RethinkingOurStory

[Right-Click to Download mp3]

Streaming Audio  

In this post, we conclude part 6 of our year-long project. We’ve been rethinking the Christian telling ofthe Story about what happened to humanity to get us in the pickle we’re in. How is it that evil is so much a part of the human experience? How is it that we seemingly possess two natures? What does God have to do with the dark and light side of our natures, and how does God help us in our journey from dark into light? And in particularity, what does Jesus’ death have to do with any of this?

Over the last weeks, we’ve thought about the definition of the dark side of our humanity, working on a definition of the “sin” from which we need to be saved. Last week, several historical ways Christians have talked about what it means when we say “Jesus saves us from sin.” In this post, I’ll tell you one more of our traditional understandings of Jesus sving us, and then tell you what I think personally.

***

We Christians can’t reduce the cross of Jesus to a mere historical event. For us, it is the axis around which our faith rotates. It is in the cross, the grave, and our experience of the Risen Christ that we rest our eternal hope. So it is especially important that we articulate well, this most precious part of our Story. The sin-salvation part of the Story serves as the birth canal through our spiritual journeys begin. it is the starting point of our awakening into the deep rivers of life and the beginning of our journey to the heights of love and virtue that are ours in Christ Jesus.

We Christians talk a lot about the Greek word, agape. It is the word we use to define Divine Love. Wwe regularly quote John’s central message that God is love. But when we tell the story of sin and salvation, we often reduce agape to a tiny sliver of its glory. We talk a lot about God’s Love, but then tell the salvation Story in a way that robs it of its force, its potency, its virility.

To consider well that “Jesus saves us from sin,” our starting point must be that the first and foremost impulse of God’s Love is self-giving. God is not stingy. God does not hold back blessing or goodness. Everything Divine originates in Love, and it is God’s nature to lavish that love in unfettered abundance.

All of Creation demonstrates the self-giving, Love-nature of God. Rain and sun and soil and air and fire and food, all erupt from the Divine impulse to give lavishly. All of Creation shows forth the Divine heart of love, and anyone who has eyes to see will take this truth in.

However, given that so many of us are blinded to this truth, blinded by anxiety, care, and concern, blinded by the pain, hurt, and wounds we inflict on one another as we live from our lower natures, blinded by greed and ingratitude, fear and drivenness, Jesus is given us as an even clearer articulation of Divine Love. The message of Jesus, the life Jesus lived among people, and most pointedly, the death of Jesus, are all clear articulations of Divine love. The clearest of these is the cross. The cross reveals the that selflessness and the sacrifice are elemental to Divine Love. The cross demonstrates that Divine Love offers the very self of the lover to the beloved, offers the lover’s being, body, soul, and existence in expressing itself. For Christians, the cross is the clearest revelation of the always-loving, always-giving heart of God.

Given what we said in part 4 of this project (rethinking human nature), that our deepest natures are of God, and that our truest selves are our divine-nature selves, when the cross reveals the love-heart of God, it is in fact, revealing to us our own truest hearts as well. The cross shows us that we are closest to our true selves when we, like Jesus, pour ourselves out in love for another, when we give the totality of our being, the whole of our hearts, on behalf of others.

This is the nature of God. This is the nature of our deepest, truest selves.

It is better, I believe, to speak of the cross as a revelation of Love, than as a payment for sin.

***

This brings us to one more historical theory of the atonement, one I did not cover last week. It is called the Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement. It dates back to 4th Century and the teachings of Augustine, one of Christianity’s most influential  theologians and philosophers, and was best articulated by Abelard, a philosopher, teacher, and short-time monk, from the 11th century. Even then, both Augustine and Abelard were deeply disillusioned with the negative implications of the substitutionary theory we’ve discussed.

The Moral Influence Story of sin and salvation says that Jesus’ complete self-giving on the cross, his complete abandonment of self in service to others, and his complete devotion to the will of God for the sake of the world, completed the work of his life. Giving himself to die on the cross was the capstone of Jesus’ life and message. It spoke in deed, of the nature of God’s Love that Jesus had been speaking in word his entire life.

Focused on God’s defining nature as lavish, self-giving love, the Moral Influence Theory says that when this Love grips the depths of our hearts, it changes us at the depths of our beings. It changes the very core of who we are. It saves us. Experiencing the sacrificial Love of God as manifest in Jesus’ death on the cross transforms us.

In 2 Cor 5, Paul talks about the revelation of God’s love in Christ “constraining” him, or in another translation “compelling” him. God’s love constrains him from selfishness, lovelessness, and sinfulness, and compels him to the Divine Life, and the manifestation of the Fruit of the Spirit.

The sacrifice of Christ, this Story tells us, awakens us to Divine Love, and compels us to live our most authentic, most Divine selves. Being saved this way, we find ourselves wanting to stop being selfish, wanting to join God in self-giving, wanting to give ourselves to our neighbors and the world.

In his death, Jesus invites us into his life of self-giving. Jesus gave himself to God for the sake of the whole world, and now he invites us into this same devotion; giving of ourselves, both to God and to the world. That is the Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement in a nutshell.

Jesus’ act of love and sacrifices saves us from our false selves. It opens our eyes and hearts to save us from the soul-traps of selfishness and lovelessness. Influenced by Jesus great love, we decide to get back on the right side, decide to join God in the creative, saving way and to abandon the selfish, destructive way. Jesus’ exemplary obedience to the heart of God and his service and love for all humanity gets under our skins and we can’t let it go. If affects our intentions and changes our orientation to life. It delivers us from fear, and kindles in us a response of love. Thus awakened, inspired, and kindled, we are “saved.”

What is notable about this way of telling the Story is what is absent. There is nothing here about Jesus’ death being a sacrifice to pay for human sinfulness. Instead, Jesus’ death serves to impress upon us the depth of God’s Love; for us, in us, and through us. This in turn, results in softened hearts being drawn to repentance.

In this way of telling the Story, nothing has to change in human nature for God to accept us. No ransom has to be paid to free us. No blood has to cover over our sin so God cannot see it. Nothing about God’s view of us has to change. God’s eyes are wide open to our sinfulness, and God’s Love just is. It always has been. It always will be. And likewise, God’s forgiveness just is, always is.

What changes when we are saved, is us. We are awakened to a new vision, a new priority, a new life. We see the Way we hadn’t seen before. We see the Truth we hadn’t known before. We see the Life we hadn’t lived before. Jesus selfless and exemplary life calls us to take the road we had not traveled, and that road makes all the difference.

