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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Francken Ambrosius "Worship of the Golden Calf"

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.

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.

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.

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.

We saw last week, that through our Christian history, there have been many ways we have understood the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

As is true of all reality when we encroach on the territory of God, the Divine, the Transcendent, we have trouble talking about things clearly. The doctrine of the ineffability of God tells us that God is a reality beyond our ability to formulate in thought or word, so when we do talk about God (essential to the human experience), we are always talking about that that can’t be talked about. Consequently, it makes sense that the people who experienced the Jesus-event, the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the category-blowing experiences after his death had trouble talking about it, had trouble assigning meaning to it. They tried their best to suggest several ways to give meaning to their experience of life overcoming death, of sin being defeated by love and truth, but over the years, the many ways were reduced to one. Especially since 1895, the most common way conservative Christians have tried to make meaning out of this moment in history has been called the substitutionary theory of the atonement.

James Hall Brooks: Niagara Bible Conference

At a bible conference in Niagara, NY in the years approaching the new century, a group of Christians articulated 14 points of belief. As often happens when a fundamental shift is occurring in a society, the rise of science and biblical criticism was causing many Christians to feel they were losing their roots. Responding to what they saw as an attack on the basics of their faith, the Niagara Bible Conference posited 14 core points; “fundamentals,” they called them. The first 5 of these core doctrines have been called the Magna Carta of fundamentalism.

One of those five core fundamentals reduced the many historical ways Christians have talking about Jesus saving us from our sins to just one, Christ’s vicarious, blood-atoning death as fulfillment of the Old Testament offering system for the forgiveness of sin.

We saw last week, that this “substitutionary theory of the atonement” is problematic. It has some often unconsidered implications that merit some rethinking. Last week, I said we’d begin that rethinking by considering what sin is. Hopefully, if we can deepen our understanding of “sin,” we can deepen our understanding of the words “Jesus died for our sins.”

We began this section looking at the core motivation behind all religion:  how to deal with the reality that we humans carry two natures, nobility, virtue, goodness, the very image of God nature on the one hand, and ignobility, wickedness, badness, the very image of a depraved nature. The latter, we said, is not the deepest reality about ourselves, but it is a very real part of us, a part we must deal with every day. Our religion demands we address this dilemma which we have come to call “sin.”

Over the years, we’ve come to make a distinction between lower case “s,” “sins,” and upper case “S,” Sin Nature. Sin Nature, we’ve said, is what truly separates us from God.  That phrase “separation from God,” has become a mantra of sorts for us; one, I suggest, we should keep. Of course we have to think clearly about what “separation from God” means, but in the end, I believe we’ll want to keep it.

As we consider the two meanings of “sin,” it is obvious that lower case “sins” were not deal-breakers for Jesus. People who did sex and drugs and rock and roll; liars, cheaters, thieves; these were the people he associated with. Frailty, failure, adultery, betrayal, these were just not big things to Jesus or even to Paul. To be sure, the writings of Paul discourage us from doing bad acts. Almost every letter, he’s encouraging virtue, discouraging vice. However, he couldn’t have been clearer, that God is full of grace for all kinds of sins, all kinds of failures, all kinds, all the time.

No, the truly problematic Sin, we’ve been taught, is the “Sin Nature;” something inside us that separates us from God, something inside us that separates us from God-Love, from GoWd-Life, from God-Thoughts, and from God-Instincts.

Here’s how we’ve told the story. God made you with the capacity to sin, and the knowledge that you would sin, and then when you did sin, he turned his back on you, requiring a stiff punishment for you, or for an innocent man in your place. A severe penalty had to be exacted in order to make you acceptable; death. This severe penalty had to be meted out, because God requires death when sin happens.  And this was not just death to our bodies, but spiritual death, eternal death, death we call separation from God. You’ve done bad, and the law of the universe is that bad must be punished. The wages of sin, after all, is death, and so you’re in for it. Because you have sinned, you must be punished by separation from God.

God is pure and perfect and cannot abide to be in the presence of sin, therefore God cannot abide you, for you are sinful. Your sin has earned for you, the rejection, the alienation, and the eternal separation from God. You made our bed, and now you have no choice but to lie in it. All have sinned, and all must pay the piper.

And that’s the sequence of events that comes to our mind when we think about our story of sin. The human race did a bad thing and must suffer separation from God for doing it.

This way of thinking about sin demands we somehow become different from our fundamental nature before we can be acceptable to God. As long as we hold this view of sin, however we tell the story of Jesus saving us, it must include doing something to change our essential state of being. We must be morphed from our unacceptable state, to an acceptable state; a change in our fundamental essence.

It is this demand that necessitates the magic embodied in the substitutionary atonement. God, by punishing Jesus, changes our fundamental nature. And with this way of giving Jesus’ death meaning, comes the unspoken implications of God’s heartlessness, and the depiction of a God who treats people like we wouldn’t treat a dog.

So maybe there’s an assumption about sin that triggers this line of thinking in our story, that if changed, would allow us to come at the story differently. What if Sin (capital “S”) is not an extension of sins (lower case “s”)?  Even though we say they’re different, we have an unspoken assumption that they’re intimately related. They’re bad acts, bad thoughts, bad motives. The lower case version is when we act them out, the upper case version is an infection of that badness inside us that can’t help but leak out.

