A Recent Sermon I Wrote and Delivered on Sin

                “Re-Thinking Sin”

          A Sermon Offered by Toby Jones to People and Churches All over the Place!

    (Based on Matthew 5:38-48, Luke 15:11-31 with inspiration from both Rev. Dr. Tom 

           Dickleman and Phillip Yancey in his book "What Good is God?")

         

What is sin…? How do you define sin? It’s a tiny little three-letter word that has been around for an awfully long time. And we all grew up with a certain awareness and understanding of this word, didn’t we? So what was yours? What IS your understanding of sin…?

For me, I grew up with a pretty clear and tightly defined notion of sin. It wasn’t complicated. God had made rules; the Bible spelled them out; You break those rules; it’s a sin, plain and simple. And you will pay a price. There will be consequences for sinful actions. Sin is the violation of the rules God made. God’s rules start with the 10 Commandments and expand to include the nuances and additions from Jesus. I wonder how many of us here today grew up with a similar definition of sin – the moral rule breaking definition?

Now, like I said, I grew up with that very same understanding of sin, so I’m sympathetic to it and am even willing to give it a certain level of respect and legitimacy. And it’s an understanding of sin that fits in very nicely with the moral world we humans have set up.

It’s plain to see that our world operates according to something very similar to Newton’s third law of motion, namely that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. If you lose your temper and yell at me, I’ll yell right back at you. If you hit me…I’m going to hit you back. If you and your country bomb me and my country…we’ll bomb you and you’re your country right back. This action-reaction stuff is written all over the annals of human history. And not only at the national or governmental level…it trickles right down to the individual ethics that govern each and every one of us.

We as a human race are still entrenched in the action-reaction mode of existence. It is the default drive in our heads and hearts, so deeply engrained, that at times we rightly feel powerless to break out of its clutches. But I’m here to tell you today that Jesus has no tolerance for this action-reaction way of living. When Jesus talks about and teaches about sin, he is even more concerned about the reaction we have to sin than he is about the initial perpetrator of it. Any follower of Jesus who wants to talk about sin has got to include a discussion of action-reaction living.

So let’ start by reviewing our two passages for the morning. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus distinguishes his teaching – or “yoke” – for how we must live from the other rabbis of his day. He says, “You have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye.’ But I tell you NO! Don’t live that way. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left…If anyone tries to steal or take your shirt, give him your coat as well.” Here we begin to see that Jesus has something different in mind for what sin is than the mere breaking of rules. For Jesus, sin begins with the instinct to react to what is done to us. Jesus’ attempt to root out sin from among his followers begins with calling us out of action-reaction living. “If anyone forces you to walk a mile with them, go two miles with them…You’ve heard it said, ‘love your neighbor.’ But I want you to love your enemy.” Paul picks up on this thread in Romans 12 when he says, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. But repay evil with good.”

What Jesus was most bothered by in this world was not so much that people mess up and hurt one another. What bothered Jesus was the fact that people – even religious people – seem to always react to sin by perpetuating further sin. To Jesus, sin was this amazingly strong tendency to react to evil with more evil. And so when we examine his example, his teaching, his parables, his yoke, what we find is the consistent call to break this cycle of sin, to get out of this action-reaction mentality. Look at the Parable of the prodigal son, and you’ll see what I mean. What we find is the story of a younger son who sinned. He acted selfishly, insensitively, and even immorally by demanding his share of the inheritance while his father was still living. He sinned against his father and he certainly sinned against his older brother as well, leaving him alone to work doubly hard in the fields. It didn’t help that he squandered all his inheritance on prostitutes and licentious living. The parable doesn’t debate whether or not this younger son sinned. He did, plain and simple. But what makes the parable so challenging and so instructive is in the two reactions to sin that we get from the older brother and from the father.

The older brother is completely stuck in action-reaction mode. He sees his brother return and he wants nothing more than to punish him for his sin. The father, however, no less aware of the younger son’s sin, chooses to step outside of action-reaction living. The father chooses NOT to heap sin upon his younger son, but rather steps in a completely different direction – a direction of grace, forgiveness, and mercy. It is this choice – the father’s choice – that Jesus holds up in this parable and says, “THIS is how I want MY followers to respond to sin.” It is NOT an easy thing to do – this stepping outside of the natural human tendency of “an eye for an eye.” There is nothing easy or natural about it. But make no mistake: it IS what Jesus asks – even REQUIRES of us. I have come to believe that the single most important thing I can do in what remains of my life is to step off the treadmill of action-reaction living, to leave that utterly ineffective cycle behind once and for all, and replace it with Jesus’ radical M.O. of grace.

 If I want to call myself a follower of Jesus…if I want to claim that I am a Christian…I have no option but to force my way out of this action-reaction prison one decision at a time…one action at a time…one situation at a time…one relationship at a time. It can be done…It has been done in some quite remarkable ways. And when it IS done, when an individual Christian or group of Christians actually steps outside of action-reaction living, the entire world stands up and takes notice. Let me remind you of a few historical examples…

In 1999 in Mumbai, India a mob of Hindu fanatics attacked an Australian missionary named Graham Staines. Staines was working with Indian leprosy patients when he was burned alive by these thugs. They also burned his 8 and 10-year old sons with him. Everyone expected his widow Gladys to leave the country at once and retreat to Australia. She didn’t. She stayed at that same leprosy center for five more years, continuing her husband’s work. She said, “I have no bitterness because forgiveness is the only force that brings healing…and this land and all of us need healing from hatred and violence.” Do you think there is a power when someone steps out of action-reaction sinfulness to behave like Jesus instead?

