13 In the Service of the Ego I

Last week I promised to discuss the methods by which earthly food may become spiritual food. I admit this was a bold promise, and, indeed, this week, I find that I still couldn't get it all in--we'll have to have one more installment of this next week. The problem is especially difficult and large because one of my main problems is a negative--for years, I have been impressed (or depressed) by the fact that so many people use what ought to be spiritual food as fodder to feed their famished carnal nature. Yes, we all fall short of our potential, we all are sinners, and we all seek the truth so that we may transcend the natural propensities of our sinful flesh; but sometimes our literal consciousness mistakes truthful virtue for just another kind of sin in sheep's clothing--so we MUST find ways to catch ourselves when this happens.

Today we will review some basic principles of psychology in order to approach this subject in a rational manner; the main villain in today's scenario is the ego.

For now, let's begin where we left off last week:

John 6:27

27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed.

Last week I repeatedly mentioned this: it must be admitted that some things have only carnal value, while other things have only spiritual value--but sometimes the same THING can be possessed of both carnal AND spiritual qualities, depending on where the attention of the devotee is directed. Verily, verily I say unto you, the temporal or eternal value of a thing is determined not by the inherent quality of the thing itself, but, rather, by the attitude of the observer towards it; the spirituality of the observer transforms a thing from one consciousness state to another by an act of will. In other words, if some big-shot priest writes a large treatise on some religious subject, full of highfalutin' righteous-sounding jargon, designed to justify some dogmatic proposition or other, but he composes it not in the service of higher truth, but rather in the service his own the ego, this treatise becomes merely an earth-bound bauble, sounding brass, one more pitiful evocation of carnal nature; meanwhile the humblest peasant meditation on a lily of the field, in all its spiritual glory, may be of infinite value, and may resonate throughout eternity.

What this tells us is that even when we are seeking God, our seeking can go astray.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

“God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way.”

Asking God to give us what WE want when WE want it, because WE have figured out that HE owes us what WE want, is what I call living in the service of the ego. The ego is this mass of attitudes and memories and concepts that define our conscious appreciation of ourselves. We could not exist without it--that is to say we could not exist on the material plane without it; so many physically real things are part of our daily lives, that to deny their existence might be spiritually liberating, but I'm afraid it would liberate us right out of this world, and into a discarnate state of existence. Good, fine, but don't forget God put us here for  a reason, and dealing with the mundane world is one of our tasks, like it or not. Therefore, the trick is to deal with the world, but not be OF the world; not to buy into the world's illusions of substantiality, ESPECIALLY what appear substantialities of truth. The primary proposition of this address is that there are ways to distinguish the spiritually true from the spiritually untrue.

This problem has been a constant obsession with me, all my life, because determining where real spiritual truth is, is one of the primary tasks in evaluating art. I have spent my life developing a truth meter in my head and heart in order to tell when a piece of music is telling the truth and when it is bearing false witness. I used to be much more rigid about it, and I used to much more clear about what was a great piece of music and what was a crummy piece of music. Indeed, I used to mistake my own prejudices and opinions for ultimate authority, and it gave me great pleasure to announce, with pompous dogmatic pride, that this is a great piece and this is not a great piece. I was very full of myself, and worked hard to acquire virtue in the service of my own ego.

The following is an excerpt from my auto-biography which reviews how, as a young man, I perceived musical truth:

"I had always craved the real— the intuitive stuff from higher dimensions that transforms the mundane into the heavenly—the REAL real, the durable truth, the lasting truth. And I was no lazy hypocrite either: I worked hard, searching inside myself for the "truthful resonance" of every sound I heard in my head. From the very beginning of my musical life, I weighed every written note on a delicate inner-balance meter—a "truth-meter" which examined every phrase, every sonority for naked, unadulterated statements about the way things really are. I ruthlessly subjected myself to the strict rule of the truth-meter, cutting out, with burning laser beam, every false detail of my own inner image. My need for a perfectly sequential chain of logic, (that characterizes the Asperger mentality), could not tolerate the least lapse in connectivity between one musical thought and the next. It was the linking between ideas that legitimized the gestalt; without the inner connectedness of the material, the sounds were rusty artifacts, broken bottles with nothing inside. When the ideas followed one from the next, in perfect order, the life force that flowed through the whole shone into the world with the living energy of higher intelligence. It was this higher intelligence I craved, since music was the only language that made sense to me, and I would not speak half-truth gobbledy-gook to myself. I was hard on myself, and I was honest with myself. I had no choice—I have never been able to lie.

    Of course, my white hot truth-meter was equally scalding when I turned it on the music of other composers—it was a false statement detector, scanning every moment, of every piece of music I heard, for saliency, authenticity, humanity, spirit; and it was never fooled by the cleverness, or the depth of pedigree a of a musical statement. I had so thoroughly sensitized myself, in my private inner discipline, to see through the appearance-value of a thing to the heart of the thing, that my hunger for truth was only satisfied by musical statements, from myself or anybody else, about the way things REALLY are. The affirmative power of music was my only reliable comfort, when I stood alone on the pale horizon, facing the vastly inscrutable paradox of existence.

