1 John 2:28-3:3
I have spent these past seven weeks as a volunteer with the
Iona community, most of my time spent in the kitchen preparing food for the
community guests. The whole experience of working, attending worship services,
making real friends, reading spiritual writers, and soaking in the beauty of
the Island itself has left me changed in encouraging and challenging ways. I
hope to briefly share my experience of God here on Iona.
The passage from 1st John which we just heard
captures the truth that I have continually heard, often shared, but here on
Iona have experienced in a deeply real way.
This is the message: “We are children of God. And that’s only the beginning.
Who knows how we’ll end up! We’ll see Christ and become like him”. The unity of
human and divine that took place in Jesus of Nazareth is opened up to each one
of us. Every part of creation, every atom and molecule that makes up our bodies
and the world in which we live, every thing
that exists is charged with the grandeur of God. Everything is, in its deepest
self, identifiable or maybe even identical
with God, just as Jesus recognized and fully, completely, and wholly
embraced. I want to read now a short passage from a book that I’ve read here in
the past weeks, Immortal Diamond, by
Richard Rohr.
"Jesus full accepted and enjoyed his divine-human status. “I
and the Father are one,”, he said, which was shocking to his Jewish
contemporaries, for he looked just like them, and apparently they did not like
themselves. No wonder they called it blasphemy and picked up stones to kill
him. You do know, I hope, that it is formally wrong for Christians to simply
say, “Jesus is God.” It misses the major point and goal of the whole
incarnation. Jesus does not equal God per se, which is for us the Trinity.
Jesus, much better and more correctly, is the
union between God and the human. That is a third something- which in fact
we are invited to share in. Once we made Jesus only divine, we ended up being only
human, and the whole process of human transformation ground to a half.
When we tried to understand Jesus outside the dynamism of
the Trinity, we did not to him or ourselves any favour. Jesus never knew
himself or operated as an independent “I” but only as a thou in relationship to
his Father through the Holy Spirit, which he says in a hundred different ways.
The “Father” and the “Holy Spirit” are a relationship to Jesus. God is a verb more than a noun. God is
love, which means relationship itself.
Christianity lost its natural movement and momentum- out
from that relationship and back into that relationship- when it pulled Jesus
out of the Trinity. It killed what is the exciting inner experience and
marginalized the mystics who really should be center stage. Jesus is the model
and metaphor for all of creation that is all being drawn into this flow of
love, and thus he always says, “Follow me!” and, “I shall return to take you
with me, so that where I am, you may be also”. The concrete, historical body of
Jesus represents the universal Body of Christ that “God has loved before the
foundation of the world. He is the stand-in for all of us. The Jesus story in
the universe story, in other words. His union with God that Jesus never doubts,
he hands to us- to never doubt. Quite simply, this is what it means to
‘believe’ in Jesus.
The spiritual wisdom of divine-human union is first
beautifully expressed in writing in the Vedas (the oldest source of humanism,
around three thousand years old). The phrase in Sanskrit is Tat Tvam Asi, which is a though so
condensed that I am going to list all likely translations.
-
YOU are That!
-
You ARE what you seek!
-
THOU art that!
-
THAT you are!
-
YOU are IT!
The meaning of this saying is that the True Self, in its
original, pure, primordial sate, is wholly or partially identifiable or even
identical with God, the Ultimate Reality that is the ground and origin of all
phenomena. That which you long for, you also are. In fact, that is where the
longing comes from.
Longing for God and longing for our True Self are the same
longing. And the mystics would say that it is God who is even doing the longing
in us and through us through the divine indwelling of the Holy Spirit. God
implanted a natural affinity and allurement between God’s self and all of God’s
creatures, all of God’s creation."
Everything that I have just read from the wisdom of Father
Richard has become more and more evident to me here on Iona. God is so close to
the world, so inseparably united with the true self of every created thing. And
as humans we have the ultimate gift of perceiving and experiencing such truth!
The truth of triune love at the centre of all created things
is the most real, the most radically real truth in the universe because it is the circumference, centre, and enabling
energy of the universe itself. And nothing can shake or move it. The divine
core is invincible, the peace and love of the trinity is unsurpassable. Even in
the face of anything: even personal
sin that we can’t escape, or huge wars which rage and costs millions of lives,
or painful shame and guilt in our pasts, or the hurt that comes from broken
relationships, or even the fact that we experience that God will one day die
and be buried and our bodies disintegrate into the earth, all of that can do
nothing; it is an insignificant blip in the face of the divine love which calls
us children and makes us like Christ.
I’m know failing to articulate this properly or fully due
both to my own limitations of expression and all the inexpressibility of what I
am trying to express, but my experience of God on this island runs deeper than any
language, and I am ok with that. I have encountered God around me, beside me,
and within me, despite the many possible things that would prevent such an
encounter. This encounter with God is not something that I discovered or earned
so much as realized and accepted as always and already around me and within me.
And so I look forward to my life, and your lives, and the life of this world in
hope, the hope that, as John says, “when Christ is openly revealed we shall see
him- and in seeing him, become like him”.
This, I have come to believe and trust, is the entire source
of our outward action of love and justice in the world. The world, it seems,
and all of us, have forgotten our deep and true self, united eternally with
triune love. In all our actions we will bring life if we remind the world and
ourselves of the eternal goodness which is always
within us, even when the whole world or our very self seems unredeemable. What
can never be lost in the world or in us is the triune love of God experienced by
and perfectly exemplified by Jesus, a love which erupted in the resurrection
and even now is bringing us all from the depths of death to the resurrection of
new, exhilarating, and everlasting life.
You are now invited to come forward to light a candle to
symbolize the eternal flame, the beautiful true centre of triune love within
you, within others, and within the entire universe, sustaining and perfecting
us as we are invited deeper and deeper into the Christ-like mysterious union of
human and divine. As we do so you are invited to sing along quietly with the
Alleluia which we learned, praising God who is not only far beyond us, but also
God who is deep within us and God who, in an infinitely beautifully mystery, by
grace is united with us.
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