Many of us remember the stunning events of October 2, 2006, when an armed gunman entered an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, PA and opened fire, killing 5 children before killing himself. We still remember how stunned we were when all the parents of those 5 children went to the home of the mother of the gunman to embrace her and to let her know they held no ill-will toward her and that they had forgiven her son for his act. Do you think there is a power when someone steps out of action-reaction sinfulness to behave like Jesus instead?

Remember Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned unjustifiably for 27 years in Apartheid South Africa? When he was released and elected president of the new South Africa, do you know that he asked his jailer to be a guest of honor at his inauguration. Mandela also hired white Afrikaner policemen to be his personal bodyguards. He then, along with Desmond Tutu, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would bring to light the atrocities that took place under apartheid, but with the specific mandate that no acts of revenge of any sort would be inflicted upon the perpetrators.

Phillip Yancey, in his book What Good is God, tells what happened in just one of the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It involved a white policeman named van de Brock. He and a few other officers had shot an 18-year old boy and then burned his body. Eight years later, van de Brock returned to the same house and seized that boy’s father. This time they forced the man’s wife – and the mother of that 18-year old -- to watch as they tied up her husband, poured gas on him, and ignited him. Now imagine the scene when years later this woman who had lost her only son and her husband to this horror sat in a court room across from Officer van de Brock, as a part of this Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When the evidence was finished being presented, the judge asked this woman, “What do you want from Mr. Van de Brock?” Do you know what she said…? She said she wanted Mr. Van de Brock to return to the place where he had burned her husband and gather up the dust from the ground so she could give him a proper burial. Then she said one other thing that stunned the courtroom even further. She said, “Mr. Van de Brock took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to the ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a mother to him. I would like for Mr. Van de Brock to know that he is forgiven by God and that I forgive him too. I would also like to embrace him so he can know and feel that my forgiveness is real.” Do you think there is a power when someone steps out of action-reaction sinfulness to behave like Jesus instead?

Jesus was no dummy. He knew what it took to make people stand up and take notice of this revolution he had come to start. If you want to follow Jesus, there is really only one thing you HAVE to do…You HAVE to embrace a way of thinking and of living that steps OUT OF the world’s action-reaction living. It’s a BIG step, and it is NOT an optional one for the person who claims to follow Jesus. It is the road Jesus himself trod. It is the road that led him from the very cross of calvary to say, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It is the road that Jesus painted so vividly for us and for his disciples when he told the story of the prodigal son, painting those two, radically different approaches to livingthe world’s way of action-reaction, brought to life in the character of the older brother, and the ways of Jesus, brought to life by that loving father, who did NOT react to his younger son’s sinful actions, but instead stepped outside of action-reaction living to do something truly Christ-like.

That little three-letter word S-I-N has stuck around for as long as it has because billions of people thoughtlessly continue to buy into the world’s notion that every action deserves an equal and opposite reaction. But the one we call Lord came to show us a better way, a way that, instead of feeding and multiplying the endless cycle of sin, vengeance, and violence, could actually break the cycle, stopping sin dead in its tracks, before it has the chance to multiply. That way is the way of forgiveness…the way of grace… the way of the cross. It is, in a nutshell, the way of Jesus. Don’t think you can follow Jesus or claim to be his disciple without walking this same path.

Make no mistake: there is tremendous power unleashed whenever someone steps out of action-reaction sinfulness to behave like Jesus instead. Who will be the next person who dares to step out of action-reaction living to unleash the amazing power of grace?…Why not one of us? Amen.

*** Please post a comment and let me know what you think!

My 2011 Easter Message - delivered at 1st Presbyterian Church of Boyne City on 4/24/11

                              Reflections on Resurrection

                  (Based on Ezekiel 37:1-14  & Luke 24:1-12)

  Offered to the People of FPC of Boyne City, Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011

         As the Apostle Paul said, “when I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.” I did. That was me, particularly where the resurrection was concerned. I heard the Easter story as a child, was drawn to its power and hope like a child, and I believed it like a child. I guess you could say that growing up in a Christian home where church was a given every Sunday, I subscribed to that bumper sticker variety of faith that says, “God said it…I believe it…that settles it.”

         But, alas, I’m not a child anymore. And as Paul also said in that same chapter of Corinthians, “When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways.” As an adult, it hasn’t been so easy to “just believe” the whole resurrection thing anymore. Not that I suddenly lost my faith or my ability to believe, but it became a lot more challenging to simply accept that the entire course of nature could be reversed in the way that the raising of Lazarus or the resurrection of Jesus suggests.

         So over the course of my adult life, I’ve had to do some re-tooling and retrofitting of certain aspects of my faith, particularly where the resurrection is concerned. And so, what I’d like to share with all of you in 3 parts on this Easter Sunday, 2011 is what I consider to be my new and improved understanding of the resurrection and its implications.

Part I – It’s Written All Over the Natural World!