    I rejected the idea of general truth in favor of personal truth; I understood that only from the personal orientation could the literally-articulated-self diffuse into the collective self. Other people might possibly be able to jump from the experience of the collective artifact straight into the collective consciousness, but, for my Asperger brain to ascend to a higher mind state, I had to take all the steps in their proper sequential order, i.e.; I had to start at the center of my conscious self and move outward, through a series of quantum leaps, to the higher mind, the collective mind. I measured every note's relationship to the heart in precise increments. To me, the innermost heart was the only true origin of music. Truth was ancient, and grand, and glorious, and would not fit on the covers of the tabloids."

You can see from this that even as a youth I was craving the spiritual food that does not perish, but it may also be seen that I was attempting this from the most puritanical of perspectives, and was very caught up in serving the ego at least as much as searching for imperishable truth; at that time, imperishable truth only meant truth that would not squirm around and shift and change under close scrutiny.

Deepak Chopra says:

“The ego relies on the familiar. It is reluctant to experience the unknown, which is the very essence of life.”

I wanted truth that would remain stable like a rock, a haven in stormy seas, unassailed by movement or evolution. To me, ultimate truth was truth that stayed the same today, tomorrow and forever. I wanted to be born again every time I heard a piece of music, but, all too often, my literal consciousness was definitely blocking avenues to higher dimensions by rejecting the possibility that the truth of higher dimensions might not be the same tomorrow as it was today. I had not learned the lesson from Dante that I, now, never tire of quoting:

"Not that there was more than a simple appearance
In the living light which I gazed upon
And which is as it has always has been;

But my sight grew stronger
As I  looked; and so the static face of God
Transformed itself with every change in me."

  
I had not yet learned that spiritual truth evolves as I evolve, and that I was evolving all the time.

Well, I've grown up a lot and am a lot more tolerant than I used to be, but I WASN'T wrong--there IS a border between truth and mediocrity. I tell my students about the quantum leap all the time: if enough energy enters an atom to excite an electron to go faster and faster until it reaches escape velocity, the electron will jump into a higher orbit, and it will never fall back; this is called a quantum leap. We have talked about the moment of psychological re-centering when an intuition restructures our experience in a flash of time. These moments do happen, and it would do us good to learn to generate these moments in ourselves through acts of will, and to recognize them when they happen spontaneously through grace.

Much of the following deals with some basic terms from psychology, many of which were coined by Sigmund Freud, so I thought it would not be amiss to provide a review of Freud's basic model of the mind since we will be referring to it for the rest of the sermon.

Freud's Division of the Mind by David B. Stevenson '96, Brown University:

"Freud understood the mind as constantly in conflict with itself, and understood this conflict as the primary cause of human anxiety and unhappiness. . . Freud's investigations into internal conflicts such as this led him to an eventual division of the mind into three parts, three conflicting internal tendencies, the well-known id, ego, and super-ego.
This division, it is important to note, is not the separation of the mind into three structures and functions which exist in physical partitions in the brain; they are not even truly structures, but rather separate aspects and elements of the single structure of the mind. Although it is convenient to say, for example, that the id "demands" immediate gratification, the mind has no three distinct little men who engage in a constant fisticuffs of conflict. The personification of these elements merely serves as a convenient guide through a complex psychoanalytic theory.

The id, the ego and the superego function in different levels of consciousness: indeed, Freud's theory of the mind hinges upon the ability of impulses or memories to "float" from one level to another. The interaction between the three functions of the mind represents a constant movement of items from one level to another."

[Sidebar: The idea of "floating from one consciousness state to another relates directly to my idea of the multi-dimensional character of the human personality,  which we have discussed several times in the past; in particular, it pertains to the idea of conceptual re-centering of the intuitive response, or, as we have referred to it before, the EPIPHANIC response, a psychic  event which we will review momentarily.]

"Id
As the baby emerges from the womb into the reality of life, he wants only to eat, drink, urinate, defecate, be warm, and gain sexual pleasure. These urges are the demands of the id, the most primitive motivational force. In pursuit of these ends, the id demands immediate gratification: it is ruled by the pleasure principle, demanding satisfaction now, regardless of circumstances and possible undesirable effects. If a young child was ruled entirely by his id, he would steal and eat a piece of chocolate from a store regardless of the menacing owner watching above him or even his parents scolding beside him.

The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. For some urges, such as urination, this is easily satisfied. However, if the urge is not immediately discharged, the id will form a memory of the end of the motivation: the thirsty infant will form an image of the mother's breast. This act of wish-fulfillment satisfies the id's desire for the moment, though obviously it does not reduce the tension of the unfulfilled urge."

