-telling of our Story with enormously negative implications for everyday Christian people like you and me.

Next week, we’ll talk about a way to retell the Christian Story without the baggage of spiritual-physical dualism.

Next time.

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In this, the 3^rd section of our year-long project, we’re rethinking the essence of human nature.  Before our spring break, we saw how the way we tell the Christian  Story has tended to neglect the beginning:  the “made-in-image-of-God” part. We’ve tended to magnify the doctrine of original sin to the point that it eclipses the doctrine of imago dei.

So we spent some time thinking about the implications of the cornerstone belief that we are made in the image of God.  As we said, it doesn’t remove the toxicity or destructive power of sin in our lives, but it does imply that this sinfulness is our false, not our true self.

If you missed, listen to the last few weeks to catch up

Today, we shift to one more issue related to how we think about our humanity. When I introduced it several weeks ago, I used the word “dualism.”

Dualism means many things in many traditions. In the East, it means the overarching categories of two-ness in life. It means the opposition and combination of the universe’s two energies. It is a philosophy of balance between opposing forces, the yin and the yang of existence. In other traditions, dualism referos to or questions a separation between matter and mind. Still others use the term to talk about the moral conflict between good and evil.

For our purposes, we talk about dualism in the context of how Christians through history have thought about our own human nature. The two poles in this binary opposition are spirit and flesh. The opposition is between the spiritual and the physical and material.

This form of quasi-Christian dualism has its origins in a religion that began to compete with Judeo-Christianity in the years immediately after the apostles lived. It was called Gnosticism, and it began to mingle withe Christianity in those early years.

Early Christian leaders called Gnosticism a direct contradiction of the teachings of Jesus, Paul, and the disciples. Nevertheless, it did mingle deeply with the early origins of Christianity. Even though Gnosticism itself died out, it infected Western Christianity so thoroughly, that it remains in a Christian form today. Like a flu virus, it periodically returns throughout the centuries, attacking our fundamental view of ourselves.

Here’s what Gnostics believed; Human beings are divine souls, however, they are trapped in a world made by an inferior god. When Gnosticism ran into the God of the Jews and Christians, they came to believe that this inferior god was the God of Abraham (Jehovah). They conceded that the God of Abraham made the cosmos, but their view was that this creator-god was a lesser god. The true godhead-god, sometimes called Pleroma-god, or fullness-god; this was the supreme God, the god of pure spirit.  And clearly, the pure-god would have nothing to do w/ nasty physical matter.

When Gnosticism began to mingle w/ the newly emerging Xn religion, it began to challenge the ancient Judeo-Christian view that the world was good (cf. the Genesis account).  Whereas the Jewish and Christian view savored and loved the material world; whereas the Jewish and Christian view saw God present in the material world, this new Gnostic-Christian mix, began to see human nature through the lens of spirit-matter dualism. Spirit came from the Pleroma-god, flesh came from the lesser-god. Consequently, the material world was of lesser worth, a necessary evil, transient, wicked, temporary, and of very little value.  On the other hand, the spiritual world was where the real value could be found. The spirit world lasts forever, the spirit world is precious, the spirit world is real, and thus, the spirit world isto be pursued.

Matter and the material world on the other hand, the cosmos, the human body, the physical earth; these things were demonized in this Gnostic version of Christianity. Simply put, Spirit is good, matter is evil.

And the human being was seen as the battleground between these two great elements.  Human beings were pure human spirit is trapped in evil physical bodies.

And since the body was bad, sexual appetites were bad. So was the desire for food. Savoring the taste of ice cream… bad!  The desire for sleep…  bad!  The desire for comfort, warmth, coolness, human touch… all bad, bad, bad!

Like other religions in the Mediterranean before and at the time, salvation, in this Gnostic-Christian hybrid religion, was to be found by being freed from the physical realm.

Much of Western Christianity came under the influence of this Gnostic-Christian mix. We still see its influence in Christianity today. Many of us were taught explicitly or tacitly, that sexual desire and pleasure were something to be ashamed of. Many of us were taught that body desires are not to be trusted. Many have been taught that this material world will burn, and only the spiritual will survive.

Our mis-telling of the Christian story has had the effect of dislocating us from the physical world that comes from God. We are dislocated from the desires of our bodies, dislocated from our environment (it’s only going to  burn anyway), and dislocated from the material world.

In my own church upbringing, we had a tacit understanding. If one did not do a religious job, it was all right, but it was also pretty well understood that doing so was settling for second best. The desire to design circuits, or plumb houses, or make films; these were not really spiritual endeavors, and consequently, they were distractions. Any joys that come from the material world, any joys accrued by working to create something did not matter that much.