Close your eyes for a few moments…I want you to imagine something with me…I want you to imagine that you are Adam -- or Eve if you prefer. You are literally the very first person on this brand new planet. It is your very first day in your new body – although you don’t even know yet what “day” is – as you explore this amazing garden paradise. You’ve been walking all around the garden just checking out everything, sampling the fruits and vegetables, admiring the river and the stunning views. You can’t help noticing this huge, fiery ball in the skies above that seems to make everything else glisten with light. It’s so bright that you can’t really look right at it, but you see and feel its rays and recognize that it is the source of light and heat. You also can’t help but notice that this ball seems to be moving very slowly across the sky. In fact, lately, you’ve noticed it lowering a bit, as if it is falling toward the horizon. Not only that, but gradually everything in the garden around you seems less light. There is less warmth. Now that fiery ball is beginning to disappear into the ground far, far away. It’s getting dark and cold. You’ve never experienced this darkness before. There’s almost no light, just a tiny glow where the fiery ball seemed to burrow into the earth. And suddenly, all is dark. You can no longer see anything. There is no light at all, not even to see the hand in front of your face. Suddenly, this beautiful garden you were reveling in only hours ago is eerie and haunted. You feel something that will later be known as fear. You wonder why you were even put here on this earth in this garden. You lay down on the ground in a ball, hoping and praying that you would just stop breathing. Nothing could be so awful, so terrifying. Time stands still in this complete and utter darkness. You are so alone…so forsaken…so totally afraid. But wait, you see something on the other side of the sky. It’s a patch of light…then a distant glow. The sky seems to brighten incrementally….until…there it is! That same fiery ball that sunk into the earth on the other side of the sky…How did it get over there? It is coming back. It will give light and warmth to the garden once again. What a welcome and wonderful sight after that long and terrible darkness…And with each passing cycle of light followed darkness, you are a little less afraid, for you begin to understand that after darkness there is always light… You can open your eyes now.

         Every sunrise is a death, a time of complete and total darkness. But that deep darkness gives way to returning light…sunrise…sunset…sunrise…sunset.

         And it isn’t only the sun in our natural world that speaks of resurrection. Think of your flowers and plants. Last summer’s brilliant garden withered up and died last fall. Nothing could have been any deader than that garden. The snow came to finish the job, freezing to death anything that made it through the fall. And now, walk out in that same garden, and what do you see?…Little shoots and buds poking through the ground…tree branches begin to bud out as well. Nature’s nod to resurrection, it’s everywhere. You see, one of the reasons I still believe in the resurrection is because all of the natural cycles of our planet have resurrection within them.

         When we Christians talk about Jesus’ resurrection, we tend to talk about it as if it were some inversion of the natural order of things. We tend to think of Jesus as somehow going against the natural process of things when he died and then rose again. But I don’t think of it that way anymore. It seems to me that rising from the dead is exactly what the natural order of things requires. Maybe what Jesus did that first Easter morn was simply a participation in the natural order of things, sunrise sunset, sunrise sunset…the buds and flowers in your perennial beds…the trees and leaves…So the natural world and its many cycles is part of what has influenced my re-tooled resurrection faith.

Part II – Resurrection is Written in Our Human Stories:

We Love a Good Comeback!

By the time I was born in 1961, South Africa had been ruled only by whites since 1910, when an official act of parliament limited its membership to whites. Blacks weren’t even allowed to own land going all the way back to 1913. And in1962, the year after I was born, a young, South African anti-apartheid activist by the name of Nelson Mandela was arrested, for protesting this apartheid system. Mandela was convicted on bogus charges of sabotage and treasonous acts against his government and sentenced to life in prison. In that hot, dry S. African jail cell, Nelson Mandela was left to rot, to become a pile of dry and lifeless bones. 27 years later in 1989, Mandela was released from prison and led his party to power. In 1994, Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. He served as president for 5 years, establishing a new multi-racial democracy that still endures today. I believe in resurrection because of Nelson Mandela.

In June of 1966, a horrible murder occurred at the Lafayette Grill in New Jersey, and professional boxer Ruben Hurricane Carter was falsely accused and arrested, charged with the murder he never committed. In May of 1967 an all-white jury found Carter guilty of this crime, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison.  In a New Jersey penitentiary, Ruben Hurricane Carter was left to rot, to shrivel and shrink into a pile of dry and lifeless bones.  Almost 22 years later in February of 1988 after three previous and unsuccessful appeals, “new” information came to light and all charges against Carter were suddenly dropped. He was free at last, 22 years after his arrest. In the 24 years since he was freed, Carter has dedicated every moment of his life to his non-profit organization, which seeks to free prisoners who have been falsely accused and unfairly tried. I believe in resurrection because of Ruben Hurricane Carter.

On January 7, 2001 at 12:20 am, I received a phone call from my oldest brother Jeff, telling me that my mother had been killed in a car accident coming home from Charlevoix from her 70^th birthday dinner. My dad was driving and was in critical condition. In that accident the other driver was a 16-year old boy and his 11-year-old little brother was also killed in the tragedy. My mother, by the way, died with 6 grandsons. She never had a granddaughter.  Fast forward to 2008. It’s January 6, at 10:15 pm, my wife Molly’s water broke and we rushed to Northern Michigan Regional Hospital in preparation for the birth of my one and only child. Her labor was rapid and intense and in the less than 2 hours, the midwives helped deliver a healthy baby girl, Eloise. When the midwife handed me my one and only child - a girl, the bright digital clock behind her shoulder read 12:20 am January 7. My jaw dropped, my heart skipped a beat, and I beheld my mom’s first and long awaited granddaughter. It was almost as if God took those dry bones of my mother’s death and breathed life into them in the form of my darling daughter Eloise. I believe in resurrection because of my mom and my daughter.