In groups where Christians tell the Story of sin and salvation this way, there develops a strong tradition of social justice. Seeing ourselves saved this way, inspires many Christians to alleviate poverty, relieve suffering, work for liberty and justice for all.

This alone would be good argument for this way of telling the Story, but for me personally, it is only a part.

***

For me personally, being “saved” is first and foremost experiential. This is what makes the Ransom Story so powerful. It is descriptive of an experiential reality. Life before Jesus was like enslavement and imprisonment, but now, something has happened to us. Without understanding the fully mechanics of it, we are free. We were blind, but now we see. We were enslaved, but now we are free. We were trapped, but now we have liberty.

No matter which of the salvation metaphors we use, it is the experience of new life in the risen Christ that is at the core. The doctrines are only there to describe the experience. “It was this way… Then I experienced something in the life, death, resurrection, and now it’s not this way any more. Now, it’s that way!”

So personally, I draw from all the theories as I seek to describe and deepen my experience of the Risen Christ. We talked about the Christus Victor theory, and that is very important to me. Jesus’ life blows our categories of reality. Dead used to be dead, enemies use to be hated, fear used to imprison us. But Jesus showed us that death is not the final word. However the Risen Christ was manifest, it showed us that God triumphs over death, over sin, over evil, over sickness, over disease. Though we may languish in a time of waiting, in the end goodness wins, always. In the end life wins, always. In the end truth wins, always. In this our hope is set. In this our true north is set. This determines what we look for in life. We are always looking for the spaces where the Kingdom of God is manifest, where goodness triumphs. So I draw deeply from the Christus Victor story. It changes my life.

I also draw deeply from the Moral Influence Theory introduced in this post. Jesus’ life was a message of Divine Love. Jesus’ death was a message of Divine Love, and that message changes the game. Called to live my life according to the Truth that Jesus’ Life and Death reveal, I am awakened from my slumber of sin, selfishness, alienation, apathy, and I’m drawn into newness of Life. I‘m drawn to rewired priorities, rewired values, rewired beliefs. In Jesus’ self-sacrificial death, I am awakened to selflessness, to love, to care, and to a new and living way to walk this earth.

In both of these ancient ways of telling the Story, I find Life. And more, when I find myself unable to walk from vice into virtue, when I’m stuck in a path I can’t get out of, the Perfect Penitent Story also helps me experience the Risen Christ. It encourages me call to God for help in repenting. My expectation is that Jesus’ death and resurrection help me turn from my dead path to an alive one, so when I’m stuck in sin, this story inspires me to call out for help.

In the face of my selfishness, the moral influence story inspires me to selflessness and concern for others. When I’m feeling imprisoned, the Ransom story gives me hope that freedom is  there, I must search it out. When trapped in despair the Christus Victor story tells me of the outstanding hope before me; death, sin, failure, alienation, none of them have any sting. Christ has made an open show of them, triumphing in the cross. I look for hope, knowing it is there. Even if it eludes me, I am inspired to keep looking until I find it.

***

So I appreciate elements of all these ancient ways of telling our Story. But I resent the parochial posture our Church has often taken, that when we find a beautiful way of telling our Story, we assume our way is the way. I resent the narrow assumption that if our way is the way, the other ways must be wrong. I resent that so often, we don’t encourage one another to engage in the messy, often paradoxical mysteries of our faith to broaden our experience of a God who is beyond us.

I love all these ways of telling the Story, and I suspect there are other ways to tell it too. I suspect that none of us, nor the theologians who purport differently, really know what it means that Jesus saves us from our sin. But in each of these metaphors, we broaden our experience of being saved nonetheless. In each of these tellings of the Story, we find a dimension of Light and Life that widens and extends our experience of God, our experience of being saved, our experience of victory over the dark side of our natures and a release of the light and life that is born of our Divine centers.

So we conclude this section, hopefully having presented a broader perspective on Sin. I hope we don’t miss the point, and settle for simple behavior modification as the sum total of our spiritual journeys.

I also hope I’ve given cause to rethink some unspoken assumptions about God’s nature in Penal Substitution Story. I hope we look beyond only one metaphors of salvation, especially since it has some very negative implications for our souls.

And I hope that by giving other metaphors to widen our understanding of how we Christians experience our salvation, that as we are working out our salvation over a lifetime, we’ll access a more multi-faceted salvation, a more multi-dimensional salvation, a deeper experience of being saved in Jesus.

[Right-Click to Download mp3]

Streaming Audio  

The word “theology” comes from two Greek roots, theos and logos, “God” and “word.” We hear the Greek word logos at the end of all fields of study; biology, the study of bios, life, anthropology, the study of anthropos,human beings, sociology, the study of society. The Greek word logos means more than the English word, “word.” It means all the thought that can be constructed in words, all the ideas we can think about concepts, all the constructs we create to contain a thought, an idea, an understanding.

When we put the word for God, theos, with the word logos, we are saying something that cannot be said. Theology is the attempt to contain God in mental constructs, thoughts, and understandings. The very word “theology” sets up its own internal dissonance. God, is ineffable, beyond our ability to contain in thought or construct. Theology uses thoughts and constructs to contain God.That’s a succinct statement of the problem we’ve been grappling with for the duration of this project. Nowhere is this dilemma more troubling than the constructs we create to talk about Jesus saving us from our sin.

Recognizing that our quest for God exists in a realm that cannot be talked about, our Christian faith has a rich tradition of spirituality that functions beyond words, beyond ideas, beyond thoughts, apophatic spirituality, we’ve called it. In the Eastern Orthodox church we chant and gaze at icons. In the Western contemplative tradition, we practice lectio divina, a form of Christian meditation. In the Charismatic wing of the church, practice praying in tongues, a language of prayer.

Yes, we have a tradition of spirituality beyond words, beyond logos. But we also have a tradition of kataphatic theology, a spirituality rooted in words. This too, is a rich part of our spiritual heritage. Kataphatic spirituality pursues God by using word metaphors. We form thoughts; “God is kind of like this or kind of like that.”

We awaken ourselves to experience the Divine by thinking thoughts, and this is a very good, very helpful form of spirituality. But, if we take our metaphors too seriously, if we take our ideas or our thought constructions too seriously, we turn the constructs themselves, into our God. This, the ancients warn us, is idolatry. When we reduce God to something we can hold or touch or contain, this is the gravest of spiritual errors.

Many contemporary Christians forget that the most heinous sin in the eyes of Bible-writers was not atheism. No, the most heinous sin to them was idolatry. Doubting the existence of God received some attention in the scripture, but reducing God to something that human beings could contain, that was the most grievous of errors, the the thing they understood would most damage one’s soul.