By the 5^th Century, this Gnostic-Christian hybrid religion had taken such hold over Western Christianity, that we began to retell the Hebrew parts of Story. (We’ll see next week, the Hebrew worldview is very different from the Gnostic.)  By this time, instead of our Story having the Christ-child being conceived in Mary’s womb, conception took place in her ear, by spoken word only. Presumably, contact lower than the neck would not be fitting for the Holy Spirit of God.

These mental gymnastics would make us laugh if they hadn’t done so much damage to so many people in Western Christianity, especially to our view of our own human nature. When we sever the spiritual from the physical, we deny the beginning of our story where God said; “it is good, it is good, it is so very good!”

Also, we sold ourselves the belief that our bodies, our material existence was infected with ugliness and existential flaw.  As a result, we separated very material subjects like food from the sacred.  And note that as we have done so, our culture has a very crazed relationship with food.  We separated sex from the holy, and again, became a sex-crazy society. We bought into a religiously imposed sense of rejection, and become a deeply alienated and insecure society.

At about this same time, (the 4^th or 5^th Century), another doctrine began to resonate with this demotion of the material world. That doctrine was called creatio ex nihlo, the belief that God created the world out of nothing. Again, this doctrine was a Roman overlay; not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the teaching even of all Christians. Up in the north of the empire, outside the Roman demand for cookie-cutter conformity, the Celtic teachers all insisted that God did not create the universe out of nothing, but created the universe out of God. God’s breath breathed into us, was creation from God.

“Once you accept this added value that is God, then you’ll be something! You’ll be Roman, you’ll be Christian, you’ll be something instead of nothing.”

If you want subordinate the known world as the Romans did, creatio ex nihlo is a handy little doctrine to have at your disposal.

But we should note that other, less imperial Christian traditions have always taught Christ a very different way. In these tellings of our Story, Christ shows us that matter matters. These versions of Christian spirituality revere matter and see God in the whole of the created world. To them, all of the universe is alive with the movement of Spirit, and Christ doesn’t lead us away from matter, but more deeply into a daily resonance with the Holy Spirit present in all that is, in all that is always in and around us.

Now again, it was convenient for the Romans to believe in a distant Creator who disdained matter. If you’re going to crush human bodies, it’s convenient to believe that they are not sacred. If you’re going to dominate the land of other peoples, it’s convenient to believe that land itself is not sacred. If you’re going to exploit Creation, it’s convenient to believe it is neutral at best, the enemy of Spirit at worst.

But this is just not the way our story goes.

Judeo-Christians believe that spirit is good and flesh is good. God made it all, God pronounced it good, and God put the Divine right into the very essence of the material world. So the land is sacred, the body is sacred, the animals are sacred, and humanity is sacred. All are made by God, all are made of God, so of course they are sacred.

This is our Christian story.

More on this next week.

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It is a universally recognized human experience that there are two natures within us.  We see in ourselves the noble, the divine, virtue, graciousness, and decency.  We also see in ourselves the ignoble, the base, the scandalous, the unethical, and the indecent.

Trying to explain and deal with this seeming dichotomy in our human nature has been the jurisdiction of religion from the beginning. In the traditional telling of the Christian Story, we’ve tended to define the essence of our humanity more by the second, the base, scandalous, dark side of our humanity.

Last week, we looked at two traditional Christian doctrines, Original Sin and Total Depravity. The former, I said, is often misinterpreted to dismiss the cornerstone belief in our Story, that we are made in likeness of God.  The latter, I said, just seems a function of a collective sense of self-loathing. Who can look at the innocence of a child, or the love of a parent for a child, and say there is nothing within us but corruption and perversion?

We have, I said, given inadequate weight to a cornerstone belief in our tradition, Imago Dei, the doctrine that we are made in the very likeness of God, filled with the breath of God, the Spirit of God, the stuff of God.

Now again, this is not to undercut the venomous power of the darkness within us. No.  However, it is to say that the darkness does not define us. We are not our sin!

The misinterpreted recounting of original sin, tells us that what is deepest within us is opposed to God. It tells us our fundamental essence needs to be changed, that our intrinsic existence is anti-God, anti-spiritual, anti-virtue.

There’s a troubling implication of this line of thinking.  If our fundamental essence must be changed to be spiritual, once that happens, once we get “saved,” once we experience whatever alteration of our natural self that Christian experience promises to affords us, something quite unsettling happens. We become alien to the rest of humanity that has not yet had this essence-altering spiritual experience.