I also believe in resurrection because of the many recovering addicts in my life. From my own father to two of my closest friends,  I have seen up close the horrific damage that drugs and alcohol can do – not just to the user, but to their loved ones and families as well. My dad drank hard and heavy through all 18 years of my childhood and for the next 30 years after that. Due to his alcohol addiction, dad had become a lifeless bag of bones, dry bones, dry and lifeless.  But would you believe that next week on May 1^st, my father will celebrate 12 months of total sobriety? One year without alcohol. Now if any of you would have tried to tell me that my dad would ever, in my lifetime, go an entire year without drinking, I would have had you drug tested to see what you’ve been smoking. But he’s done it. He’s been raised to a newness of life. I believe in resurrection because of my dad and my many other recovering friends.

Sometimes death and resurrection occur in the here and now – in this life.  I think that Jesus rose so that we wouldn’t miss the many deaths and resurrections that occur in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones and heroes. We do God and the resurrection a great disservice if we only look for it in the life after death. Followers of Jesus ought to see God’s resurrection power in lives like Nelson Mandela’s and Ruben Hurricane Carter’s, and in the countless millions of friends of Bill W’s, who like my dad and my dearest two friends, seemed to be dying from the complications of addiction but somehow, through the recovery process, have risen again to new life.

 

 

Part III – Conclusions and Easter Wishes…

Yes, I believe in the resurrection, but not in the exact same way I did as a child. I believe in resurrection in a broader, deeper, and more profound way. And I hope that I’ve helped you broaden your understanding and belief in resurrection, so that it might come to be as much about this life as it is about the next one. I consider it a real shame that when most Christians hear the word “resurrection, they think only about the next life, life AFTER death. I think that for our faith in Jesus to be worth anything, it has to lead us to seek and tune into resurrection right here and now in THIS life. I believe that for our faith in Jesus and his resurrection to make a positive difference in our world, we have got to be seeking as many resurrections in THIS life as we possibly can, and not only for ourselves but for others --– resurrections from failure…resurrections from loss and from brokenness…resurrections from divorce and from lost love…resurrections from addiction and poor decisions…resurrection from illness and from financial hardship.  In fact, shouldn’t our belief in resurrection make us a people who are all about giving ourselves and each other second and third and fourteenth chances? Shouldn’t the people who claim to believe in the resurrection also be the people who forgive the most and hope the most and believe in one another the most?

May Easter 2011 be a day of resurrection for you and for your loved ones in the here and now. May our celebration this day be one that inspires you to be an agent of Christ’s resurrection power in the here and now, particularly for those who are down and out. Don’t belittle the resurrection or the God who authored it by pushing it off into the next life or relegating it to what happens only after we die. God resurrection power is about so much more than that. God wants to breathe that same breath into you that he breathed into those dry bones in that Babylonian valley. God wants to breathe that same breath that he breathed into Lazarus and into Jesus into YOU and into ALL the people LIVING on this earth, here and now. God wants to breath that resurrection breath into people who feel like giving up…people who feel like there is no hope…people who feel as if they are nothing more than dry, lifeless bones…

“The Spirit of the Lord set me in the middle of a valley…It was full of bones. And God led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of that valley, bones that were very dry and lifeless. And God asked me”…just like He’s asking you this very day…”Can these bones live?”… Well….can they…?  Open your eyes…Look around…Resurrection is everywhere…Amen.

Two Movies, Two Visions, Two Approaches to Life

It’s spring break in Northern Michigan. Not being able to afford to get away, I indulge in a couple of guilty pleasures every year at this time. The first is watching more NCAA basketball than most would think humanly possible. The other is I watch a lot of movies. And with neither intent nor forethought, it just so happened that in two successive days I viewed the 2010 Oscar winning documentary “Inside Job” and the much older foreign film, “Motorcycle Diaries.”

“Inside Job” chronicles the 2008 financial meltdown, uncovering its causes, its major players, and the unprecedented corporate and governmental greed and collusion that made it all possible. “Motorcycle Diaries” depicts the several year odyssey through South America that one Ernesto Guevera, a bright young medical student, takes. It is, in fact, this journey that transforms Ernesto Guevera the medical student into Che Guevera. the vibrant revolutionary and tireless champion of the underclass,

The first of these two films, “Inside Job,” literally made me sick. I threw up. I was horrified and sickened by the senseless human tragedy that was and continues to be unleashed on so much of the world – including yours truly --in the form of totally orchestrated – and therefore totally avoidable – economic rape. Seeing CEO after CEO, with personal annual incomes in the hundreds of millions, testifying that they saw nothing unethical about advising their clients to invest in funds and derivatives that the CEO’s themselves were simultaneously betting against was almost as disgusting as seeing these same slimeballs raising their right hands as they accepted positions in our current president’s cabinet. Furthermore, most of these CEO’s and puppeteers actually managed to sell off all of their own stock in the very companies they worked for in the weeks just before the crisis hit, netting untold millions and even billions, while the people whose life savings and pensions they had supposedly been stewarding lost everything in the crash. And, of course, this documentary ends with stark white words on a jet black screen to the effect that “as of this moment, exactly none of these economic rapists have been charged, tried, or imprisoned. In fact, most of them – if they’re not among our president’s chief economic advisors – are on the faculty at places like Harvard and Stanford, training tomorrow’s financiers.

