The Whirligig Gospel

It is whirligig season. I am not talking about the annoying "lawn ornaments" that sprout from front lawns each spring. I am referring to the winged maple seeds that people also call "helicopters" or "whirlybirds." They fill the air and cover the ground this time of year. My wife looked out the window the other day and remarked, "It is raining helicopters!"

As I was shoveling them from my driveway yesterday, I paused to examine one. I split it open to look for the core - the seed within the seed, like apple seeds in an apple. There was not one, of course. It was a uniform green pulp all the way through. There was no visible clue to the secret of the tree that lay within. I knew that. I just had to be reminded.

I do the same in my prayer time - looking within my soul for the core. There is none of course. I knew that. I just had to be reminded. It is just soul all the way through.

I have an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine about the biblical teaching of the soul. I go with the tripartite model of man - that a human being has three dimensions: body, soul and spirit - made in the image of God, modeled after the trinity. He goes with the more familiar body and soul dualism.

I am right, of course, biblically speaking. (This is my blog after all.) But ultimately it doesn't really matter how one dissects our spiritual essence. What matters is the experience of that essence.

A while ago I was rereading the Upanishads. It had been years since I had read through these ancient texts. They are the ancient Indian exploration of the nature of man, especially the identity of the soul.

In the Chandogya Upanishad there is a discussion between a boy and his father. The father asked his son to pick a piece of fruit, open it, and examine the seed. He did so. Then he told him to break open one of the tiny seeds. "What do you see?" asked the father. The son replied, "I do not see anything." "That is the soul," said the father. "That is you."

Jesus' favorite image for the Kingdom of God is a growing seed. He posited this as the "mystery of the Kingdom" many times in his teaching. He used different forms of the story - from the mustard seed to the parable of the sower - but the message was the same. The spiritual realm is like a seed that grows.

 As I explore the dimensions of my soul, it is like the whirligig in my backyard. It is the seed within. Yet when I examine it more closely, I do not see anything. The soul is no "thing." But there is life there. There is the spiritual DNA of the kingdom of God in the soul. If it is dissected, it dies. If it is planted, it grows.

"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches." He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The Way of the Drunken Master

There is a story about a drunk looking for his lost keys under a lamppost. A policeman stops to help him search. After futilely looking for several minutes, the officer asks the drunk if he is sure this is where he lost them. "No," replied the intoxicated seeker, "I lost them over there, but the light is better here."

I have used that story often as an illustration. What a foolish man, looking for his keys in a place where he knew he didn't lose them! Now I am not so sure. I am starting to look at him with new eyes. Maybe there is wisdom in his madness. Maybe this buffoon is really a sage in disguise.

I have been a spiritual seeker all my life. Even when I thought I had it all figured out, on a more subtle level I was still seeking for more. Seeking for a fuller understanding of Truth, a deeper experience of God.

What if the goal of my search has been here all the time? What if I am not looking for the keys (to understanding, wisdom, truth) but the light to see the keys? What if the light is the key? The light by which I have been searching is the Light that I have been searching for.

The apostle John said that Jesus is the "the true light that gives light to every man who comes into the world." Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

It is not that we are looking in the wrong place. We are looking for the wrong thing. The problem is that we are looking for something - some "thing." Whereas what we are really looking for is the light by which we see all things.

God, Truth, Reality, (whatever you want to call the End of our search) is not some thing or even some one to be found. He is the One who finds, the One who sees all things, the One by which we see.

It is hard to see the Light when we are looking for something. It is like the proverbial fish looking for water. "In Him we live and move and have our being." (I am quoting that Biblical poet a lot these days.)

The light that illumines us is the light by which we are illumined. By this Light we already see. It is just a matter of seeing that we see.

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Image is "Drunken Master" by CiTy.

Never Enough

Howard Hughes was once asked how much money was enough. He replied, "A little bit more." That is the story of our lives. Jesus told our story when he talked about the rich man who felt like he never had enough grain and goods. So he built bigger and bigger barns to store it all, until one day he died with full barns and an empty soul.

The story does not have to be about material goods. It can be about emotional security. It can be about friendship or family. It can be about respect. It can be about happiness. It can be about self-esteem. It can be about meaning and purpose. It can be about spirituality. It can be about truth. It can be about love.