This puts us directly at odds with the world, directly in conflict with the rest of humanity.  Discord is sown between the universal “us” and the not-yet-morphed “them.”

It is a little bit of a dichotomy to call such a message “the gospel.”  That word means “good news,” but, that we are false…  that we are evil…  that we are depraved and un-virtuous…   this is not news. It is something  every human on earth already knows. We’re fully aware that we are foundering in falseness and a diminished nature.

Also, it can hardly be counted “good” news that as we grown on our journey we become increasingly alienated from the rest of humanity.

Perhaps we have our Story wrong.  Perhaps the gospel is given to tell us something we don’t already know, something we have forgotten, something we have lost. Perhaps, the gospel is given to bring us back to what has always been true, that we are made by God, that we are of God, and that we are sons and daughters of the Divine. The gospel restores us to the Truth that we are not fundamentally opposed to the Source from which we come.  We are intimately linked to God at the very core of who we are. We are, in our essence, one with the transcendent Supreme.

Yes, we have lost our sense of God and our sense of self along the way, but the gospel, the good news, is given us to awaken us to what is our true and ultimate destiny.

The work of the gospel is a work of remembering;  a work of awakening from a slumber;  a work of being lost, but then finding our way again. It points us back to who we are, points us to who one another are, and even points us to who those most debased among us really are. The gospel points us to the reality that the Divine was vested in human beings from the very beginning.

And so, we begin to understand the redemptive work of Christ as awakening us from our slumber and pointing us back to what has always been our destiny. Good news points us back to who we are, and reminds us how we are to live – as repairers of the earth, dancers with the Divine, community-creators, virtue-restorers.

At the root of every person…
Notwithstanding the great rebellion,
Notwithstanding the great blindness into which we’ve fallen,
Notwithstanding the great slumber that has settled upon us,
Notwithstanding the great evil that besets us…
…every one of us is at our core of God

Again, this has tremendous implications how we live. When we say that each person is of God, it changes how we think about our own deepest energies, how we think about our mental energies, our emotional energies, our sexual energies.  These are of God

It also changes how we interact with one another. When we see one another in times of terrible failure, deeply lost, or foundering in sin. If we are of God, then these base parts of ourselves are veneer, not our essence. We see one another’s base and dark sides as secondary, not primary.

Also, it changes how we raise our children. We teach them to look deeply within themselves for Divine wisdom. We teach them to look past the surface experience of their failures and shortcomings. We train them to access the Divine, Inner Voice we trust is always present within them. Yes, we teach them to listen to us for a season, but ultimately, we train them to listen to the Divine deep within themselves.

It also changes how we process our own failures. Even in the throes of our biggest disgraces, our most embarrassing breakdowns, it is within ourselves that we go for strength and restoration. We look to the Inner Divine for healing. We teach our children that Jesus is “in their hearts.” We teach adults that the Spirit of God is closer than close can be, even within us. Consequently, it is within ourselves that we go to access a Divine touch, Divine healing, redemption, and restoration.

Finally, this shift in perspective about human nature changes how we deal with people who hurt and repel us. Maybe they repel us because we ourselves are still slumbering in darkness, nursing personal hurts, fears, and insecurities. If this is the case, we seek out the Inner Light for redemption.

When they hurt and repel us because they themselves still slumber in darkness, just as our prayer, actions, and spiritual disciplines focus on awakening ourselves to the Light that is already in us, our prayers, actions, and spiritual practices toward those who hurt or repel us pursue the same.

When our sense of human nature is Divine first, sinful second, it changes our relations with other people, both those inside and those outside our spiritual community, both those who affirm us, and those with whom our relationships are negative and broken. In both cases, our strategy is the same. It is to us to awaken to the Divine Light within ourselves, and it is to us, to help others awaken as well.

This posture of expectation changes how we act. What we look for (and it is a truism that what we look for, we find), we find.  When we look for Divine Light in ourselves, and in others, it is there to be found.

Inviting others to awaken to their own Divine nature, inviting them to see the Light in themselves that they might not have seen, inviting them to awaken from the slumber of the False Self and to emerge into the experience True Self…  This is the message of Jesus.

Listen to what Jesus said in Jn. 9:39:
I came to you to bring everything into the clear light of day, to make all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.

Jesus’ life and message were about awakening us to see beyond our mundane, base, False-Self nature. His is a call to walk awakened to Divine Light within.

When we get to the section of our year-long project that looks at Jesus, we’ll see that he plays a critical role in our awakening from the slumber of the False Self. The teachings, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus point us to this good news with clarity and power.