But what if lower case sin and upper case Sin Nature are not simply extensions of one another? What if they are fundamentally different in nature, not even apples and oranges, but apples and rocket-ships? What if upper case Sin, is any illusory belief that separates us from God, like the belief that I am not loved by God, or the belief that because I’ve sinned, God cannot accept me, or the belief that I am not love-worthy?  What if Sin Nature is the shame that lies at the core of these mis-beliefs?  What if Sin Nature is a collection of compensatory strategies we employ to make ourselves OK in the face of this debilitating, existential shame? Like the strategy to maintain control of people, things, and circumstances to fool myself into thinking I’m OK? Or the strategy of making everyone pleased with me, to prove to myself that I’m OK? Or the strategy of creating security for myself by gathering enough money, enough insulation, enough of anything, so I feel safe?

What if Sin nature, is in fact, illusion and not the innate proclivity to do bad?  Even more specifically, what if Sin Nature is the compilation of illusions that separate me from the energizing power of Divine Life, separates me from the wisdom of the Indwelling Spirit of God, separates me from the indwelling presence of Divine peace and joy and  goodness and virtue? What if this is the Sin from which I need to be saved?

Instead of seeing badness causing God to separate himself from me, we could see illusion and false belief about The Way Things Are as the thing that separates us from God.

This is not the most common way Christian people see things, but consider this. Our tendency not to see things this way, can be directly traced to our visceral sense that ours is an anthropomorphic God, a God created in the image of humanity.

As we’ve discussed in earlier sections, this is not our religion’s story, but it creeps into our instincts, even our scriptures, at every turn. God is like us, God is made in man’s image, so of course, we imagine God rejecting us for sinfulness. It is, after all, how we treat one another. It is how we feel when somebody sins against us. So, if God is a projection of ourselves, of course that’s what God will do.

But again and again, our saints and prophets and sages and saints have all said it is not so. Our God cannot be contained in the metaphor of being a human. Sure, we use the metaphor of king, ruler, father, mother, and lover, but these cannot contain the vastness and different-ness of God.

So when the scriptures teach us, not that God loves us, but that God is, by God’s very nature, made up of Love, and when our scriptures teach us, not that God parses out mercy, but that God is by God’s very nature made of mercy… and forgiveness, and grace, and goodness, and kindness, if we drop our human images of God, a very different story begins to unfold.

In this telling of the Story, we are not separated from God because God has just had it up to here with our sin.  We are not separated from God as punishment for being bad.  Instead, separation from God is a function of us being sold a bill of goods, deceptions that tell us up is down, black is white, in is out. We’ve been deceived into thinking we are not made in God’s image, we’ve been deceived into believing that we must earn our love, that we are not intrinsically love-worthy. We believe it is not true that we, simply because we exist, are the apple of the eye of God, the apple of the eye of All That Is, the eye of The Ground of All Being. We believe that the very universe does not sing forth our love-worthiness, that the very atoms do not pulsate with our worth and preciousness before God. And behind this mask of deception, this mask of illusion, this mask of erroneous belief that separates us from God, this Sin Nature, we learn to cope with reality Not As It Truly Is. And of course, that just doesn’t work.

We live our lives trying to make up down, in out, and white black, so of course we are frustrated, of course we become afraid, of course we feel shame, of course we have to compensate, of course we create strategies to make life work, and of course those strategies don’t work. In our frustration, our fear, our shame, we hurt others, we have hurtful thoughts toward others, we do hurtful acts toward others, and we do sins.

Out of the illusion of Sin Nature, emanates the bad words, thoughts, and acts that we call “sins.” But, it is the illusion itself that is the culprit, it is the illusion itself that separates us from God, and it is the illusion itself that is the Sin. It is the illusion itself that Jesus dies to save us from.

Now, next week we’ll talk about some other historical ways Christians have told the story of Jesus saving us; ways that do not require God to have been repulsed by the sin he created us with the capacity to commit; ways that never required an innocent man to suffer so that God’s honor could be salvaged, or the penalty of death be paid.

In this section of our Rethinking Our Story Project, we’re looking at how our religion’s narrative unfolds. “What happened?” that’s the question we’re asking, and more pointedly, we’re asking how it came to be that we human beings grapple with two natures inside ourselves. George Bernard Shaw recounted an ancient parable from Native Americans:

“Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he said….’whichever dog I feed’.”

In our Judeo-Christian tradition, the word we’ve used to talk about this universal human dilemma is “sin.” We’re asking the question; “what happened that made us this way?,” and “what happened that can help us out of this pickle we’re in?”  As you might expect given how our project has unfolded thus far, we’ll see that the way we tell the story of sin and redemption has been conditioned by the history of it’s formation.

The way we tell the story today hasn’t always been how we’ve told it. The two doctrines of “original sin” and “total depravity” we talked about in part four of our project have not always been the way we Christians have talked about ourselves. The doctrine of Jesus being a sacrificial lamb isn’t the only way we have told the Story.

One thing is clear from scripture and from extra-scriptural documents; whatever happened after the death of Jesus blew people’s categories of normalcy. In the movie The Passion of the Christ a common view of the resurrection is portrayed. Jesus, in a body just like he had before dying, walked out of the tomb. As commonly held as this mental image is, it doesn’t jive well with the accounts in scripture.  In the scriptures, when Jesus appeared to people after his death, they didn’t always recognize him. He walked and ate with two disciples, but only after he was gone did they know that it had been him. After his death, Jesus showed up, but did so in unseen ways.