We can never have enough. Therefore we are always searching for more. When we don't find it, we fill ourselves up with substitutes: food, alcohol, drugs, work, politics, or anything else that will help us forget what we can't find.

The Kingdom of God appears when you stop searching for more. God is enough. The end of the spiritual search is when we stop searching. It is when we know that if we keep searching, we will never find. The only way to find is to stop.

This is grace. Grace means you already have it before you ask, before you seek, before you knock. Grace is here now. There is nothing you have to do, nothing you have to find. Otherwise it would not be grace.

Searching is born of the emptiness that needs to be filled. But it can never be filled. It is infinite. There is not enough of what you are looking for to fill that space. 

But when we stop trying to fill it and have the courage to live in that infinite space, we see that it is already infinitely full. It always was. We just didn't notice. We were too busy searching.
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Image is "Never Enough" by Theresa Horstman. Mixed media, acrylic. This piece is built from typewriter ribbon (center) taken from notes created while reading The Diary of Anais Nin series (both the first edition and the posthumous editions). The ribbon is stacked and glued together to create a thick mat, leaving only the edges and top layers readable.

Jesus' Conversion Experience

Jesus' life changed in an instant. One day he was a carpenter living an ordinary life in an ordinary village in Galilee. The next day he decided to go down to the Jordan River to hear his cousin preach. While listening to John's message of the Kingdom of God, he felt the leading of God to be baptized.

As he came up from the water, the heavens were opened to him, the Spirit of God descended upon him, and a voice from heaven said, "You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased."

It was Jesus' conversion experience, if you want to call it that. You could call it his awakening to his true nature. What we call it will depend on our religious framework. But one thing is certain; it was more than a dip in the river. Everything changed that day.

I think Jesus would call it being born again or born of the Spirit. Later he said to Nicodemus, "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God."  I think Jesus was referring to his own experience at the Jordan.

We can experience the same thing. It may not happen at a riverside preaching service, but it might. The physical setting is not important, but the elements of the experience are.

First "the heavens were opened to him." A transcendent dimension opens up our life. The Spirit of God descends like a dove. To say that the Spirit descends "like a dove" means that it was not a violent experience. No holy-rolling, "slain in the Spirit" Pentecostal type thing going on here. This was a gentle alighting of the Spirit, a natural opening up to God.

Then there is the Father's voice, "You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased." At that moment Christ realized powerfully what he had always known - at least since he was twelve years old - that he was the beloved Son of God.

The Bible says that we are sons and daughters of God. "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." "For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus." This does not deny the uniqueness of Jesus. It simply means that we can hear the voice of the Father as well.

God calls us his children. "Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!" "The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

Jesus' experience is our experience. When we are "in Christ" then we share everything that is Christ's. Too much of Christianity is second-hand experience and second-rate spirituality. The truth is that the experience of Jesus is available to us. Our ordinary lives become extraordinary when we follow Jesus' footsteps to the river.

The Lost Years of Jesus

I am occasionally asked about the so-called "lost years" or "missing years" of Jesus."  These phrases refer to the life of Christ between the ages of 12 and 30. The Bible talks about his birth, first two years in Egypt, and return to Nazareth. Then it skips to his bar mitzvah at age 12. After this the Scriptures are silent about Jesus' life until he begins his public ministry at about the age of 30.

Usually people ask about these silent years because they have watched a television "documentary" (I use that term lightly), or read a book, or heard a teaching that claims to fill in the gaps in the biblical record. Usually it is a story about Jesus as a yogi in India or a lama in Tibet. Any serious historian will tell you that these extra-biblical accounts of Jesus' life are pure speculation.

Why does the Bible tell us almost nothing about the first thirty years of Jesus' life? I wish they did. It would be interesting reading. But there is a reason they are not mentioned: those years are not important.

We Westerners are obsessed with the importance of our lives. We take the events of our lives very seriously. Celebrities write their autobiographies as if they were writing holy scripture. At Barnes & Noble I saw the autobiography of Miley Cyrus, which she wrote last year at age 16. What life wisdom does a 16-year-old actress have to share?

The gospel writers did not give us the details of Jesus' first thirty years of life because they did not consider them important. Jesus did not speak about his early life because he did not think it was important. To Jesus all that was important was what God was doing. "Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner."

It does not matter if Jesus traveled. It does not matter what his favorite song was, his favorite color, or his feelings about his dad's death. All that mattered to Christ was the Kingdom of God and his role in it.