But for today, I want to simply frame this simple understanding about our human nature; if our starting point for thinking about human nature is that we are made of the stuff God is made of, it changes everything. It changes how we relate to ourselves, one another, our world, and our conflicts.

I recently read a book, Christ of the Celts, by Phillip Newell. In it, he talks about how the Roman Empire’s view of human nature so infected Western Christianity. But out on the borders of the empire, out where the Celts lived, he said, Christianity held a very different view, a view akin to the one we’re talking about.

In the book, he told this story…
A number of years ago, I delivered a talk in Ottawa, Canada, on some of these themes. I referred especially to the prologue of the gospel of John and his words concerning “the true light that enlightens everyone coming into the world” (John 1:9). I was inviting us to watch for that Light within ourselves, in the whole of our being, and to expect to glimpse that Light at the heart of one another and deep within the wisdom of other traditions.

At the end of the talk, a Mohawk elder, who had been invited to comment on the common ground between Celtic Christianity and the native spirituality of his people, stood with tears in his eyes. He said, “As I have listened to these themes, I have been wondering where I would be today. I have been wondering where my people would be today. And I have been wondering where we would be as a Western world today if the mission that came to us from Europe centuries ago had come expecting to find the Light of God in us.”

If our starting point for thinking about human nature draws from the very opening scene of our Story, “made in the image of God,” if our starting point is that the very stuff of God was breathed into us from the beginning, it changes everything!

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For several generations, we Christians have tended to think about our own human nature rather selectively. We tend to listen to certain themes and doctrines from our tradition, but ignore others.

Looking within ourselves, we see that we behave badly, we think, feel, and act in ways that are hurtful to others.  We have tended to define our own natures as this negative, sinful part of ourselves.

As we saw last week, the very first book of the Bible highlights a critical element in our Story that we have tended to overlook or at least,deemphasize. We are created in the likeness, in the image of God.  We are imbued with the indwelling presence of the Divine.  ”Created of the same stuff God is made of…,” that’s how we’ve articulated it.

Now, this is not to say that the lower part of our nature isn’t destructive. Last week, we saw that it very much is! But it is to say, that the realest part of our nature, the first part of our nature, the deepest part of our nature is Divine in origin.

As we said last week, this starting point in our thinking about ourselves changes everything. For example, instead of thinking of our salvation as  God changing our fundamental essence, the focus of our spiritual lives and the spiritual practices we exercise are upon returning us to that part of ourselves we lost along the way. Instead of seeing ourselves as totally corrupted, totally polluted, totally contaminated, we see ourselves as lost.

Our Story tells us that we’ve forgotten ourselves. We’ve become disconnected from our true selves, and have drifted from the experience of our essential nature. Consequently, we’re so confused, bewildered, and cast adrift, that we’re unable to recall who we truly are; unable live from our true centers.

We begin to believe that this lesser version of us, is true.

But, if we keep in mind the starting point that we are made in the very likeness and image of God, the spiritual journey becomes about being found instead of being altered. The spiritual life, the experience of “being saved” is about being restored to our Truest, Divine Selves.

Now, this may seem merely a semantic difference, a minor shift of perspective. However, at a visceral level, it profoundly affects the way we are Christian.

This week, we rethink a couple of ancient Christian doctrines that have contributed to this harshly negative way we think about ourselves; the doctrine of Original Sin and its severe cousin, Total Depravity.

Original Sin was a way the ancients talked about our human nature that explained the dark side of our humanity.  We know there is a base side of us, what some call “the reptilian side.” It is immediately evident that there is a darkness within us; something quite  ugly, something hurting and hurtful, something wounded and wounding. It feels like there is a tragic flaw inside, some kind of Shakespearean drama playing out in our souls.

If that was all the term “original sin” meant to us; that there is a real, present, and powerful dark side in all of us, that would be a helpful way to think and talk about the experience of being human. Paul talked about the pain of dealing with this part of us when he said, “The things I hate, I do, while the things I want to do, I don’t.”

I bet the doctrine of original sin began as a descriptor of this dark thing that goes on inside all of us. However, the word “sin” has come to mean something else as the years have gone by. When we use that word in daily vocabulary today, it is a synonym for “culpability” or “crime.”  This makes sin mean “evil deeds, words, or thoughts;’ “malevolent acts we perpetrate on the world, others, and ourselves.”

Then when we add the adjective “original” in front of that idea, we come to think of original sin like this; I’m bad. I’m very, very bad. I know I’m bad because of  all the bad things I do, even when I try not to. It must be, we conclude, that it is my very nature to do bad, and thus, be bad.