And then there was Che. At 21, with only his exams separating him from his medical degree, he takes a leave of absence from his training to travel by motorcycle from one end of South America to the other with his best friend, Alberto, also a med student. They leave with very few possessions, riding double on an old beat up motorcycle. They’ve got a map, a few dollars, and the dream of visiting some leper colonies and learning from the doctors and nurses in the trenches. Admittedly, they’re also hoping to see the world up close and get laid as often as possible. But the journey doesn’t go exactly as planned. Far sooner than they’d ever imagined, they run out of money, run their tired motorcycle into the ground, and wind up living among the poorest of the poor. They witness unemployed, destitute brothers sitting outside horrific and dangerous mines, hoping to get picked up as day laborers, knowing the chances of them coming out of the mines alive are slim. Despite numerous reasons to abandon their trip, at Che’s insistence they soldier on and make it to several of the bare bones leprosy clinics on their itinerary. And in the film’s most compelling scene, it is the duo’s final night at the last leper colony. It is also Che’s birthday. The clinic staff is throwing a party for him. After they sing Che the “Happy Birthday” song, he wanders outside the festive hall to the water’s edge and gazes across the lake where he can just make out the feint lights of the lepers’ compound. The facility is set up with the clinicians on one landmass across a huge lake from the lepers who live on another. The staff travels to and from the island each day by boat. Che begins to disrobe. Alberto comes out to check on him and asks him what he’s doing. Ernesto/Che says, “It’s my birthday and I want to spend it over there [he gestures to the lepers’ side] not here.” Despite Alberto’s protestations, Che starts swimming for it. It is pitch black. He’s been drinking. And he has horrible asthma that has almost killed him twice on this odyssey already. The clinicians watch in helpless horror as Ernesto disappears into the darkness of the lake. Meanwhile, the lepers on their side begin to hear the splashing of a swimmer and come out to see what it is. Eventually, they see that it is their beloved new doctor, and they begin to chant his name. “Er-nest-o! Er-nest-o! Er-nest-o! They wade out to greet him with hugs and excited splashes. (From his first day at the colony, Ernesto has shunned the “rules” about gloving up when interacting with the highly contagious patients. He has always just touched them and allowed the lepers to touch him as well…Hmm…Sound like anyone else we know from history?) I burst into tears and wept until my daughter awoke from her nap to find me sobbing on the couch.

Two movies. Two visions. Two very different approaches to life. We can only hope – and DO whatever each of us can – to see to it that Che’s prevails. 

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The Living Vision Community exists to inspire and equip people to live as Jesus did.

As an experimental form of spiritual community, we attempt to fulfill our mission in an organic, non-institutional way.

(While we choose to unite around Christ-like action rather than uniform belief, those seeking a sense of our underlying principles and practices may refer to two publications:)

- The Way of Jesus: Re-Forming Spiritual Communities in a Post-Church Age,

 by Toby Jones

- “The Eight Points,” by The Center for Progressive Christianity

(http://www.tcpc.org/about/8points.cfm)

 

Our Spiritual Practices

In the evolution of our Living Vision experiment, we’ve done a lot of different things to deepen our sense of community. Most recently, we’ve turned to some of the spiritual practices of our ancient forbearers to connect us more profoundly to each other and to the God who is our Source.

Spiritual practices are exactly what their name implies – exercises or practices designed to nurture and develop the spirit that already dwells within all people. Quakers refer to that indwelling spirit as the “divine light” or “spark.” When we begin with that understanding or belief –- that God’s Spirit already dwells within every single human being – relationships are always relationships between equals. There is no hierarchy or pecking order. The Indian greeting or blessing “Namaste,” meaning “the Spirit in me greets the Spirit in you,” captures this sense of mutual respect that the ancient spiritual practices further engender.

The other thing I love about spiritual practices is the fact that they, like anything else that matters, require practice. They must be repeated with regularity to bear fruit. And yet, at the same time, the spiritual practices are never really about whatever fruit that they may or may not elicit. They’re more about the practice, the process, the doing. As one of my friends likes to say, for example, about the practice of silent meditation, “What this practice reveals more than anything else is how incredibly cluttered our minds are and how impossible it is to ever shut out the myriad voices drowning out the still, small voice of God.”

And so, we come. Again and again we come. On the first and third Thursday evenings of the month we come to practice, to be still…to be still and know….KNOW that we are not God. In the doing of these ancient –- and in some ways foreign – practices, we humble ourselves. We recognize our common emptiness, our collective clutter, and our shared humanity. We humble ourselves while, at the same time, boldly affirming that within each and every one of us lies that divine spark, that Imago Dei –- the image of God. And together, through these shared spiritual practices, we fan each other’s flame.

Come and join us, April 7 from 6-7:30 pm. Namaste…

"Beyond Belief" - a sermon by Toby Jones delivered 2/27/11 at 1st Pres. of Boyne City, Mi

                  (Based on Micah 6:6-8, I John 3:16-18, Luke 4:16-21, & Luke 7:18-23)

         It seems appropriate that on a Sunday when you prepare to baptize three people and welcome another half dozen new members into this church, that we spend some time asking each other one fundamental question: What does Jesus want from us? What DOES Jesus want from us?