The accounts are confusing, I suspect, because the people who gave the accounts were confused. Something happened, and they struggled for words to talk about it. Something happened, and they struggled for ideas to explain it. Something happened, something that changed the ground rules of living, but they didn’t have mental concepts to put it all together and assign it meaning. They knew it was big, they knew it was important, they knew it profoundly changed their perception of life, but they didn’t know how to explain it.

So naturally, they did what you and I would have done. They tried to make meaning out of it. They tried to form buckets in their brains into which to put the experience. They tried to say “this is what it means,” or “ that is what it means.”  Consequently, in the scriptures, we see many ways of talking about the 2-nature condition in which we find ourselves, many ways of thinking about having both darkness and light residing within us, both good and evil within us, a mean dog and a good dog fighting within us.

We also see many ways of talking about how this Jesus event changed the way we live in these two natures. We hear those early authors almost universally saying that Jesus saved them from the dark side of their humanity, but they use all kinds of different metaphors to do so. As we’ll discuss in coming weeks, they talked about a soul being kidnapped, and Jesus paying a ransom. They talked about a soul unable to turn around and walk rightly, and Jesus leading the way, and making it possible. They spoke of Jesus as a shining example, calling to a part of us that had been silenced and covered over.

They talked about their experience in many ways, but they all agreed; “I was lost, but now I’m found,” “My soul was dying, but now I’m alive,” “I was trapped, but now I am free.”

But people don’t tend to like ambiguity. Iit feels unclear and disorderly. People don’t like ambiguity. It feels inconclusive. So, over time, we humans try and pin things down with a little more certainty, a little more surety, to seal things up in a tidier box. That’s just what we do. We don’t like stories with multiple possible plotlines. We like to know the plotline, the one and true story.

So, understandably, we reduced the many ways of telling the Christian story of sin and redemption to only one way, and we called that way, the substitutionary atonement. There are specific historical reasons why this way of telling the story has become the primary way our Story is told. It got a big boost in the 11th century, and then again in 1895, but it is by no means the only orthodox way to tell the Story. In fact, it has some real liabilities that should encourage us not to make it the only way we tell the Story.

In the 11th Century, a theologian named Anselm was trying to explain Christian sin and redemption story in a way that made sense to people. He lived in a world of medieval European politics (feudalism), so he told it in a way that resonated with the sensibilities of his constituency. For him, God’s honor was offended by sin, and had to be restored. In the medieval world, politics, economics, and social structure were held together by feudal hierarchy, and honor was the glue that held it all together. Consequently, it was a fit metaphor for Anselm to suggest that God was the lord, we are the vassals, and sin has broken the honor bound covenant between us.

In the feudal system, the lord’s honor didn’t have to be restored to make him feel better. No, honor was not that trivial. The lord’s honor had to be restored because it was the foundation of order for the whole social, political, and economic system. A broken covenant ripped the social fabric, and invited chaos and anarchy.  Consequently, sin, to Anselm, violated God’s honor and stood as unanswered justice that had to be made right for the world to keep functioning. Sin could not simply be forgiven willy-nilly. To preserve God’s honor and dignity (lest the system, the very universe fall apart), God needed satisfaction.

For the sake of the universe, for the sake of all, God must preserve the honor of his own dignity. He must not forgive sins without some form of payment being made. So when Jesus died, Anselm keyed in on those scriptures that spoke of Jesus’ sacrifice being a sacrifice of the one, to pay the penalty for all. For him, Jesus death satisfied God’s dignity , restored honor, and repaired the breach in the universe. And his way of telling the Story was a perfect fit for those living during feudal times. It matched the world around them. It fit with the way they understood society. It had comforting familiarity for them and touched their hearts deeply.

But for us, today, living in a decidedly un-feudal society, it has problems. In essence, here’s what it says to our 21st Century ears. God is omnipotent and omniscient, all-powerful, all-knowing. God made the world, the universe, and all that are in them. God set the rules of physics, the rules of human nature, the whole thing. It’s God’s game, he made the rules from the beginning.

So… God made human beings with the ability to sin (all powerful). God made human beings knowing they would sin (all-knowing). And then when they did sin, God saddled them with a debt they couldn’t possibly pay. Sinful human beings must pay the ultimate penalty of death and eternal separation from God (hell, we call it) for being who God made them to be and doing what God knew they would do.  Furthermore, there’s nothing they can ever do about it.

However, to show his gracious and merciful side, God sends his only son, a perfect man, without sin, and then he proceeds to beat the tar out of him, flog him, crucify him, turn his face from him, and then kill him. And only after this, after the blood of an innocent man has been shed, only then will God let that be enough.  His wrath is satisfied, his honor is restored, he can now allow humanity back into his good graces.

Now few Christians tell the Story that baldly, but for all the nuance we try to put around it, that’s the basic plotline of substitutionary atonement.  And that way of telling the Story of sin and redemption is a bit problematic for people not living under a feudal lord. It seems highly unfair. God seems capricious, devious, unjust, and unsporting. All in all, it’s a pretty dirty business and God is at the center of it.

