Spiritual formation

Please bring a brief description of your spiritual background, your present spiritual self, and what you would like to get from our group talks.


Spiritual Background
Love
The Bible and the Christian tradition taught me that God is love, and my mother taught me what it meant to be loved. The basis of my early theology is embodied in the children’s song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

The cross
I tried very hard to believe that the cross embodied love, but I don’t believe that. Jesus taught us to care for the least, the lowly, the outcasts of society. For going against the rules built up by his tradition, he became a threat and was executed. From that I learned that people who make rules to live by love those rules more than they love other people.

Methodism
Albert Outler theorized that John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church (which I grew up in), used four different sources for his theological conclusions:

Scripture - the Holy Bible (Jewish and Christian Testaments)
Tradition - the two millennia history of the Christian Church
Reason - rational thinking and sensible interpretation
Experience - a person’s personal and communal journey

I learned in seminary that scripture is the foundation for the other three, making the Bible the primary source for all of Wesley's thinking. Too much emphasis is placed on scripture and tradition, in my opinion, with too little emphasis on reason and experience. Using my god-given ability to think, I have come to see that tradition -– and that includes scripture, which is embodied tradition -- has led us astray from what Jesus said and did.


Present Spiritual Self
Jesus
Jesus embodied love (God is love, according to the Bible) in a way no one else in the Judeo-Christian tradition has ever done, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus wanted us to worship him. I personally think he would be horrified to see where the church has gone “in his name” –- by which I mean specifically two things: (1) its insistence on literalizing what Jesus is purported to have said and done during his ministry, and (2) its decision to worship Jesus instead of doing what Jesus taught.

Christ
Christians missed the mark, in my opinion -– and sin is defined as missing the mark. We missed the mark when we redefined messiah to mean something like “son of god” and began to worship the messenger. The Hebrew word messiah and the Greek word christos both mean “anointed.” King David was anointed and called messiah, but we overlook that discrepancy in our theology.

We missed the mark when we developed a religion and institutionalized it -– kneeling and bowing and kissing rings and wearing garb to set apart one group of people as though they are special and exalted, forgetting that Jesus told his followers to take on the role of servants.

We missed the mark because we turned the pre-Easter Jesus into a post-Easter Christ. We did that by insisting that people take “on faith” (in other words, accept something “fantastic”) that God performed a bunch of miraculous and magical things with a dead body because this arouses the awe of the masses who are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

We missed the mark when we said God’s honor was so tarnished by our sins (by our missing the mark) that God required a blood sacrifice of a perfect lamb (exactly like the Jewish burnt offerings of the Old Testament that the Jews have themselves given up) before God could forgive our missing the mark. What kind of God is that?  That bloody god sounds like the men in Arab lands who mis-use the Qur’an to justify killing a wife or daughter who accidentally exposes a part of her face, thus dishonoring the man. Huh?

We missed the mark when we decided the world was our oyster. Whether our world was created or evolved, the God of the Jewish testament proclaimed it good. Its goodness has become polluted and diminished during these many years of Christian reign over it. It seems to me that Christians prefer to feel entitled to do as they please rather than please God by being loving and compassionate and kind.

Not my god
During the “God is dead” hysteria of the late-1960s and early-1970s, the most rational response I heard was “which god?” Do you mean the God on high sitting on a cloud and zapping us for making mistakes? I’m glad to hear he’s dead and gone, though I haven’t seen any sign of that yet. Do you mean the God who supposedly wrote the “Word of God”? Great! Now we can forget about stoning those who break the rules in God’s rulebook. Do you mean the God who decreed that the Israelites were to kill every person and every animal in the towns they conquered? Wonderful, if that means we can now quit killing in God’s name. None of these is my God.

Oneness
I learned many years ago that we are all one. I am including the animals and the plants and the rocks as well as the humans who inhabit this planet. Since I first heard it in a philosophy class around 1970, I have been considering the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects everything on the whole earth. More recently, I have pondered the possibility that a molecule in my body may once have been part of the structure of a flower or an emperor or a mountain on the other side of the world. The air I breath may once have been sucked into the lungs of Hitler, yes, or maybe Muhammad or Cleopatra or a llama in Peru. This kind of thinking is necessary to help us feel our connectedness with all other beings, all other life, every other person alive today or in the past or in the future. The closest thing Christians do to empowering this idea is to share the “one body and blood” during communion within the community, when we share the same meal with Christians all over the world and the Christians of all times. Would that the emphasis were on the oneness ... rather than centuries of arguing over whether the bread becomes the body of God when it is blessed. Share a morsel of bread and quit bickering, for God's sake!