In this post, I will suggest some mental constructs to help us understand and experience the words “Jesus saves us from sin.” Let us not err in believing that once we’ve fashioned these constructs, that they are reality. Let us not believe that we understand how forgiveness for sin works, what it means, or it’s full depth or breadth. Salvation from sin exists in the dimension of the Divine, and as such, exists in the realm of the ineffable. It is a transcendent truth, an uncontainable truth. And notwithstanding our Protestant history of fighting amongst one another over who got it right, these are only metaphors, nothing more.

So we begin.

Earlier in this section, we spent considerable time talking about the substitutionary atonement theory. This prominent historical metaphor for salvation, we said, has some glaring, usually unspoken, problems. Simply restated, Jesus’ death was a sacrifice in the vein of Hebrew Law, and as the Lamb of God, Jesus death assuaged God’s wrath against humanity for their sin through the shedding of innocent blood. We outlined the problems with this, in that it makes God unreliable, capricious, angry, and unjust.

I want to underscore that the substitutionary theory of the atonement can be very helpful. It is based on several ancient scripture texts, and it helps us embrace some important spiritual truths. For example, it tells us that while grace is free, it is not cheap, it is costly. This is very helpful. However, we must keep in mind that it is only a metaphor and metaphors break down when they are pressed too far.

This way of talking about sin and salvation works well to help us think through one set of questions, but when applied to another set of questions, doesn’t work at all. Recognizing this, through the centuries the church had developed a whole bevy of Stories to help us think about sin and salvation, to think about that which cannot be thought about.

1.  Ransom

The most ancient way of telling the story of sin and salvation is called the Ransom Theory of the Atonement. As we’ve discussed, in the aftermath of Jesus’ death and resurrection, people’s categories of reality were shattered. Death, it appeared, is an illusion, and life wins. Love, it appeared, is more powerful than hate. Grace, it appeared, is the defining nature of reality. Wow!  We didn’t know! Something profound happened to them as they experienced the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and they were casting about trying to explain it.

To understand how the idea of “ransom”  was helpful to the ancients, we need to understand a bit about their world. At that time, ransom had a different context than it does today. Today, kidnapping is a crime, and the primary motivation to commit it is to gain a financial payout in the end. In ancient times, however, things weren’t quite so refined. Kidnapping was less a crime, and more a business transaction. Kidnapping was for the purpose of building up a flagging labor pool. “We need slaves to take care of business around here, let’s go to war.” “We need women to bear and raise children, to cook, clean, let’s go off to war!”

Once an enemy group kidnapped a loved one, the family found themselves smack in the middle of a business transaction. If the price was too costly, they could either forgo the loved one and let them live their lives serving as slaves, or they could gather the buy-back funds, and try and get them back. The slave-holder had a considerable investment in risk and future returns for his endeavor, and was in no hurry to send loved ones back. Of course, money talks, and a payment could always be made. “Want your son, daughter, father, mother back? All it takes is the right price.”

This kind of transaction was not an uncommon, and was understood by all. In that context, the new Christians embraced this social norm as a metaphor to talk about what was happening to them. “It’s like I was enslaved to sin,” they said, “enslaved to my lesser nature, enslaved to my false self, enslaved to a conquering foe. And now, it’s like Jesus has paid a ransom to free me. Jesus’ act of selfless love and sacrifice delivered me from my captivity to the lesser demons that have driven my life, driven my soul. I’m free!  I’m free!  I’m free.”

You can see how this would be a powerful metaphor, a powerful way of talking about, and deepening one’s experience of God’s redemption. But again, any metaphor breaks down. If this story was the Story, we’d have to ask to whom is ransom is paid. To evil?  To the devil? And if so, how is it that God, from whom comes all heaven and earth, could ever “owe” a ransom to anybody? But again we must keep in mind, only a metaphor.

2.  Christus Victor

The second Story that helped the ancients talk about their experience is called the Christus Victor theory of the atonement. Even though the penal substitution theory has been the dominant story since 1895 and the Niagara Bible Conference, the Ransom Story has been the most common Story through all of Christian history.

In it, the enemy isn’t sin, it’s death. Of course, sin is still in the mix.  Sin’s wages are, after all, death. The Garden story tells us that sin and death are so intimately related that if death is conquered, sin is conquered along with it.

By going to the cross and dying, this Story goes, by going to the grave and then rising from the dead, Jesus conquered death, one time, for all to come. In doing so, he demonstrated to us, the true nature of things. He demonstrated to us the redemptive power of God. He demonstrated to us the order of things that is to come. He demonstrated to us our ultimate destiny. Paul asks death, “Where is your victory?  Where is your sting?”

Christ defeated death for all humanity, becoming the firstborn from death, and demonstrating the future before all of us, to be reborn from the dead. All of us, like Jesus, will conquer death, and by implication, ultimately conquer the sin nature, the false self, the lesser nature. Again, you can see how this way of telling the Story, was also compelling. It speaks to the ultimate victory over that which crushes the human experience. Death does not win. Sin does not win. Evil does not win. Instead, God’s Spirit within us, God’s Spirit in all the universe, wins.

Today we may weep in sorrow over the pains of sin and death, but tomorrow joy comes. Tomorrow our tears are wiped away. Tomorrow our enemy will be vanquished, our enemy will be destroyed. We saw it in Jesus, and we await it in our own experience.

3.  Perfect Penitent

The Perfect Penitent Story of the atonement starts with the question, “If God wants to forgive us, why doesn’t he just forgive us?” What’s the need for death, blood, the cross, the whole ransom-paid, sacrifice-made thing? Why not just say “your sins are forgiven?” That’s what Jesus and the apostles did. Why doesn’t God do it that simply?

This way of telling the Story responds to that question and tells us that the sin-salvation package is not just about being forgiven by God. It’s about being transformed to the very depth of our souls. It’s not about being forgiven by God for the bad thing we did, it’s about being changed so that badness isn’t so woven into our nature, into our daily lives.

To experience this kind of transformation, requires we experience another spiritual keystone; repentance. To be truly transformed, we sinners must repent, we must turn from the path we are walking, and we must walk a new one.

But that’s the rub. Repenting, changing the path one travels; we’re not very good at it. We’re not really able to turn and walk a new way of life, because deep down, some part of us is quite content with sin. Hatred may feel bad, but part of it feels good. Mistreating others feels bad, but part of it feels good. Exploiting other people feels bad, but a little bit of it feels very good. And so, turning away from a lesser-self path, and walking a true-self path is very difficult, indeed impossible over a lifetime.