This is a God that smart people would stay away from. If anybody we know treated a dog like that, let alone their own son, well, that’s just somebody we ought to give a wide berth. How in the world did we get so indebted to a God who made a system with such crummy rules? Well no thanks, God!  You stay over there, I’ll stay over here.

And we ought to be repulsed by this telling of the Story.

If it wasn’t so common, so mainstream Christian, we’d have nothing to do with it. It’s fundamental assumptions are that God is not eternally loving, that God made us one way, and then rejects us for being that way; that God despises, and that God abhors at least part of us, the sinful part.

So, how do we unravel the telling of our Story in a way that remains faithful to our history, to our scriptures, but at the same time holds together more consistently, the themes of God’s love, human beings made in the image of God, and the tragedy of these two natures within us?

I think a good starting place is to ask ourselves what sin is. What happened to the human race that resulted in the two natures? What is the nature of this dark side of our souls?

If we answer these questions well, we’ll be better positioned to answer the question of what it means when we say that Jesus saves us from sin.

Next week.

Welcome back to our year-long project Rethinking Our Story.  Thus far we’ve covered four of six sections (the seventh section on rethinking our spirituality, will be pushed to next year, and cover a full year itself). The first section focused on rethinking how so many Christians think about scripture. Then, we spent some time rethinking how we have told the story of God’s nature and human nature, and finally we focused on the way we talk about Jesus.

That section before the summer break focused on the players in our Story, and now we are turning to the Story itself. Now, we’ll synthesize what we’ve said before the break, and begin to talk about what happened before you and I came on the scene; what happened to human beings that got us to this place in which we find ourselves; what happened that makes human nature the way it is? And how do we overcome the dark parts of our souls, and awaken to the light?

What is the Story we find ourselves in?
And how, then, are we to live accordingly?

When we began this project, I talked about a problem we Christians face. The way we have told our narrative; the way we frame reality that under-girds how we think, how we act, and the program we design to help us grow spiritually, has not really been working for vast numbers of American Christians of late. As a whole, we Christians are faring quite badly in our sexuality, our mental health, our finances, our marriages, our stress-related disorders, and our influence in the world around us. In other venues I’ve given a lot of statistical evidence on this point, but as a species, we American Christians are doing quite badly.

I’ve suggested that the Story we tell about ourselves, about our religion is a root cause behind how badly we’re doing. For the past many generations, we’ve reduced this narrative to one dominant focus; the point of life is to escape punishment in hell for our sins. Original sin, as the doctrine is called, is going to keep us all from being with God in eternity. Our sinfulness has created at best, a rift, a legal separation between us and God, and at worst, has earned us the very wrath of God. We desperately need to solve this problem.  In this view, the relevance of the God-Jesus narrative is to do just that; rescue us from the horrible, horrible part of ourselves, to settle the legal dispute between us and God, to assuage the wrath of God, and to secure a place in heaven for the eternal afterlife.

If you’ve been part of the project, or listened online to catch up, the groundwork we’ve laid by talking about God’s nature, human nature, and the nature of Jesus will make it easier, to rethink this singular with a very different emphasis.

There is no dispute that human beings are in a bad place, no dispute that sinfulness is a very large problem. Anyone who watches the news, or teaches school, or deals with the public in retail, or marries a human being knows that human beings are trapped in sinfulness. We’re stuck.  We’re in a pickle, and like all the other religions, Christianity is trying to figure out how to get out of this pickle.

The groundwork we laid in the first part of this project affects a very different view of how we face that dilemma. I suggested that God is love, and if we think about that reality deeply enough, it forcefully challenges some of the old ways we’ve told the Story. We’ve suggested that human beings are made in the image of God, and that too changes everything. And, we’ve suggested the Jesus was fully human, and fully divine, and this too, if properly considered, forces us to question some of the assumptions behind the old telling.

Our religion’s Story, our way of talking about The Way Things Really Are must be better. Things are at a desperate place, and we must do better. Our Story must inspire us to better lives than we’re living today, it must inspire and enable us to live more virtuously, more like Jesus, it must help us bring the values of God to our relationships, our society, our economy, it must help us live less frenetically, with less exhausting busyness, it must inspire us to love better, forgive better, extend grace to our enemies better, do politics better, do social justice better.

We need a better telling of our Story at the core of our religion. So let’s begin rethinking what happened that got us to where we are, and hopefully, as we do, we’ll find a better way to move into the abundant life Jesus taught us about.

***

Our Story, like all good stories, begins with the problem of good and evil. It tries to address these deep human realities, not on the surface, not this act of good, or that act of evil, but in a deep and universal sense, the good and evil that are at the core of our very existence as human beings.

How is it, that we are good (we spent a lot of time talking about the implications of being made in the image of God), and are at the same time, so bad?

We’ve avoided the word “sin” thus far, because I believe our old telling of the story so trivializes and misunderstands it, but in effect, the “bad” in human nature, is what we Christians call “sin.”

How can we human beings be both noble, good, loving, gracious, kind, and merciful, and at the same time be hateful, spiteful, stingy, selfish, mean, and sometimes unspeakably evil? How can good and bad exist side-by-side in the same being? How can fresh water and foul water spring from the same well? How is it, as Paul says, that the things we want to do, we don’t do, (the virtuous and good things), while the things we don’t want to do (the ignoble and sinful things), we do so often? How did it come to be that we wake up inside ourselves and find these two natures so powerfully alive inside of us?