         Millions and millions of Christians and churchgoers in America have answered the question of what Jesus wants from us in the following way. Very simply, what Jesus wants from us to accept that he is Son of God and BELIEVE in our hearts that he is who he said he is and that he did all that the Bible said he did. For the vast, vast majority of Christians, the question of what Jesus wants from us all boils down to one word: BELIEVE.

In fact it’s probably been at least 500 years that the Christian Church has been giving this answer to the question of what Jesus wants from us. But I think that it is the WRONG answer, and I argue my point in the second chapter of my latest book, The Way of Jesus. I have become convinced that it really isn’t belief at all that Jesus cares about. In fact, I think that what we believe may be the least important thing from Jesus’ standpoint. I think that Jesus has had enough of our beliefs and all our bickering about them. I’m here to tell you that Jesus is dying to get us to move BEYOND BELIEF!

From the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus was after one thing – and it wasn’t believers; it was DISCIPLES. Do you know that the difference is between a believer and a disciple? A disciple of a 1^st century rabbi wanted to BE LIKE his rabbi. Christian scholar Dallas Willard defines discipleship this way: “A disciple is an apprentice; someone who has decided to be with another person…in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is. A disciple choose to be with a particular rabbi in order to learn from him how to become like him.”[1]

What I argue in my book and what Dallas Willard argues in his is that somehow, somewhere along the line, followers of Christ have gotten really confused. We’ve wandered away from the central task of living as disciples of Jesus, and become satisfied instead with simply believing in Jesus. We now find ourselves living in a time when, “it is almost universally accepted that one can be a Christian withOUT being a disciple.” Willard goes onto suggests that the dominant belief in most Christian churches today is that: “One can be a professing Christian and a church member in good standing without ever being a disciple.”[2]

And this is a HUGE problem, folks, one that I am so concerned about that I have dedicated the rest of my life to the challenge of bringing people back to the path of discipleship. When Jesus called his disciples to follow him, he was NOT simply asking them to learn about him or believe in him: Jesus was calling his disciples – including you and me – with the expectation that we would actually BECOME LIKE HIM. In fact, he even promised in John 14 that we would actually do far greater things than he had done!

Let’s look at some of Jesus’ most famous parables and teachings, and you will see the truth of what I’m talking about. Consider these following gospel moments:    

        Jesus tells a story of a man with two sons. He asks them both to go work in his field. One son sayssays he’ll do his father asked but doesn’t, and the other son he won’t go into the field but he does. Jesus then asks, “Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

        Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan, which concludes with the following: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?. . . Go and DO likewise.”

       In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, Jesus concludes by saying, “If you’ve done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it unto me.”

      How about The Parable of the Talents in which Jesus gives three servants three different amounts or talents, and then, in the end, evaluates each servant by what he has DONE with the gift.’

     Then there’s Jesus’ famous teaching in The Sermon on the Mount, in which he says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”[3]

Again and again, Jesus made the point that he wasn’t interested in people believing in him. What Jesus was interested in was people following him and doing what he did. And yet, anyone who hangs around most any American church can readily see that what we have in our Christian Churches today are NOT so much disciples of Jesus, but rather FANS of Jesus, people interested in learning about Jesus without the genuine intention of actually becoming like him. And that’s understandable, when you stop and think about it, because, after all, it is SO much easier to fill ourselves with knowledge about Jesus than it is to wrestle with the life-changing call to actually become like Jesus. But Dallas Willard reminds us, true Christ followers are the ones “who actually learn to DO what did and Jesus taught was best.”

         Brothers and sisters, it’s time that we all let go of this damaging and distorted notion that Christianity is primarily about our intellectual assent to a body of beliefs. This ridiculous Pauline notion that a Christian is someone who has “accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior,” has got to be set aside once and for all. Anybody who thinks that being a disciple of Jesus can somehow be boiled down to a sentence we say to “get saved” is not only missing the point, but is grossly misrepresenting the Jesus of the gospels. No one who has systematically and comprehensively studied the gospels could ever suggest that Jesus is more concerned with our verbal confessions of faith than he is with our actions – actions on behalf of the poor, the lonely, the suffering, the oppressed.

In the fifth chapter of my book, The Way of Jesus, I tell the story of an amazing little Episcopal church in NYC that has really figured out what authentic discipleship is. They are a congregation of less than 150 people. In the late 1980’s their church had gotten so small and in such debt that the diocese had decided to close them down. The elders of the church decided that since they were going to get closed down anyway they might as well go out with a bang – doing something “Christlike.” So they decided to start offering free lunches to homeless people. Now remember – this is in New York City, right? On the first day 30 or so people wandered in. The next day it was 50 and then 150. Soon they didn’t have any room left in their fellowship hall. The sanctuary roof was leaking, and it just so happened that at about this time the roofer came to the church board and asked to remove all the oak pews that were bolted to the floor until he could get the roof patched or the pews would all be ruined. The board thought – this is great. We can move the lunch ministry into the sanctuary and fit way more people. Out went the pews, in came the fold up tables and chairs, and soon they were feeding over 1000 lunches a day – in their sanctuary. There was a huge line of homeless folks every day at noon that stretched around an entire city block! There was no way that a tiny, struggling congregation of only 150 people could keep this up all on their own, but soon other congregations, businesses, and even groups from other religions saw what was going on and asked if they could help! Would you believe that that tiny Episcopal church now serves nearly 400,000 lunches a year and has served over 10 million lunches since starting this ministry in 1987, back when everyone thought the church was through?