And look at you!  You’re bad too. You hurt me, you perpetrate wars, your Wall Street greed hurts me, you rape, you murder.  It must be, we conclude, that we’re all bad, in fact we’re born bad!  We must have gotten badness genes by simply being human.  And further, those badness-genes must be the truest self we are.

This is the most common way we Christians have thought about human nature for generations, and it isn’t an unreasonable conclusion, given the way life is. Indeed, if we tell the Story differently, the difference will be one of nuance that takes into account the other doctrine of Imago Dei.  However, it is a very important and distinguishing nuance.

Five hundred years ago, the European reformers in our Christian tradition had very negative view of our essential nature. In addition to thinking of us as essentially bad, guys like Calvin used another term:  ”totally depraved.”

The essence of human nature, they said was totally evil, totally corrupt, totally perverse, totally reprobate, totally degenerate, totally licentious. Apart from the active redemption of God, human nature is, they concluded, intrinsically without any redeeming quality.

Our desperate need then, is for God to change our fundamental makeup, to change our basic essence. The salvation offered us in Jesus, they taught, affords us a fundamental change of nature, not unlike what some in our tradition believe happens during transubstantiation, one substance being miraculously transformed into another. Salvation, in this way of telling our Story, answers our fundamental need to be altered in nature.

As we’ll see two sections from now, that is not the only historically Christian way of telling the Story of our salvation.  There have been other ways of thinking about “being saved” that have as their beginning point, a very different view of human nature from that of the Reformers.  These ways take into account the powerfully destructive power of sin, but they do so keeping intact our understanding that the essential nature of the human is Divine likeness.

Over the years, Xnty in the West has told the Story of our human nature almost exclusively as being fundamentally corrupt and perverse.  This telling has had a twisting effect on our thoughts, motivations, actions, and on our Christian culture.  This total-corruption thinking has slowly eroded our collective sense of self.  If one’s religion tells them these horrible things about their basic nature for enough generations, it tends to lead us into a collective sense of self-hatred. It tends to remove our sense of the glorious Divine within us.

And further, as we Christians grapple to deal with this fundamentally dark sense of self, we take a harsh posture toward ourselves.  Believing we have to keep this corrupted self on a tight leash, our spiritualpractices become demanding, demeaning, even brutal. Picture the images of self-flagellation that was part of spiritual practice during the Middle Ages.  Of course, that was an exaggerated form of self-brutalization, but it was rooted in a very mainstream sense of who we are.  One need not have a whip in hand to be whipping one’s self.

A secondary effect of this thinking on Christian life and culture is that the harshness we practice toward ourselves tends over time, to morph into a brittle and dogmatic intolerance toward one another, and toward the world around us.  If I’m this hard on myself, we think, then you should be this hard on yourself too.  And if you’re not, well I can’t help but judge your failure, and find you wanting.

This harsh view feels quite normative to many Christians reared in the West. We were, after all, schooled in this way of thinking from our childhood.  But if we could step outside how normal it feels to us, if we could consider our unconscious assumptions, and their implications in cool light of day, we would see that it is really no wonder that so many people in Europe and now in our own country are walking away from Christianity.

Our studied belief that we are totally depraved has negatively affected our actions and beliefs.  But more distressing still, the doctrine may have had a self-fulfilling effect upon us.  In many ways, Christian culture has become depraved.  The troubling thing is that this belief may have brought about its own outcome.

I want to suggest that there is another way to think about the ancient doctrine of original sin.  As mentioned, instead of seeing it as a doctrine of essential culpability, we could see it as a universal wound, a sense of being dissociated from our true, Divine self.

If we would view the doctrine this way, it would help us be more patient and empathetic toward ourselves and toward one another in our failures.  Viewed this way, it could help us define the spiritual journey more helpfully.  We would be less surprised or scandalized when darkness shows up in ourselves or in one another, less harsh, less ungracious.

Reconsidered, the doctrine could serve as a pointer to help us be honest with ourselves about our lostness, and could motivate us to diligently seek the restoration and redemption of our true selves that is available to us in Jesus Christ. And it could do this without the load of condemnation and self hatred many Christians have come under.

Properly understood, the term “original sin” could be a helpful doctrine.  It could help forewarn and forearm us to seek out the Spirit’s aid finding and returning to our true natures, our true centers. It could help us seek and out and experience the reality that we are now, and ever will be, one with God.  Sinful though we may be, our truest self is in union with God. A reconsidered understanding of original sin could deepen our spiritual lives, as has been the experience of those in our past who held Divine Union, as the starting point for thinking about their humanity.

Next week, we’ll look at other historical ways Christians have understood human nature, other ways we have thought about the two natures that battle within us.