In this Story, Jesus willingly accepted death when he could easily have escaped it. He did so to help the whole human race do what they couldn’t do, repent. Wen he did, he became a repent-er on behalf of all of humanity. He willingly submitting himself to unjust condemnation and punishment, acting out perfect repentance on our behalf. “This is how one changes paths, this how one repents,” he was demonstrating. “I have done it for you, now you continue along in this vein.”

4. Powerful Weakness

Finally, many Christians have understood Jesus saving them from sin through the Powerful Weakness Story. This Story keys in on the truth that vulnerability is strength.

By making himself vulnerable on the cross, by accepting suffering at the hands of Rome and Israel alike, by not reacting with violence as his disciples suggested, by not rallying the people to revolution as the religious leaders feared, Jesus’ vulnerability demonstrated God’s loving heart.

A key passage in this telling of the Story, was uttered by Jesus on the cross. “Lord, forgive them. They don’t understand what they’re doing.” By making himself vulnerable, and willingly suffering instead of fighting back, Jesus demonstrated God’s goodness and forgiveness, and in the end, this powerful weakness wins.By willingly accepting suffering, Jesus awakens humanity to reconciliation with God’s Truth, God’s ways.

The Roman centurion at the foot of the cross watched Jesus die. He understood the rebellions led by other Jewish messiahs, he understood that Jesus willingly went another way. He saw in that moment, the corruption of the Jewish and Roman power structures alike, and articulated the Powerful Weakness Story clearly. “This is the Son of God. This is the heart of God. This is way of God. Love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness, these are the Divine.” And his heart is transformed, and he is saved.

Violence, vengeance, retaliation, domination, control, manipulation, and corruption are all revealed for the impotence and feebleness that they are. Like a puffer-fish, they expand themselves to look daunting but in the end, they are all show, no substance. In making himself vulnerable, and sacrificing himself in weakness, Jesus becomes powerful, transformative, and potent.In the weakness of the cross, Jesus is revealed to be strong, and love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness are revealed for their potency, their strength, and their staying power.

Conventional thinking would call this way of telling the Story nonsense. Conventional thinking gets stuff done by coercion and force. But Jesus reveals these paper tigers to be self-defeating in the end. In the end, Love wins, mercy wins, sacrifice wins. What appears weakness is actually strength. What appears foolish, Paul tells us, turns out to be wisdom in the end. The cross demonstrates this clearly.

The salvation of the cross is a call to Christians to live the same principle in their own lives. Human power, arrogance, and pride (especially religious pride) are empty promises with no legs to go the distance. Our shared illusion is that we can build our lives, even build God’s Kingdom our own way, on our own timetable, with clever techniques again and again, just screws things up. On the cross, Jesus calls his followers to the wisdom of the ancient Truths, to the power resident in the apparent weakness of Love, grace, mercy and Truth. Weakness wins. Love wins. Grace wins. Forgiveness wins.

So, there are four metaphors for helping us experience Jesus saving from sin.

• Ransom Story
• Christus Victor Story
• Perfect Penitent Story
• Powerful Weakness Story

None of them carry the negative implications of the penal substitution Story, but again, they are metaphors only, and consequently, if pushed to far, will break down themselves. Next week we’ll conclude this section. I’ll introduce one more way of telling the Story of sin and salvation, and I’ll tell you which metaphor I find most helpful when I think about Jesus saving me from my sin.

[Right-Click to Download mp3]

Streaming Audio  

Recognizing how our faith has become ill over the last several generations, we’ve been rethinking our Christian Story. In this section,  we’re rethinking what happened to humanity, how we got to where we are. The garden, the tree, the serpent, the man, the cross, the empty tomb; this is the plot line our Story has followed to talk about a central human dilemma; a dilemma every religion has to deal with. How did we come to have these two natures battling within ourselves? How did we come to have both a glorious, Divine nature, and a corrupted, selfish, sinful nature? How did we get this way, and thus informed, how does our religion help us get out of the pickle this dual nature puts us in?

Figuring prominently in how our Story is told, is this phrase; “Jesus died to save us from Sin.” These words are precious to us as Christian people, but as has often happened in our storied history, in our generation, we’ve reduced and corrupted the scope and consequence of this precious truth. In this section we’ve pointed out a couple of problems. First, by reducing the many Christian ways of talking about salvation down to one, the substitutionary atonement theory, we have made that way the “Truth” instead of just a helpful metaphor to talk about something beyond our ability to talk about. Thus, we’ve invited into our religion, some unwitting implications about God, namely that’s he’s just awful! a God nobody in their right mind would want to be around.

Last week, we suggested a second reduction of this precious Truth of salvation, making salvation only a personal thing, reduces Jesus to being our personal savior. I suggested that this made sense, when we were trying to tell our Story in a way that our consumerist, individualist society could understand, but when we reduce Jesus’ salvation to being merely “personal” we reduce the grandeur, range, and reach of our powerful truth.

Listen to this scripture from Col. 1:15-20

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Jesus, the visible image of the invisible God…
Jesus, who expressed in humanity the transcendent mind and thought of God (logos)
Jesus, with God, in God, of God from the beginning…
Jesus who expressed this logos-mind of God…
Jesus, before all things, whose Spirit is present in all things, and through whom all things are held together…
Jesus, the firstborn of many rising from death to life…
Jesus, in whom the fulness of God dwelt…
…opened a way for all things…   all things
…things on the earth…   things in the transcendent realm of the heavens
…all things
…to be reconciled to the Divine
…to be reconciled to God

A lot of people have puzzled over this scripture, wondering if perhaps all things means “all things.” That’s certainly a valid discussion, but for today, not our point. Our point is to say that the idea of reconciling the earth to God, reconciling the heavens to God, has to mean more than getting a handful of people who pray the Jesus prayer into heaven. Especially in light of Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God, being “saved” has to be more than a personal savior, saving me from hell, blessing me, bettering me, and guiding me. Jesus saving us from Sin has implications that are more global, more universal than can be contained in just me, you, and the band of people who go to the right churches, getting blessed, and getting to heaven.

Soaking in only one dimension of salvation in Jesus has led to a lopsided spirituality. We might do better if we expanded our consideration to include a broader understanding of the human dilemma. The ancient conception of Sin, we’ve said, has less to do with the bad things we do, and more with the falsehoods we hold to be truths. The human condition is about deception. That being so, Jesus offers us a salvation that is big enough to address the planet’s condition. Salvation unmasks the deception and delusion that is shared by all human beings.

The way the world functions is rooted in illusion:

“If someone mistreats you, you have to respond harshly, or they’ll take advantage of you and do it again.”

