“The Christ within Is One”
“The Christ within Is One”
Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year B May 12, 2024
Acts 1:15-26 Psalm 1 1 John 5:9-13 John 17:6-19
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
This spring has been dynamic with weather. Battleship-gray clouds have delivered sleet, hail, and rain either as drizzly mist or full-on downpour. Other days feature above average temperatures and sunshine that lasts longer each day. The in-between sometimes features rainbows. Sometimes faint, other times brilliant and intense, often with a double rainbow; rainbows catch our attention.
It seems rainbows are something that we see and feel. There is a mental fascination and an emotional, even spiritual stirring. It’s one thing to see something like a rainbow. It’s even more intense to experience them in life. Seeing a rainbow, we can talk about water droplets, visible light, refraction, angles, arcs, whatever weather aspects or scientific data relate to how rainbows form; why they have different colors, that sort of thing. All these would be interesting facts. We could either believe them or not, accept them as science, or reject them. If we like them, we could even share these facts with others so they might hear and understand what rainbows involve. But would our descriptions give the whole picture? Could we share thoughts and scientific concepts in ways that others could fully understand?
Much of life can only be discovered by living it. To be told about something isn’t the same. To explain a rainbow is no substitute for seeing a rainbow in person. Especially if it’s a double rainbow, or if you were in the storm that created the moisture in the air, or if you saw how dark it got as those clouds gathered before they unleashed their downpour. Then, when the sun comes out, you experience glory. You survived the storm, and you can participate in praise because you are one with the storm, one with the rainbow, one with all there is. In living experience, a rainbow is entirely different than mere shared ideas and asking, do you believe in rainbows?
The same is true for faith. Those who follow Jesus learn from the Spirit as we travel on the Way of Christ, as we trust God with our whole being. It’s one thing to hear about God, and another thing to be in living relationship with God, and still more to realize experientially that God lives inside of us, and even more to make the connection that we are divine beings at our core, and there is no separation, only unity. The Christ within is one.
This Good News is kind of like a beautiful rainbow. It’s one thing to hear about it, maybe you believe it or reject it, maybe you figure you can go it alone, you’ve got that spirit within dialed just right. But it’s another thing to learn from the very subtle ways God reveals in mystery, even and especially through the most difficult times. As the life of wisdom reveals, sometimes you can’t breathe deep enough to soak in all the awe and wonder; other times it’s all you can do to take the next breath. Life is a mix.
This morning we read some very dynamic scripture passages, and we hear Jesus in the midst of a prayer for the disciples as he talks about being in the world, not of the world, no longer in the world, but followers in the world, but they are not of the world: John uses rather surreal language filled with image and symbol while it’s supported by a foundation of relationship and intimacy, care and devotion, but most of all love. The Love of Jesus is what gives Christian faith strength and power, not in dominating ways, but in sustaining ways. Love is what changes a weather phenomenon like a rainbow into a promise and redemptive reminder from a Presence that can be trusted. Love is something that is lived in all its complexities and gifts.
Diana Butler Bass wrote a book called Christianity After Religion, the End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. We studied this book in our adult class Sunday mornings in 2016. The texts this morning got me thinking about it again as Jesus prays for those God has given him, which could mean the church.
Bass talks about the church that we’ve mostly known undergoing a tremendous change, and in this process of Spiritual Awakening, God is at the heart of this transformative work. It’s tough, because one thing comes to an end for a new thing to come into being. Even the prayer Jesus prays anticipates his own death, tied to the life of those who carry on. This is the pattern of all life, and yet it’s still hard.
Bass talks about the church based on these three things, in this order: Belief, Behave, Belong. Christian faith in the belief, behave, belong structure, is based on doctrines. The word orthodoxy means having the right ideas about God and coming to an agreement with this in the form of belief. This is an idea thing, to agree with certain concepts or assumptions about who God is, who we are, and how that relationship plays out. These concepts are limited to the efficiencies and deficiencies of the consciousness that develops them.
The usual party line of the Western Church in the Greco-Roman world involves Jesus as the Savior because God is wrathful, and we are original sinners who are condemned, yet we’re saved by Jesus who becomes a divine mediator, the sacrificial lamb who takes away our punishment through the cross. Anyway, rather than get caught up on specific doctrines like penal substitutionary atonement or the doctrine of original sin, for now let’s just use belief as the catch-all term Diana Butler Bass says is the first aspect of the contemporary Church in most of our experiences and assumptions.
A second thing she lists, after belief, is behaving. If you believe, if you pray the right prayer and have correct thoughts, you better behave a certain way. Thou shalt not behave otherwise. This makes Christianity a moral contest, a rules game, a purity code, and a witch hunt involving inquisitions. To behave a certain way is so critical that if you don’t behave properly, you risk the third aspect, belonging. Only those who believe correctly and behave properly are allowed to belong. If you mess up either of the first two, the third does not work. Then comes exclusion, excommunication; these describe the process used to demonize, write-off, even kill those assumed unsaved. This is a process of othering, of viewing others as objects who present a threat.
Thankfully Bass recognizes that we are in a movement of God that unravels this prevalent form of Church. What emerges is based on the same things, but as this Spiritual Awakening takes place, the order changes. Instead of Believe, Behave, Belong that religion tries to promote and institutionalize as Church, God is bringing about a faith community that lives out love through Belonging, Behaving, and Believing, in that order. Belong, behave, believe.
Belonging is first. Love is unconditional and relationship is primary. Indeed, if we experience faith, which is what mysticism is, experiential faith, then we perceive through our hearts that we are united with all things, and Christ is in all things, and all things are in Christ. If Christ is in all things, then how can something not belong? Everything belongs.
Next is behaving, because once you experience acceptance and love from God and a community who shows genuine concern and care as best as they know how to express it, then why would you behave in ways that tarnish this gift? The Ten Commandments, for example, stop being an external list of law and become instead an internalized outcome of a lived faith. They are results of loving and belonging.
Finally, there is believing. After the community is formed, as the church lives in love, then we share our experience and through story and partnerships come ways to express what is taking place. These are not ideas about God, but limited metaphors that point to the mystery of God at work in the community, that help express a wholeness that we would not find individually. To discover together and share what believing involves, it’s as a community that we confront and overcome that in our world which seeks to challenge God’s divine purpose.
It's a lot to take in, things like church decline that become birth pangs of what comes next; the switch from how church has developed over 1,500 years, from believe, behave, belong, to the reverse of belong, behave, believe. This process is also wrapped in larger revolutions, like a shift not just from patriarchy to matriarchy, but a healthy, whole, combination; and the unfolding of a new structure of consciousness, especially from the deficiencies and narrow truths of rationalism to a more integrated, balanced experience and ability to hold multiple perspectives with spiritual openness.
To do this inner work takes effort, yet we can be encouraged because the grace-filled prayers of Jesus echo through the ages and the Living Christ continues to welcome, fill, and send us as Love finds expression in and as our lives. Because this gift is far more than mere words, beyond mere thoughts, ideas, or concepts, but a deep, abiding, lived reality, we trust that God is glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.
She has written three other books since then, each expounds on an aspect of:
BELONGING shifts from membership toward relationship.
BEHAVING shifts from rules toward practice.
BELIEVING shifts from dogma toward experience.
https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/after-christianity-after-religion