When I visited this church and got to see the feeding ministry, I saw Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, Agnostics and Atheists ALL helping, ALL working together to prepare and serve those lunches. I even noticed that there were two signs on the front of the church. One for the Episcopal Church and one for a Jewish temple! That small Episcopal congregation is now sharing their building all week long with a Jewish congregation! And I have to believe that God and Jesus LOVE what is happening at that little corner of 8^th Avenue and 79^th Street, where hundreds of people have set aside their religious differences, set aside their BELIEFS to get together on something SO much MORE important–feeding hungry people with no questions asked and NO sermons preached. God and Jesus must be thrilled that here, at least, is one group of people who have gotten beyond belief – BEYOND BELIEF – in order to DO what Jesus did, in order to BE disciples.

While the Apostle Paul may have been overly concerned with verbal confessions of faith and correct belief as he understood it, Jesus was not. Again and again, Jesus called his disciples to action, to works of love and compassion. I am firmly convinced that Jesus has no interest in our debates over dogma and our various doctrinal litmus tests for correct belief. Jesus is much more concerned that his followers focus on doing what he, himself, did—not just knowing what Jesus did or talking about what Jesus did—but actually doing it. This is discipleship.

    Congregations of “believers” who persist in dealing only, or even primarily, with beliefs will continue their precipitous decline toward irrelevance and extinction. Only those communities of disciples who are willing to move “beyond belief” to equip and encourage each other to DO the things that Jesus did will have the relevance, the respect, and the right to grow and thrive as we move into our very uncertain future. This is what the Church of the Holy Apostles did on their little corner of 8^th and 79^th So what will you do here on the corner of Park and Pine?

          As you prepare for the baptism and membership rituals of the next few moments, I hope you will be willing to move beyond belief. I hope you will DARE to be disciples -- people who set aside the tired arguments about belief in attempt to actually become LIKE Jesus in your ACTIONS – to do a little something Christlike. It’s up to you. Is the 1^st Presbyterian Church of Boyne City going to be just another dying community of “believers?” Or are you going to become a community of disciples, determined to DO the things that Jesus did, no matter how hard, no matter what the cost. Jesus put it this way: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the work of the gospel will surely find it.” Amen.

---

Seeking a Faith that is "Beyond Belief"

In my recent endeavors to launch a new kind of spiritual community here in Northern Michigan, I and the people around me have struggled to really pin down who we are and what we believe. Since I have written extensively in my latest book, The Way of Jesus, about my aversion to forms of faith that are belief-driven (ie – based on a list of proscribed dogmas or tenets) I won’t dwell on that here. But I can’t tell you how challenging it has been to get a group of people together and functioning without such a belief list to guide us. 

One of my fellow travelers in the Living Vision experiment happens to also be the president of the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He sent me a very compelling piece by the grand poo-bah of the National UU Association that was the best articulation I’ve ever read on the trouble with belief. Here are a few choice excerpts for your consideration:

“The trouble is that we treat the question “What do you believe?” as an obvious and natural question. After all, religion is about what we believe, isn’t it? No! No. Religion is not about what you or I or Baptists or Catholics or Jews or Muslims or Hindus believe. I would even go a giant step further: Belief is the enemy of religion. Let me repeat that: Belief is the enemy of religion.

Perhaps I should explain. We are so immersed in a culture that views religion as a matter of what people believe that we think this is the way it has always been. It isn’t. All of this emphasis on what someone believes is actually very modern and very Western. No one objects to calling Buddhism a religion. Yet Buddhism has no theology at all in the way we use the word. Buddhists don’t believe anything, at least not anything that is a set of propositions. Buddhism doesn’t even have a god in the usual sense.

Jews have never had anything like a creed, a statement of belief. Ironically, Jesus, about whom there are all sorts of creeds, probably never encountered a creed in his life. The whole idea of a creed would have been foreign. Jews did have a definite sense of God, to be sure. However, the key to the God of the Jews is that he had a covenant with the people and gave the Hebrew people the law. The Hebrew scriptures never show any interest in what people believe. The scriptures show a lot of interest in what people do. They are supposed to love God and obey the commandments. The great prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, Ezekiel—were concerned with justice, compassion and being faithful to the covenant. They had no interest in doctrine.

The early Christian communities, while they did show more concern with what people believed, actually tolerated a lot of variety.

Islam, the next great religious movement, also has little theology. Its statement of faith is that there is no god but God and that Mohammed is his prophet. This is a way of insisting, as did the Jews, that there is only one God. And this is another way of saying that we all owe allegiance to a common source; we are all one people. The great emphasis in Islam is with what the faithful are supposed to do,  not what they are supposed to think.

All the emphasis on religion as belief does not come on the scene until much later. It started with the Catholic church and its creeds, but it really got intense with the Reformation. All of this emphasis on religion being about believing the right things is really a modern development. Even the whole idea of belief has gotten twisted. The word used to be used in a very different way. “Belief” once meant “what I give my heart to” or “what I commit myself to.” Belief was linked to emotion and action. Belief did not mean agreeing with a set of metaphysical or theological propositions....

I want to make a more radical point. The point is that religious belief is actually the enemy of religion. Every major religious tradition seeks to impart a sense of wonder, mystery, awe and humility. Belief systems stop this cold. Belief systems start where our thinking stops.

Once we think we have explained it all, once we think we have all the answers, our minds close and we become arrogant, belligerent and defensive.