Jesus indicated that this truth is in fact an illusory truth, a means to an end we don’t want.

“You’ve got to go along to get along.”

Again, a commonly held idea, but according to Jesus, a delusion.

“God rewards the good and punishes the evil.”

All good religious people think that’s true, but Jesus indicates that God blesses good and evil alike with sun, rain, food, and provision.

The human condition is mix a little truth with a little illusion. We cling to this mix because the truth part, but are destroyed by it because of the illusion part. If salvation in Jesus is going to be big enough to fit scriptures like the one we read above, it must be big enough to address the prime Sin problem – illusion. It must be about cherished beliefs being challenged, about treasured realities being dismantled, and about heart-felt convictions being dismantled and replaced

If salvation was merely uni-dimensional, and focused solely on taking care of our afterlife, we could reduce it to a one-time ritual. We could pray the prayer, get into the water, accept the free gift and we would be saved. Salvation, in this telling, happens on this day, at this meeting, in this place. That’s when we did the action, made the profession, prayed the prayer, that’s the day we “got saved.”

But that doesn’t jibe with Paul telling us to work out the salvation Jesus affords us over a lifetime. In his letter to the church in Philippi, he said just that. “Work out your salvation,” he says. For grammar buffs, this is the present, middle, imperative, suggesting a progressive series of present moments. In other words, “keep on working out your salvation in each moment of your life.”  That doesn’t make sense if salvation is something we can do once, and then be done with it. It does make sense if salvation is an ongoing work of the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit in our lives. If salvation leads us, from illusion today, to Truth tomorrow, sector after sector of our days, area after area in our lives, dimension after dimension of our humanity, it does make sense to work it out over a lifetime.

Our understanding of “Jesus saving us from Sin” that has been reduced to a one-time, personal event, has led to some severe anemia on our spiritual journeys. Like sailors who got scurvy for lack of vitamin C on long voyages, the Christian community has lacked in basic nutrients of the soul. A one-time event dismantles constant alertness to Jesus’ salvation, diminishes our expectation of constant transformation and processing in our souls.

Many people I know have experienced their Christian faith getting too small for them as they have grown. Over time, their Reality has expanded, and their Christian story couldn’t contain their expanded reality, their expanded experience. I believe our one-time mindset at the starting point of our journeys has a lot to do with this.

***

The other day, my son called me from college where he’s taking a religion class. “Do you know what Jewish people do,” he asked me? “They ‘argue Torah’ for their religion. That’s it!  they constantly argue what this means or that means. That’s critical to their religious tradition.”

“But Dad, he continued, “I want a religion that is solid, irrefutable, not open for everybody’s interpretation.”

“I wish I could help you,” I told him, “but it’s just not that way. Our experience of God is constantly morphing, changing. We constantly outgrow an old understanding of God, and replace it with a new one.”

I continued explaining to him that there are two very beautiful things about the Jewish tradition of arguing Torah. First, their religion started before Enlightenment certitude kicked in, so ambiguity is in their DNA. Consequently, their commitment to community is deeper than their commitment to certitude. This means that they’ll argue passionately today, but still be together tomorrow. Our Protestant tradition, on the other hand, started after the Enlightenment’s love affair with certitude. Consequently, when we argue together, we assume only one of us can be right, and the other must be wrong. And so, we break off relationship with one another and form another sect of Protestantism, 38,000 at last count.

The second thing that is so beautiful about arguing Torah, I told him, is the premise on which the idea rests. God, and the things of God, cannot be pinned down in our understanding. They’re just too big to fit in our brains, our hearts. So by arguing with one another, they expose each other to higher and deeper ways of thinking about God. They’ll never get there, God is too big for that. However, by arguing, their understanding of God doesn’t remain static. It’s dynamic, always morphing, always changing, always evolving. In that, they grow closer to Truth than we do in our static, once-for-always understanding of Divine things.

The absence of this evolutionary dynamic is enforced in our spirituality by how we think about salvation. Salvation happens once, we’re done, we’ve got our ticket to heaven. What is there to process?  What remains to hash out?

This is very different from a salvation that is about daily deliverance from illusion, daily deliverance from lesser truths. It is very different from an ongoing, forever process. No, we’ll never corner the market on Truth, we’ll never be done seeking Truth, we’ll always be discerning deeper dimensions of the Divine, always be seeking out deeper understanding of the spiritual Truths. This kind of evolving growth is embedded in an ongoing understanding of salvation, and would serve well, those who outgrow their Christian faith.

If we reduce it to being a one-time purchase of our personal ticket to heaven instead of an ongoing work of God’s Spirit, leading us to deeper and deeper experience of things Divine, it’s no wonder we are disposed to static thinking in our spiritual lives.

We just finished an extended Sunday lesson on the Suffocating Power of Self. In that lesson, we reconsidered the concept of “the judgment of God,” saying, God’s good judgment is something we really want. When God’s good judgment is in play, justice trumps injustice, mercy trumps exploitation and cavalier disregard of people by systems, wisdom trumps foolishness, and so forth.  We want this!

I’m suggesting that this process of experiencing God’s good judgment, being daily called from lesser, false truths to greater, True Truths, that this is the salvation of Jesus; that this process is central to what it means when we say Jesus saves us from Sin. This is a salvation that gets worked out over a lifetime. It never gets old, because there is always a deeper Truth to embrace, always a deeper character reformation available to our souls, always a deeper layer to be shaped into God’s likeness. We are never finished discerning that Jesus would call me to live this way, or to act that way

We’re never finished awakening to the indwelling Holy Spirit, that part of us that is made of the same stuff God is made of. We’re never finished experiencing our true selves, our love-joy-peace-patience-kindness-goodness selves, our fruit of God’s indwelling Presence selves. This is never a completed task we tick off our list. We never finish experiencing God’s good judgment, experiencing God’s always-present forgiveness, experiencing the teaching of God’s Inner Voice, experiencing the revelation of God’s deeper Truths. This salvation is always in play for those with ears to hear.

[Right-Click to Download mp3]

Streaming Audio  

Before summer break, we looked at the players in our Christian Story. This Fall term, we’ve turned to the Story itself. Here’s a brief review of what we’ve said thus far:

We human beings are in a pickle, no doubt. Our religion has called the pickle “Sin nature,” telling us that inside us is both the nature of God (nobility and virtue), and the nature of sin (ignobility and corruption). And like all other religions and philosophies, ours has a Story to tell about how we got in the pickle, and how we are getting out. It begins with a garden, and a tree, and a serpent, and ends with a man, a cross, a grave, a resurrection. When it’s all said and done, we say these words; “Jesus saves us from our Sin.”