This is the problem our Story is trying to understand, because if we can understand it, we’ll be better equipped to walk toward the light, and away from the darkness.

Ours is not the only religion to grapple with this dilemma. All the religious traditions have this problem as the starting place for their stories. The Jewish and Muslim faiths frame the cornerstone of the problem with the same story we do, but come at the solution a little differently. The Buddhist and Hindu religions frame the cornerstone of the problem a bit differently, but comes at the solution very similarly to the teachings of Jesus.

From the beginning, this is the problem religions are trying to solve. In college I remember a story from a comparative religion class. Iit was one of the cosmological myths of the ancient world religions from before the Axial Age. I think it was from Babylonian, but can’t be sure (that was a long time ago).

Their story went like this.
In the beginning, there were two gods among the pantheon; one a god of pure evil, the other a god of pure good. They were, quite naturally, at odds with one another, and one day their ill-will erupted into physical confrontation. In those days, people thought of universe as a 3-tiered affair, with the dome of the heavens above, a flat earth below, and an underworld for the spirits of the dead below that. Onto the dome of the heavens, climbed these two gods to have it out once and for all. It was such a vicious fight , that they completely tore one another apart and from the residue of their bodies, their mingled blood fell to the earth as droplets; each drop a little bit of the god of good in it, each with a little bit of the god of evil in it, and wherever a drop fell, a human being grew from the earth.

In this clever ancient story, our ancestors framed an understaning of the condition in which they, like us, found themselves. Each of us has an essence of good within us. Each of us has an essence of evil within us. This is the human dilemma. This is the starting point for our Story, the problem that our religion, like the other religions, is at work trying to solve. To the degree that our thinking gives us a context, gives us understanding, gives us a point, this is the degree to which we are able to walk away from darkness and walk toward light.

As to specifics, our account begins in a garden. It begins with a purity, innocence, and goodness born of the very breath of God in the human soul. But then enters the villain, a serpent, a temptation, a rebellion, and with the rebellion erupts a dividing of our humanity between two loyalties; loyal to the Divine image within us, loyal to the rebellion of self-as-God. How well we solve the problem of these divided loyalties, is how well we are able to find our ways from darkness to light.

Next week we’ll begin thinking about several different ways we have told our Story through the centuries, several ways we have stopped telling it, that if we were to revisit, might help us avoid some of the current pitfalls that are so damaging us.

Jesus’ humanity.   Jesus’ divinity.

Historically these two themes have defined the Christian discussion about Jesus, the central figure of our religion. How we think about these two seemingly mutually dimensions of Jesus is powerfully determinative in the religion we live.

Last week we laid some groundwork for rethinking the habited ways we Christians have come to think about Jesus, imagining a way of thinking about our own humanity that has bearing on how we think about Jesus. We pictured a model with three concentric circles, three layers of human consciousness; body consciousness, ego consciousness, and Spirit consciousness. We focused on that third, elusive, spirit level of consciousness asking, “what is it?”  ”Is it?”  ”Does it exist at all?”  and if so, “What makes us think so?”If you missed this lesson, it is critical prerequisite for what we’ll say today, so go back and have a listen.

Let’s pause for a moment to remember something we said during the “Rethinking God” section of our year-long project. When we speak of “the divine” we are speaking about that, about which we cannot speak. Our minds and hearts are not expansive enough to contain the mystery and the depths of the divine, rather, it is an encounter we have out on the edge of human experience. We see majestic mountains, or we contemplate the expanse of the universe, or we hold a newborn baby and consider the mystery of being-ness vs. not-being-ness. Out here on the edge of human experience, we get glimpses of the transcendent, the beyond-us-ness of reality, and we want to talk about it. But here we face a problem. Our minds and hearts are unable to contain the immensity of this Reality. Consequently, we are reduced to developing code words to talk about the experience:  we call it “God,” “the Divine,” or “the transcendent.”

But human beings being what we are, our next inclination is to try and pin down this un-pin-down-able reality to precise, controllable terms. We try, but we can’t do it. Our minds and our hearts are simply unable to fully embrace that which is by definition, beyond us.

So we use pointers, simile, symbols, allegories, images, and figures of speech to talk about this part of human experience. We say “God is like this, or like that.” We say that God can be experienced similarly to a child experiencing a Father, a bride experiencing a bridegroom. We create these analogies, and then we savor them deeply.  However, we must always remember that they are merely ways of talking about that which cannot be talked about.

It’s important to remember this when we speak of “the divinity of Jesus,” or “Spirit consciousness.” In this arena, we’re talking about reality beyond ourselves. We’re treading in areas of our religious tradition that we are told we can never contain, never fully grasp.

That being said, let me offer this conclusion to last week’s preamble;
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

(Remember, we don’t know what we’re talking about here.  We’re using shaky metaphors at best.)

Human beings were vested with the image of God vested at Creation. That’s what the Story in Genesis tells us. Human beings have capacity for oneness with the Father the way Jesus had oneness with the Father. That’s how Jesus prayed for us in John 17. We humans can be “in Christ” and experience “Christ in us.” It’s a mystery, but that’s how Paul spoke of his own life.