The stories of our lives are not important. I know that may be hard to accept, but no one but your therapist really cares about your childhood and your unresolved emotional issues. And she only cares because you pay her to care. All that matters is the Kingdom of God and our role in it.

The details of our lives will be forgotten. Our personalities and accomplishments are utterly trivial. That goes for both celebrities and average folks. All that matters is our connection to the Eternal. The rest is just a story that we tell ourselves to convince others that we are important.

Every year spent living outside God's will are lost years. Every day spent living God's story is time well spent. As the apostle Paul writes, "Walk in wisdom ... redeeming the time."

Parables & Koans

Jesus was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He was not an academic professor or even a trained rabbi. Unlike the apostle Paul, Jesus could not point to a famous mentor like Rabbi Gamaliel. Jesus was nobody from nowhere.

Furthermore his teaching style was like no one else's. He did not quote legal precedents from other rabbis. He talked directly to people's hearts. People were astonished at Jesus' teaching because he taught with authority, unlike the scribes and Pharisees.

Jesus spoke in parables. "Jesus spoke to the multitude in parables; and without a parable He did not speak to them." Parables were not unknown before Jesus, but Jesus used them differently. His stories were not allegories or metaphors. They were pointers.

 

Jesus said to his disciples, "To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is given in parables, that 'Seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.'"

Jesus' parables appear to function more like Zen koans than rabbinic allegories. They were meant to point to "the mysteries of the kingdom of God," to use Jesus' words. They were not meant to help people to see, but to reveal what they could not see or understand.

Jesus never taught that he was the Christ, yet God revealed this truth to Peter. "You are the Christ," said Peter. Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven."

Such a revelation was not communicated by human words. As the apostle Paul explained, this truth was communicated "not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words."

I have heard - and preached - many sermons on the parables of Jesus. Mostly they missed the point. Parables are not intended to be exegeted and exposited. They are meant to point beyond themselves to the Kingdom of God.

As Jesus said, "Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive."  But then he added, "But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear."

"The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how." He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Hidden Treasure

The other day there was an interesting story in our local newspaper. A retired jeweler named Barry Landis was sorting through items donated to Goodwill Industries in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Among the pile of costume jewelry, he spotted something unusual. It turned out to be 2.6-carat diamond and platinum ring. It has a two-carat European-cut diamond, surrounded by 14 smaller diamonds. The ring has been appraised at $17,600.

This was not a generous donation by an anonymous giver. Instead it is likely that someone was cleaning out a relative's old jewelry box and literally threw out a fortune. They still have no idea what they gave away.

There is a story from India about a poor man who goes to visit a wealthy friend. After being treated to a full meal, he falls asleep. The wealthy friend sews a priceless jewel into the lining of his sleeping friend's robe. When the poor man awakens, he continues on his journey, having no idea that he has been given a fortune.

The man lives his life in poverty, enduring great hardship and always in want. Years later he happens to meet his old friend again, who is shocked at his poverty and shows him the jewel in the robe. The man realizes for the first time that he has always possessed boundless riches but did not know it.

Jesus told stories of treasure. A tenant farmer was tilling a field when his plow unearthed a treasure that had been buried in the ground. He sells everything he has to buy that field and secure the treasure. Another man was a merchant, a lifelong seeker of beautiful pearls. One day he comes across a priceless pearl, and immediately recognizes its true value. He also sells everything that he has to buy that pearl.

A rich man came to Jesus one day. Jesus offered him the priceless gift of eternal life. He was required to do just one thing in exchange: sell everything that he had and give the proceeds to the poor. The man couldn't part with his riches, and "went away sorrowful."

The world is composed of different types of people. Some people never notice the treasure sewn into the fabric of their lives. Some are so blind they discard treasure, thinking it is a worthless trinket. Others find treasure buried under their feet when they weren't even looking for it, but they know it when they see it. Others are lifelong seekers; when they find their heart's true desire, they willingly give up everything to possess it. Then there are seekers who cannot bring themselves to accept the treasure when they find it; the price seems too high.

The Kingdom of God is right before our eyes. It is not enough just to have eyes to see it; we need the heart to enter the Kingdom. "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?"

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Photo is of the 2.6-carat diamond ring that turned up at the Goodwill distribution center in Harrisburg, PA.