Through the centuries, we’ve told the story of what it all means in many different ways, but all Christian people agree; the centerpiece of our religion is that humanity is stuck in Sin, but somehow in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are saved.

We’ve seen how in recent history, the many ways Christians have told the details of the Story of salvation have been reduced to one. After Anselm in the 11th Century, and particularly after the Niagara Bible Conference of 1895, for many Christians, there has been only one way to talk about sin and salvation. We’ve called that way, the substitutionary theory of the atonement. It’s familiar to most Christians. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Like the Passover Lamb in Jewish history whose blood persuaded God to “pass over” and not exact death on the people, Jesus’ blood satisfies God’s wrath, and he passes over us, not exacting upon us the wages of sin; death.

But, we’ve seen, this way of telling the story has problems. Primary among them is the unspoken foundations upon which it rests. In this telling, God is vengeful, capricious, and unjust. God is a human-like being, sitting up in heaven monitoring our sins and exacting punishment for them. Having made us with the capacity to sin (God’s omnipotence), and having made us with the foreknowledge that we would sin (God’s omniscience), once we did sin, God punishes us with eternal damnation. God insists on a pound of flesh to pay for the offense our sin has caused his honor, his dignity, his holiness.

And, we have seen; though this way of telling the salvation Story seems to match the “Lamb of God” scriptures, it is very out of sync with the “grace, goodness, and justice of God” scriptures. So we’re in an interpretive dilemma. Do we side with the scripture interpretations we’ve grown up with, or do we rethink our story, and try to find a way out of the dilemma?

Since the way we’re telling the Story today so clearly is not working for us, since it does so little to inspire or awaken us to the life Jesus taught is ours, since the church is so clearly suffering under the toxic pollution of intolerance and dogmatic judgmentalism, let’s put some work in, rethinking things. let’s see if there’s another way we can understand salvation.

***

In this section we’ve considered a bigger picture of God, a God not containable within human constructs, a God that is not a projection of human traits, and thus, a God that is not required to do what any self-respecting human being would do; punish people when they sin against him.

We’ve also reconsidered “separation from God,” the Christian definition of Sin.  How does that work? Does God, like an angry husband, turn his back on us, divorcing his bride? Is God the one who initiates and enforces separation, or is it us? We’ve suggested separation from God comes from ourselves, caught up as we are, in un-Divine thoughts, un-Divine habits, beliefs, and illusions. Sin, we’ve said, is less our badness, and more our false beliefs about God, about human nature, about The Way Things Are; false beliefs that drive fear, shame, and soul wounds, which in turn, drive us into bad thoughts and actions.

These themes give us a different way of thinking about separation from God, and the possibility of a different way of telling the salvation Story, a different way of thinking about Jesus “saving us from sin.”

Rethinking a doctrine as deeply embedded in us as the doctrine of salvation is a very uncomfortable proposition. We wouldn’t do it, if it weren’t absolutely necessary. But look around. Look at the Christian Church. Our current Story isn’t helping us. It isn’t inspiring us to the Way, the Truth, and the Life that Jesus taught us was ours.

One of my favorite authors is Richard Rohr. As his community in New Mexico was rethinking our Story, they made a bumper sticker

God does not love you because you are good.
You are good because God loves you.

Later they refined it…

God does not love you because you are good.
God loves you because God is good

These simple couplets speak of a fundamentally different way of thinking about sin and salvation, but when we’ve been raised in one way of thinking, it’s difficult to live from a different starting point. We’ve lived lives based on the old script for a long time. We’re part of communities that interact with one another on the basis of the old script. The scarcity-narrative is deeply woven into our religion. It has become normalized for us to speak of God’s free grace on one hand, but strive for God’s favor on the other. We pray the right prayer, do the right ritual, attend the right meeting, behave this way, but not that, and so forth to gain God’s blessing.

It’s normative for us to work hard so we’ll be attractive enough for people to accept us, to shape ourselves up, to remain in a state of God’s grace. We’re also used to the decorum and social norms that develop when other people are busy making themselves attractive for the same reasons. And anything we are used to, seems natural to us. Consequently, our brains tend to resist any alternative way of thinking, feeling, or behaving. Yes, we realize that our current telling of the salvation Story diminishes Jesus’ central theme of meritless love. Yes, we realize that our current instincts belie our own words, belie the unearned grace our saints and sages taught us. But change feels unnatural and unsafe. And those feelings, make change undesirable.

But we have to change, or we’ll die. Look around at the state of the Church. We need a better Story!

Many in our society believe that accepting Jesus as their personal savior would make them a worse person. They believe the salvation we hold so dearly would make them more self-centered. They believe “getting saved” would make them less concerned for the poor, less concerned for the environment, less concerned that the oppressed find justice. They believe Christian salvation would make them less forgiving of other people, less tolerant of their weakness, their sins.

And why do you suppose they believe that? Of course, because that’s what we do. We are more self-centered. We are less concerned for the poor, the environment, the oppressed, the weak, and those in trouble. And the world has heard enough about Jesus to expect more.

I’ve said repeatedly in this project, that it won’t do for us to see this problem, and work a bit harder to fix it. No, it’s our Story that is betraying us.

One toxic part of our Story is the idea of Jesus as our personal savior. This idea has led to a very flawed version of salvation. Our personalized version of the salvation Story focuses on what getting saved will do for us, not to us. Consequently, Christians over last several generations have given less of their souls, their energies to help others, have cared less for the troubles, the pain of others, and have served less of the world’s needs, the world’s troubles. Christians haven’t always been this way, but now, it is the majority report.

We fell into this sad state innocently enough. All we were trying to do was tell our story in a way that people in our society could understand (the same thing we’re trying to do in this project). We live in a society that holds one doctrine deeply and dearly; to make money, you must cater to people’s personal desires. This doctrine has so permeated our social thinking, our instincts, that we Christians co-opted it into how we tell our own Story. As central a belief as it is, it made sense to appropriate it as our own. It made sense to us, and it made sense to the people in our society we invited to join us.

So we told the story of Jesus as a personal savior. And when we did, the salvation of Jesus fell into the category of products designed to benefit people in their lives. It became the same kind of personal benefit we gain when we get a personal trainer. A trainer helps us lose weight and get stronger. A personal computer helps us be productive, a personal automobile helping us get where we need to be.

I have some personal radio stations on the internet. They only play music I like. This is a benefit I love! I don’t have to switch stations to find what I want. I don’t have to listen to music you like, or music my kids like. I find this a a great benefit to me!

