Article from Epistle to the Presbyterians, March 2006
by Thomas A. Sweet
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On our recent foray into New York City, while Emily shopped in Fifth Avenue stores, I sat on the steps of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and watched the throngs of people passing by. I chose those particular steps because they are the ones on which homeless people who cannot be accommodated in the church’s shelter sleep at night in New York, the Fifth Avenue Church having won that right for them in court after the NYPD and the city bureaucracy had contested their presence there.
Enthralled by the great diversity of the people streaming across my field of vision, I called to mind that little sentence tucked away in the middle of Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.” Indeed, I saw “fish” of every kind from those steps, and I loved it. I remembered, too, the prayer of Jesus in John 17: “May they all be one…”
Dominant strains of Christianity through the years too often have misled people into believing that our primary religious task in this life is to prepare ourselves to face a judgment day in which God will adjudicate our lives as acceptable or not. The church has divined all sorts of rules for living that one must keep in order to pass muster at heaven’s gate. The church even has declared at times that there is no salvation outside of the church. (Nothing self-interested in that statement, is there?) Life, according to this view, is mostly and finally about passing a celestial admission test. Seeking to save one’s own eternal skin. A bad strategy, it seems to me, if we are trying to follow Jesus who said, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose them.”
More and more of us are being led to understand that participating in an evolutionary spirituality is closer to the dream and intent of God for us. Our task, yea our privilege, in this life is to become, collectively, truly, fully, and authentically human so as to embrace humanity’s part in the continuing unfolding of creation. As such, inclusiveness is not simply a matter of our reaching out to help or to welcome a wider group of people (that, frankly, often serves to puff us up with pride at how “open” we are). Inclusiveness is about seeing the face of God in an ever-widening panoply of people, situations, and nature and responding appropriately.
Is that not the gift of Jesus? That he was able to see in the people and peoples he met the face of God and therefore treated them with candor and compassion toward a more hopeful future? He also embraced the natural world and the earth itself as habitats of divinity. This-world, this-life were the focal points of Jesus. Jesus enfleshed the cosmic Christ that the Old Testament calls “Sophia” (wisdom) and that John in his gospel calls “the logos” (life-essence) and that Taoists call the “Tao” and that goes by many other names. Thus, we (Christians) call Jesus “Christ.” We do so not because he is the One who must be “believed in” in order to be saved from a hellish afterlife, but because he shows us what life bathed in the mind of Christ (Christ-consciousness) is like (Philippians 2:5).
“What God has joined together, let not humanity put asunder…” Yet, we have insisted on fracturing the oneness of everything, breaking it up into pieces over which we then devour one another for rights of possession and control. We need Jesus, not to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, but to be our guide and way to an enlightened consciousness that honors the divine desire for oneness called Love amid our great and wonderful diversity.
Lent can be a time for us, individually and collectively, to clothe ourselves in the mind of Christ as we are taught by St. Paul to do. We can do it sitting on the steps of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church watching “fish’ of every kind on parade in front of us and welling up with esteem and gratitude for our common humanity, at the workbench in a factory, in a classroom, under a waterfall, any old place. Church, at its best, helps us to do it. Toward that end, I invite you to a Lenten discipline of Sunday worship and to feast on the diet of Lenten parables being prepared for you (see cover article). See you in church, for the sake of the world God so loves.
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