I’m suggesting that these ways of speaking of the union between Divine-ness and human-ness crop up throughout our scriptures, because the Divine is an essential element of being human.
Being divine is simply an expression of being human.

A way of talking about this mystery of human existence is to say that we are of God, we are in God, and that we are made of the same mysterious, inaccessible, transcendent, ineffable stuff that God is made of.

The implication of this is quite challenging to the way we’ve so often thought of the divinity of Christ.

In this way of framing our story, what distinguishes Jesus from normal everyday people like us, is not that Jesus was divine. No, this way of thinking suggests that we are all divine the way Jesus was divine. This way of thinking suggests that what distinguishes Jesus from normal, everyday people like you and me, was not his divine-ness, but how purely he expressed that divine-ness. This way of thinking suggests that Jesus set a standard of pure expression of what it looks like when we humans live from our  Divine centers. It suggests that rather than being a non-human deity like Zeus, Jesus was a pure expression of what it means to be truly human.

Let’s go back for a moment, to our concentric circles of human consciousness. Imagine sprinkled throughout the outer two layers of body and ego-consciousness dark nodules of illusory belief, undigested hurt, unhealed wounds, and truths we believe that are not true. Imagine these dark shapes littered throughout our ego and body consciousness and generating their own thoughts and feelings. Imagine these falsehoods, these wounds, these illusions creating everyday actions, feelings, instincts, drives, and impulses;  beliefs like this:

• You are not worthy of love, or…
• You have been so bad, you must now earn God’s love, or…
• The only way you can ever redeem yourself is to straighten up and fly right for the rest of your life.

On the basis of  beliefs like these, people  think thoughts and feel feelings about Reality. They develop strategies for living, they interpret other peoples actions, they build belief systems, they build coping strategies. They develop a whole version of self, on the basis of these dark nodules of false belief and illusion, and this amalgamation of belief, instinct, coping strategy, feeling and action becomes the version of self with which we interface with the world. It is a version of self that is based on falsehood, a false self, but it is the self we live nevertheless. It is a version of self that betrays us at every turn, it fractures relational peace and creates wars among nations. It creates a pecking order in the office, and a pecking order of nations, the haves and have-nots. It deeply infects the human race and is the root behind our misery and our tendency for self-destruction.

But imagine Jesus somehow magically, or by divine appointment coming to live on earth in his true humanity. Imagine Jesus through some means, perhaps through special birth, perhaps through divine appointment, perhaps by genetic anomaly or an attained enlightenment; imagine Jesus living on the earth as a true human.

Absent the amalgam of false belief and instinct that infects humanity, imagine Jesus living a true self, as a true human, as a pure expression of the divine-human that is all of us.  Imagine Jesus free of the false self, free of the wounded self, free of the betraying-instinct self. Imagine Jesus, a true human, an unadulterated human, a pure expression of humanity; fully human, fully divine.

Instead of thoughts, feelings, and actions emanating from the hurts and mis-beliefs that characterize the human experience, Jesus lived as all humans are created to live, from his divine center. Jesus radiated the essence of God that indwells us all, unblocked, unpolluted, unadulterated by the coping strategies that so ensnare and divide us from our own Spirit consciousness.

In this way of rethinking our story, what distinguishes Jesus from the rest of us is not his divine nature, but his freedom from the nature of sin that would block the divine nature. Jesus expressed the Divine purely, naturally.

And when he did, we stood in awe, and said “He must be a god!”

But that’s not what Jesus said. What Jesus said is that we will do the same things he did, that you and I will do even greater things than he did.

That’s not what Paul said either. Paul said that Jesus was the firstborn of many who will live this unadulterated life, the firstborn of many who will follow Jesus into their own experience of unpolluted ego and body consciousness, the firstborn of many who will purely express the divine.

Now again, this is just a model for thinking about things that cannot be thought about, a metaphor to help us explain what cannot be explained, a metaphor like the Trinity that tries to explain three aspects of divine experience or a metaphor like “Father” or “King” that tries to talk about other aspects of divine experience.

But since metaphors are all we have, consider the implications of this way of thinking about Jesus divinity and humanity.

We began this section talking about how our religion’s thoughts about Jesus as a deity separate us from him. “He is a god, for goodness sake, and I am a mere mortal.” “He is in a different category than me, a completely different kind of being than I am, how can I possibly aspire to the selflessness, the sacrifice, the nobility, the truthfulness, the divine power expressed in Jesus.” “He’s a god…  I’m a mere mortal.”

But in this way of thinking, we’re not disconnected from Jesus at all. In this way of thinking, we’re divine the same way Jesus is divine. The difference is that unlike Jesus, our divinity is masked, hidden, and covered over by dark splotches of false beliefs, false instincts, and unhealed wounds. We need to be healed, we need to be delivered, we need to be saved from the encrustation of falseness that obscures the divine.  However, the divine is in us, just as the divine is in Jesus.

Jesus, having walked this earth as a visible expression of the invisible God (as Paul called him) showed us what was possible. He showed us what is embedded in us, at the core of our truest identity. He calls us to a new life, an abundant life, a holy life because he awakens us to the Divine present in us all. He calls us to a life lived beyond the illusory, beyond the sin nature, beyond the false self.