And when we put Jesus’ salvation into this category, it powerfully connected with the sensibilities of a consumer society. The Church began selling salvation as a personal product, a product to improve your life, a product you consume for the good it will do for you.

And the benefits are considerable, not the least of which is a secure afterlife. By shopping around for a personal savior, we’ve been able to avoid hell and gain heaven. Also, Jesus’ salvation helps us improve our personalities. We treat the wife and kids better. When we pray, Jesus helps us on the job, with the family, in our own personal growth. Jesus helps us with all that stuff!

So, we Christians congratulate ourselves for being such shrewd customers. Boy, did we choose well! Look at all the benefits we get!

So with this way of telling our Story, it is no surprise that as a group, we’ve become more self-focused. It is no surprise that our religion is producing selfish people, consumerist people, narcissistic people.

But does consumer salvation sound like Jesus? Does this Story and the fruit it bears make us like Jesus? Was Jesus in the business of making people more self-focused?

Come on.  Of course not. The salvation of Jesus is from selfishness to selflessness, from unconcern for the world, to concern, from carelessness, to compassion for the hurting and needy.

Even though the Titanic had only enough lifeboats for half the passengers, only 708 of the 1084 lifeboat seats were filled. Because of the shoving, pushing, and self-focus, 35% of the lives that could have been saved, perished. Does it seem Jesus’ way to get his people in the cosmic lifeboat and leave others to face crime, injustice, poverty, and oppression? Does it seem Jesus’ way to focus on his people’s salvation, to gather us into tidy, gated communities where we can congratulate ourselves, and celebrate our good luck?

Of course not. But that’s what has happened to us. “Join us!  We’re going to heaven after we die. Join us!  the world may burn, but we’ll be safe. Join us!  Jesus will help you with your job and kids. We’re a bunch of shrewd shoppers. You should be like us…
…and become sons and daughters of perdition, just like us!

No, that’s not Jesus’ salvation! Not at all.

[Right-Click to Download mp3]

Streaming Audio  

Last week, we said it is clear from the people Jesus associated with that lower case “s” sins were not deal-breakers. Also we said, for Paul, the grace of God was such a central them, it trumps any of our bad acts or thoughts. This would seem to indicate that God doesn’t think and act like you and I do.

And if God isn’t a version of humanity like you and me, maybe the way we’ve thought about sin, and God’s forgiveness of sin, can be reconsidered. On the other hand, if God is bound to human-being traits like you and I are; if God really is just an extension of thoughts about our favorite parent, grandpa, king, judge, or lover, then it would be completely appropriate to expect that he’d get fed up with our sin, and eventually the bad things we do would become deal-breakers. After all, that’s what people do. That’s how humans act and think. If our Story should start “in the beginning man created God; in his image created he him,” then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect such humanly-inspired terms for sin, lostness, salvation, and redemption.

However, we’ve seen in this project (section 3), that while seeing God as a projection of human-ness can be a helpful and often necessary part of the spiritual life, it is only a stopping place on the journey, not a final destination. Those who have gone before us, who have progressed deeply into spiritual maturity, all tell us that God cannot be seen only in terms of human-like traits. God cannot be reduced to fit into the human condition, to think with a human mind, or to act with a human will. God is beyond that; so far beyond that, our doctrines say, that God must be understood as “ineffable,” “incomprehensible,” or “un-understandable.” We shouldn’t even speak the word “God,” our Hebrew scriptures tell us. It makes our actions too familiar with a concept we are better served leaving in the realm of the unknown.

So, perhaps we should take another look at our scriptures about Love and Grace, and do so without trying not to fit them into a human-limited construct. Maybe the idea that God’s Love is limitless, changes the game, as does the limitlessness of God’s Grace. Maybe the complete otherness of God’s ways makes Divine Love and Divine Grace different than the way we human beings live.

Also, maybe the separation from God that sin produces, isn’t because God, like any self-respecting human being would do, has gotten so fed up with our long-term sinfulness, that he has imposed upon us separation from himself.

If God’s Love truly is unmerited, truly is unlimited, the game has changed.  How can unmerited, unlimited Love be thwarted by sinfulness? How can it cause God to turn from us and reject us? Maybe, as Jesus’ life certainly demonstrated, the Divine can exist quite comfortably in proximity to human sinfulness. Maybe the Divine is not, as many were taught, so soiled by sin, so offended by sin, that God must respond by imposing the death penalty on us;  separation from God.

Maybe the wages of sin isn’t death because God, unable to abide our sinfulness, sentences us to death. Instead, maybe the death-wages of sin is descriptive of what happens. Maybe it tells us what sin does to us, not what God does to us.

And if this is so, separation from God has a very different meaning. Yes, sin is what separates us from God.  Yes, greed, and selfishness, and pride, and envy, and hatred do indeed separate us from the Divine Life. But not because God can’t abide our sinful state. No, they separate us from God because they are decidedly un-Divine. You can’t be greedy, and at the same time have the Divine heart of generosity. You can’t be prideful, and at the same time yield to Divine Truth and Divine Life. You can’t be hateful, and at the same time live in, and flow in God’s love.

So perhaps the death-wages of sin are not a death penalty imposed on us by God (who has had “just about enough of that, young lady!”).  No, perhaps, it is a description of what the human condition does to us; separates us from God, separates us from love, joy, peace, patience, kindness… the Fruit of God’s Spirit, and separates us from Divine Union, the baptism of the Spirit, and immersion in Divine Life, Divine Love, and the Divine Nature.

If this is so, it radically alters what we think is happening when we say Jesus saves us from sin.

One of my favorite modern hymns has these lines in it; Till on that cross as Jesus died,  The wrath of God was satisfied. As much as I love the hymn, and it’s clear articulation of the power of salvation and the victory of the life of God over sin and death, I rewrote those lines for our community to sing. I can no longer sing of Jesus’ death satisfying the wrath of God. I can no longer believe that God has so deeply rejected me for my sin that a chasm has been rent between us, a gulf that cannot be bridged without a death-sacrifice by Jesus. I can no longer believe that I have been so rejected by God for my sin that a Jesus-bridge must be built for me to return to God.

As will be clear later in this section, I do completely believe the words “Jesus died for my sin.” I’ve just come to believe that something else is going on when we say those words; something different from God’s wrath being satisfied.

I think this very common way of telling our Story sacrilegiously diminishes one of the fundamentals of our faith, one of the cornerstones of our our religion – the Love of God. This way of telling our Story sacrilegiously reduces the scope of Divine grace and goodness to being just a bit better than humans can muster.