Just look at what happens when a belief system takes hold. What follows can be truly horrible. First, we categorize everyone who does not agree with us as either ignorant or evil. If we have the truth and are certain we have it, then our task in life becomes spreading this truth. Our task also becomes defending the truth from all of those who disagree. Believers have enemies everywhere. The world becomes a battleground. This is the world of Muslim fundamentalists blowing up innocent people and of Christian fundamentalists trying to criminalize gays and lesbians. This is the world of John Calvin burning Michael Servetus alive because Servetus did not agree with the doctrine of the Trinity. This is the world of the Spanish Inquisition. Once a religion becomes an all-encompassing belief

system, murder will surely follow.

Believers are dangerous. They always have been.

So, if religion isn’t really about what we believe, then what is it about? Can we be religious without a belief system? I am convinced that religion without belief is true religion. Religion that is focused on belief is a dangerous corruption of true religion.

Religion without belief is not phony religion. It isn’t fake religion or pretend religion or partial religion or religion lite. The problem with asking what someone believes is that it is the wrong question. True religion is about what we love, not about what we think. True religion is about what you and I hold sacred. The practice of true religion is faithfulness to what we love. The key religious questions you and I must answer are these: What do we love so much that we are moved to tears? What gives us unspeakable joy? What gives us peace beyond understanding? What do we love so much that it calls us to action? What do we care about so deeply that we willingly, enthusiastically, devote our lives to it?

When we focus on what we truly love, we ask life’s essential questions. We ask questions like, “How shall I live?” When we ask the question together in community, it becomes, “How shall we live together? What shall we do together?” When we focus on what we truly love, we discover something wonderful: we discover that we love the same things.

We realize that we need one another. We want to be compassionate and gentle with one another. We want to raise children who are kind, content and responsible. We want a place where we can come together to remind ourselves of what is truly worthwhile. That is what worship is—it is literally an affirmation of worth.

And we want to make a difference in the world. We are not content to be a club. We know there are hundreds, thousands, of neighbors who love what we love. And if they love what we love, they have the same religion we do. We open our hearts and our doors to them. Religion beyond belief is the religion millions of people long for. It is religion that transcends culture, race and class. It is religion where we can grow spiritually, a religion where we can forge deep and lasting relationships, a religion where we can join hands to help heal a broken world.

The central issue before us as a religious movement is not to decide what we believe. That will just set us to arguing among ourselves until the theological cows come home. (Trust me, the theological cows have been gone for millennia and they’re not coming home in our lifetime.) No, the central issue before us all is whether we will accept the challenge to become a religion beyond belief. We live at a time when religious tribalism kills people every day. Fundamentalists try to force their beliefs on others. Millions upon millions want no part of that kind of religion...”

                                   

-       From Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Quest, Oct 2010

Rev. Paul Morales

I love Morales’s phrase “religion beyond belief,” and I intend to use it in attempt to better articulate what we at Living Vision are trying to live into. I am not a Unitarian. I am a follower of Jesus. But I am deeply grateful to Rev. Peter Morales, and I wholeheartedly embrace the expression of faith that he is seeking in and through his tradition. I believe with all my heart that the Jesus of the Gospels was after this very kind of religion, one that was “beyond belief” and centered on “what we love, not what we think.” 

Leave me your comments and join the conversation!

Next Living Vision Gathering: This Thursday, January20 6-8pm Soup and Bread Discussion. For directions and more info email me at tobyjones48@gmail.com

Getting Connected in 2011

It can be a little lonely and isolating starting a new kind of spiritual community from scratch. Those of us who have answered the call to take on such an uphill climb need the support of other alternative communities in order to press on in the creation and establishment of our own. With that in mind, I have been searching for networks of progressively minded spiritual communities with whom I can share the Living Vision experiment. One group that has really caught my eye, my mind, and my heart is The Center for Progressive Christianity.

To familiarize readers of this blog and the folks in the Living Vision Experiment with their network and ideas, I want to post what they call their "8 Points" in hopes that you will reflect upon them and respond to them using the "comments" icon below this entry. I'd really like to hear what you think of their fundamental principles and whether they seem compatible with the 7 principles I've outlined for Living Vision in my book The Way of Jesus: Re-Forming Spiritual Communities in a Post-Church Age.

Here they are:

The 8 Points of The Center for Progressive Christianity:

We Have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.

We Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God's realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us.

We Understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus's name to be a representation of an ancient vision of God's feast for all peoples

           

We Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including ...

We Know that the way we behave toward one another and toward other people is the fullest expression of what we believe.

We Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty - more value in questioning than in absolutes.

We Form ourselves into communities dedicated to equipping one another for the work we feel called to do: striving for peace and justice among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God's creation, and bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his brothers and sisters.

We Recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege.

 


Thanks for joining in the conversation! And don't forget, the folks of The Living Vision Experiment will be meeting each Thursday night from 6-8 pm at my house: 138 E. Sheridan (Apt. 5) in Petoskey, Mi. Everyone brings either some soup or bread to share and in the next 6 weeks we'll be bringing Bibles to study the fruits of the Spirit as they are delineated in Galatians 5 and in the life and teachings of Jesus. ALL are welcome. Just call me, Toby Jones, at 231-881-6734 and let me know if you're coming. See you Thursday!

Grace & Peace,
Toby Jones, founder of Living Vision