If our religion is based on a view of Jesus that is distinct from ourselves, we have no recourse but to helplessly await a magical rescue from our selves. But if our religion is based on a view of Jesus that reveals the deepest reality about ourselves, then he is calling us back to our truest state, back from the state we fell into that alienated us from our own divine identity, back to a true self, a self made in the divine image; a self that is one with God the way Jesus was one with God.

And the difference between the Christianities founded on these two different views of Jesus divinity couldn’t be more striking. In the latter, the spiritual life isn’t about gaining legal access to God; we could never lost it.  It is our true identity. In the latter, religion is not about earning God’s forgiveness so we can have restored relationship. The divine is as close to us as close can be, even in us. Forgiveness is simply the way things are, the nature of the Divine.

In this second view of Jesus’ divinity, the spiritual life is a life of discovering and returning to our true, Jesus-like selves. The spiritual life is about awakening to the indwelling Spirit of God the way Jesus did. It is about accessing our own the Divine centers and living responsively to the Inner Voice, the Divine Voice within us…   the way Jesus did.

And it is on that note, that we break for the summer.

But note this: the next section in our year long project is titled “Rethinking What Happened.”  In that section we’ll be considering what has happened to humanity to get us stuck in this false-self condition. We’ll reconsider what theologians call “The Fall” and “The Atonement,” asking how we got in the pickle we’re in, and what has Jesus done to help get us out.

When we do, the way we’ve rethought our own human nature and the way we’ve rethought Jesus’ humanity and divinity will have tremendous implications for what we mean when we say the words “Jesus saves us from our sins.”

See you in September!

NOTE:
See the comment below for scripture references about it being part of our humanity to share the divine nature.

Again this week, we’re following the path laid out by the historical conversation by looking at Jesus humanity and what we Christians mean when we say “Jesus is divine.”

We spent several weeks thinking about Jesus’ humanity, his historically determined self-perception as a warrior-messiah (a well-rehearsed genre of leadership in Israel), but we also saw how he subverted the violent, militaristic core of that genre. We said that this understanding of Jesus’ humanity profoundly shapes how we live out our religion, how we follow Jesus.

Last week, as we began looking at what it means when we Christians say that Jesus is divine, we saw that if we don’t think clearly about this, it has troubling implications for living our faith.

Jupiter: God of the Romans

We saw that throughout the ages, people have held a personified, humanized, anthropomorphized, vision of God. We’ve tended to see God as a man; a super, special, majestic, celestial kind of man, but a man nonetheless. The Romans, Greeks, Aztecs, and Norse all saw their gods this way. It is almost a knee-jerk human instinct to do so. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, our saints, sages, and writers of scripture have disallowed us this instinct. We are to hold the tension of allowing our God to exist and function beyond human construct, beyond our ability to contain, understand, or pin down.

But even though our ancient traditions teach us this, we usually try our best to pin God down to the understandable. Even our scriptures tell the stories of God interacting with people as though he himself was a person. In the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, God talks as a person, acts, and wills as a person. But again and again in our tradition, we’re told not to limit God to any image we can construct in our minds.

God the Father

But because we do it anyway, because we work so hard to envision God as a “him,” a Father, a King, or a Bridegroom, when we say “Jesus is divine,” our mental images tend toward the special, toward the “big-man-in-the-sky.” Our instincts tend to equate him with the way the Greeks talked about Zeus, a full god;  or Heracles, a demi-god. We tend to interpret our doctrine that Jesus is divine in a way that corrupts any meaningful way of thinking of Jesus as truly human, at least not the way I am human, or the way you are.

In the section we did on rethinking our humanity, I said we’d discuss another way of thinking about ourselves when we got to the section on Jesus. Now’s that time.

Let’s imagine a way of thinking about our own human nature that takes into account the things we know about ourselves from experience, but also the things we’ve come to believe about ourselves by faith; beliefs we gain from our historical, religious, and scriptural traditions.

Human Nature in Three Parts

Imagine with me, three concentric circles. These three circles represent three layers of human consciousness. The outer layer is the easiest to see, the inner the most difficult.

Let the outer layer represent our body-consciousness. This is the part of us that is aware of existing in three dimensions, aware of existing in time and space. This part of us is aware of up and down because we feel gravity; it is aware of physical limits, because our body provides a nice package to contain us. In other words, we don’t exist beyond our skin the same way we exist inside our skin.

Body-consciousness represents a primal part of us that is rooted in our biology, and relies on our senses. It distinguishes the experience of awake-ness or asleep-ness, it knows if we’re energized or fatigued, it has muscle memory, it is conscious of hot, muggy days like we’ve had recently, or cold, frigid days like we have in winter.

Freud

We assume the capacity to observe our body-consciousness resides in our brains, the second of our concentric circles. Our brains both energize and direct our senses, and interpret the data we gather. Together, the gray matter, the chemicals, the neurons, the transmitters, create another layer of consciousness we can call ego-consciousness (for those familiar with Freud, we’d include superego in this layer). It is the amalgamation of thoughts we think and feelings we feel. It is the way of being ourselves that expresses temperament, habit, instinct, morality, and conscience. Though this layer of consciousness is also rooted in our bodies, the human brain is so vast in its capacity that this way of being self is distinguished from the animals, and is less primal than body-consciousness.

It is in this part of self that we contemplate truth, beauty, and the good life. It is here we become self-aware, and discover that we’re extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, thinkers or feelers. It is here we discern if we’re strong or weak in compassion and resolve to do better. It is in this layer of being that we find ourselves more an impulsive person, or more a methodical planner.