When we do this, we ignore how Jesus talked about God in his stories. Recall the story of the day laborers. Some worked all day, some worked just an hour, but all received a just and generous payment. Recall the story of the prodigal. There was no death-payment required to come home. No, he was simply accepted by the father, embraced by the father, loved by the Father – always, completely, never wavering.

Again, we don’t teach our children that “God loves us.” That would imply that love is something God does. And if you do something, you can decide one day to not do it. No, instead, we teach our children the Bible verse that “God is love.” It is the very nature of God to be love. It is the very nature of God to be grace. It is the very nature of God to be patient, long-suffering, and merciful. God can no more be unloving, unmerciful than black can be white, or in can be out.

I believe we sacrilegiously trivialize the love of God when we elevate sin to a status strong enough that it can force God’s hand, compel God to reject, shun, abandon, or turn from us. And given that we’ll see before we finish this section, that there are several historically, orthodox Christian ways to talk about Jesus saving us that do not trivialize or reduce God’s nature of love, we would do well to rethink the way we have.

Jesus revelation of God was so thoroughly loving that what we do or do not do is no factor.  Jesus taught that it is the nature of God to send rain to water the crops of the unjust, just as freely as it is sent to the just. The sun is given to warm and grow the food of the unjust, just as freely as it is given to the just.

With these words so central to our scriptures, then, why is earning God’s love and so heavily weighing our sinfulness and un-love-worthiness, so persistent, so deeply embedded in our Story?

I believe this reduction and dismissal of Divine Love in how we speak of sin and salvation is due to human pride. The ancients taught us that pride is at the root of all that separates us from God, at the root of all that is sin.

Note what I am not saying.

I’m not saying that pride is so odious to God that it renders you un-love-worthy to God. I am not saying that God rejects you for your pridefulness, that God cannot stand to be in the presence of your pride, or that God separates him or herself from you because of your pride is as filthy rags. No, I’m only saying I believe pride lies at the core of all that separates us from God.

You cannot be both proud, and awake to God.

Consider this. At some visceral level, we humans don’t like the idea that God gives the sun and rain to the unjust as freely as they are given to the just. We don’t like it because that allows some folks to be freeloaders, to get God’s good gifts without earning them. And where’s the fairness in that? (hopefully you can hear pride getting warmed up here.)

Consider that we don’t like a universe in which worthiness, desirability, and love-worthiness are just the nature of how things are. We don’t like that everybody has them.  We prefer them to be earned by our efforts, we prefer to earn them by something we do to distinguish ourselves.

Many would rather be deemed love-worthy than to be loved. We want to be special, set apart, and recognized for our efforts. We want to be differentiated enough from others to merit God’s special attention. And this instinct is at the core of why we pollute the story of salvation with a picture of God rejecting at least some of us, God unable to abide the sinful parts of us.

Even though we use the words “the grace of God,” it is little more than lip service. The word “grace” occurs so often in scripture, we have to say it, but for us, we like a world in which we earn our own way. Consequently, we tell the story without serious consideration that Grace, Forgiveness, Mercy, and Love could simply be the nature of God, be the nature of the universe, be the nature of The Way Things Are.

Instead, we pollute our story with images of God holding love, grace, and forgiveness back, until a death-sacrifice is paid. Pride actually prefers telling the story in a way that sin earns the wrath of God, and gets us in a serious pickle, rejected by the God of the Universe. That way, when we figure out the religious formula for getting ourselves out of the pickle (pray the proper prayer, exhibit adequate repentance, accept the free gift, see the light, believe the doctrine, etc.), we feel we are somehow ahead of the poor saps who haven’t figured out the rules of the game yet. We get to be “us,” and they have to be “them.”  Pride just loves that kind of stuff!

This prideful instinct creates a way of telling the story that is difficult to freely receive what “just is.” If love is free, mercy is free, grace is free, we feel that somehow diminishes us when we get it. If we didn’t earn something, we don’t like it. We actually prefer a world of scarcity, a world in which there isn’t enough Divine love to go around, a world in which we somehow came to discover the one and true way, and become the special ones able to access the little bit of love God has to offer. That makes us special. And prideful flesh likes to be special.

But again, the ancients taught us that pride is the root of all sin, the root of all that separates us from God.

Overcoming this fundamental human disposition is at the core of the Bible’s plot-line. Conquering this way of thinking and viewing our humanity has been the steady movement of God throughout history. This prideful way of thinking will separate us from God better than anything. It will separate us from God’s love by duping us into thinking that love is a finite resource, reserved only for those who jump through the right hoops. It will separate us from God by causing us to believe love and grace are only for the elect, the few, those with the acumen to see the truth and accept it.

As long as we keep following this kind of win/lose, earn/loss salvation script; as long as this is the door through which we enter the spiritual life, Christian spirituality will continue to be as unhealthy and sick as it is today. We will continue to appeal to low-level, base, self-interested parts of our humanity, and our morality will never rise to the transcendent, life-giving abundance Jesus told us was ours in God.

Pride and the story it concocts will keep us from tapping into the Divine Life inside us that just is; the Divine strength indwelling us that just is.

But the Christian Story was never intended to follow the basic win/lose plot-line of the rest of human history. Ours is good news. As such, it is a radical departure from the instincts that have driven the pitiful, win/lose narratives of human societies over the centuries.

But today, it’s our own religion that has fallen into a pitiful state.

And we got into the situation we’re in right now; we got into this anemic spirituality that makes us actually worse people than those in the society around us; we got in the position we’re in, because we allowed our concept of God’s Love and Grace to be diminished. We shoehorned our own Story into the win/lose, pride-based, scarcity story that drives the rest of societies. We just added some religious frosting on top.

Even the un-Christian world around us is wising up to the truths of Jesus faster than we are.

Unless we awaken to the grace that is always extended to us; unless we become aware of the generous love of God that just is, Christianity will never produce in us, the new mind, the new self, the new Life promised us by Jesus. Without our Story being founded on this central understanding of the way God is, we will just retread the same old tired scenario that seems to plague the human race throughout the centuries.

Our story is a radical departure. It is rooted in a God who simply is Love. It is rooted in a love-worthiness that simply is, grace that simply is. And that, I believe, must be at the foundation of our Story of sin and salvation.

When the implications of our tale of sin, salvation, and the redemption of God demands we have a God who turns from us, rejects us, and requires a sacrifice to be able to accept us, we absorb a set of instincts and assumptions that betray us, that make us so very unlike Jesus.

And as I keep promising; before we finish this section, I’ll give you a historically orthodox way out of those instincts and assumptions.