At first glance, one could say that these two layers, understood deeply enough, would suffice to define our humanity. In fact, a whole philosophical school called “material reductionism” insists that this two-layer model must suffice. But saints and sages from all the religious, and from many philosophical, and metaphysical traditions have made another observation as well.

We are able to observe ourselves existing in ego-consciousness. I can observe myself thinking thoughts and feeling feelings. I can observe myself being moral or immoral. I can stand outside myself and watch myself being introverted or extroverted, impulsive or methodical. With training, I can put such a gap between this form of “me” and my impulses that begin to think of self having a third layer of consciousness, an “observer” layer.

Which raises the question, what is the nature of this observing layer of the self?

The problem is that when we set out to observe this observing part of ourselves, we become it. When I observe the observer, I become the observer. When I look at the looker, I become the looker.

So by definition, I cannot pin down with precision, what the nature of this observing self is. I know it is deeper than the thoughts I think or the feelings I feel because it can observe myself doing them. It is deeper than the temperament I possess, or the instincts I experience for the same reason. So what is this mysterious inner layer, this mysterious inner part of me?

As our society increasingly gravitates to the material reductionist view of “The Way Things Are,” the view of many has become that for something to matter, it must fit into what can be sensed, measured, or reasoned by human beings. Consequently, many come to believe that any layer to our humanity that is beyond the senses or reason.

But what if it’s not that way?

To say that reality only exists inasmuch as we humans can observe, measure, or reason is a statement of faith. Certainly we Christians (as well as Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus) believe that reality is much less limited than that. Our faith statements would be at odds to the that of the material reductionist.

We would agree with the reductionist view that the human brain, and ego-consciousness is extraordinarly powerful, but would disagree that chemicals and electrons are all there is to reality. We would agree with the neuroscientist’s observation that part of the brain lights up when nuns meditate or when Pentecostals speak in tongues, but would disagree that these spiritual experiences are nothing more than the electrons and chemicals that are being observed.

Because neuroscience can show us where spiritual functions happen, it does not follow, to us, that that’s all there is to reality.

I read a neuroscientists who said this, “Just because I can look at your brain and tell that you’re seeing an apple, does not mean I can say definitively that the apple is there, or that it is real, only that you are having a brain experience of an apple. The same is true of the experience of God. Because I can tell you that your brain is lighting up the God-section, this says nothing about the realness or un-realness of God. (REFERENCE)

Consider an analogy from my mp3 player.

To say that an experience in the brain is God, is like saying that playing an mp3 on an iPod, is Chopin. A Chopin nocturne plays by ones and zeros on my digital player, and if I was an engineer, I could fully understand the process. But if my player breaks, Chopin still exists beyond the player. Chopin exists as sheet music in some other part of the world. Chopin exists in the memories of many skilled pianists. Chopin exists in mp3 files on my computer. So if my iPod breaks, I can access Chopin elsewhere. I can get it back.

An mp3 player is not Chopin.

Drawing on this analogy, we could suggest that another layer of consciousness exists beyond the grey matter in our heads, that a layer of consciousness exists beyond the electrons, beyond the neurons, beyond the transmitters of our brains. We could suggest that our brains, like mp3 players, may die, but that a layer of consciousness could exist beyond our brain’s life or death. In fact, in the last many years, a great deal of research into near death experiences seems to indicate this is so, that a layer of human consciousness exists beyond an active, living, brain. (REFERENCE)

Even though many today are deeply committed to the idea of material reductionism, many philosophies (not just Christian philosophies) chafe under the rigidity of these restrictions. George Berkley (the guy the city and the university were named after) made this point. When I see and touch an apple, I don’t see and touch an apple. I only see and touch the image that goes in my eyes, the sensations I take into my hands. Then I take these sensations into my brain and construct an image. My experience of the apple is the experience of this image. What I don’t know is if that mental image corresponds to reality. Is there a real apple out there that I’m experiencing? Of course I assume so, but I cannot prove it. (REFERENCE)

Schopenhauer

Building on this, another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said something like this. Our sense perceptions are not reality, they are only sense perceptions. This means there are two worlds, the “phenomenological” world that we experience through our senses and the “numinous” world we must be willing to admit may exist beyond our senses. (REFERENCE)

The world of phenomenon that we access through our five senses may not be the sum total of reality, existence, or human nature. Our spiritual faith has suggested for thousands of years that this is so, and that the third part of human consciousness, the undefinable part of us, the part of us that is able to observe and think about the things that happen in the layer of ego-consciousness, is spiritual in origin.

The different religious and philosophical traditions talk about this layer of human consciousness differently, but in Christian thinking, we teach our children that this part of us is the part where Jesus lives in our hearts, the part of us is where the Holy Spirit of God indwells us. This is the part of us Genesis says is made in the very image of God, and it is where we experience what Jesus prayed for us, that we would be one with God as he experienced being one with God.

At NRCC, we’ve been talking about this part of our faith story for a while, and have said it this way; this is the part of us that is made out of the same stuff God is made out of.

We’ll finish next week by talking about the implications of this way of seeing humanity, and we’ll see that it helps us think about the words “Jesus is divine” in a way that doesn’t discount him being a real-live human being like you and me.