[Sidebar: In this case we are using the term "wish-fulfillment in the same sense as the term "end condition" as it applies to intuitive re-centering. Both terms refer to a mind state projected into the future at which our mental efforts are attempting to arrive.]

"Ego
The eventual understanding that immediate gratification is usually impossible (and often unwise) comes with the formation of the ego, which is ruled by the reality principle. The ego acts as a go-between in the id's relations with reality, often suppressing the id's urges until an appropriate situation arises. This repression of inappropriate desires and urges represents the greatest strain on, and the most important function of, the mind. The ego often utilizes defense mechanisms to achieve and aid this repression. Where the id may have an urge and form a picture which satisfies this urge, the ego engages in a strategy to actually fulfill the urge. The thirsty five-year-old now not only identifies water as the satisfaction of his urge, but forms a plan to obtain water, perhaps by finding a drinking fountain. While the ego is still in the service of the id, it borrows some of its psychic energy in an effort to control the urge until it is feasibly satisfied. The ego's efforts at pragmatic satisfaction of urges eventually builds a great number of skills and memories and becomes aware of itself as an entity. With the formation of the ego, the individual becomes a self, instead of an amalgamation of urges and needs.

Superego
While the ego may temporarily repress certain urges of the id in fear of punishment, eventually these external sources of punishment are internalized, and the child will not steal the chocolate, even unwatched, because he has taken punishment, right, and wrong into himself. The superego uses guilt and self-reproach as its primary means of enforcement for these rules. But if a person does something which is acceptable to the superego, he experiences pride and self-satisfaction.

The superego is sub-dividable into two parts: conscience and ego ideal. Conscience tells what is right and wrong, and forces the ego to inhibit the id in pursuit of morally acceptable, not pleasurable or even realistic, goals. The ego ideal aims the individual's path of life toward the ideal, perfect goals instilled by society. In the pursuit, the mind attempts to make up for the loss of the perfect life experienced as a baby."

Having reviewed the basic Freudian vocabulary I now want to shift our discussion to a more spiritual plane. We begin our examination of some of this source material with Steiner. This is from a Wikipedia article on his most famous book, ‪Philosophy of Freedom‬:

"Overview
Steiner observes that the key question concerning the existence of freedom of the will is how the will to action arises in the first place. Steiner describes two sources for human motivation: our natural being, our instincts, feelings, and thoughts insofar as these are determined by our character - and the dictates of conscience or abstract ethical or moral principles. In this way, both nature and culture determine motivations that play into our will and soul life. Overcoming these two elements, neither of which is individualized, we can achieve genuinely individualized intuitions that speak to the particular situation at hand. By overcoming the dictates of both our 'lower' and 'higher' sources of experience, by orchestrating a meeting place of objective and subjective elements of experience, we find the freedom to choose how to think and act.

Freedom for Steiner thus does not lie in uninhibited expression of our subjective nature, but in the conscious unification of this with the objective constraints of the world."

[Sidebar: The idea of "orchestrating a meeting place of objective and subjective elements of experience" is the crux of the matter; the whole process of evaluating experience as either spiritual or carnal depends on our ability to distinguish the spiritual from the carnal. How we take the various levels of experience in hand and reconcile them into an integrated experience is the subject of this discussion, and must be looked at closer and closer if we are to derive any meaning from these comments.]

"Steiner coined the term moral imagination for the inner act which results in free action. He suggests that we only achieve free deeds when we find a moral imagination, an ethically impelled but particularized response to the immediacy of a given situation. This response will always be individual; it cannot be predicted or prescribed. This radical ethical individualism is, for Steiner, characteristic of freedom."

[Sidebar: We remind you that the intuitive epiphanic response cannot be "predicted or prescribed." Unlike the ego, which depends on rigidity of thought--stability of literal meaning--spiritual truth defies all the devotee's efforts to control or direct the direction of the information stream. People determined to pin down the sayings of Jesus into neatly contained, fixed little boxes, will ALWAYS fail, because spiritual truth cannot be controlled by the literal mind--it takes the language of the heart to accomplish this. What Steiner calls the "moral imagination" is just another way of referring to the mysterious working of the heart on mundane issues and realities. Furthermore let me remind you that the conclusion arrived at by the heart are nearly always a surprise. It must be noted that staunch dogmatists HATE surprises.]

"We become aware of the outer nature of the world and its inner nature in radically different ways: our sensory perceptions inform us about the outer appearance of the world, while our thought life penetrates its inner nature. This division is particular to and defines human experience. Steiner suggests that we actually have the capacity to overcome the dualism of experience by reuniting perception and cognition. When contemplating our own thinking activity, we are perceiving that which we are thinking, and thinking that which we are perceiving. Steiner suggests that freedom arises most purely at this moment, when free ideation arises out of ego activity; this is, for Steiner, spiritual activity. . .

Steiner seeks to demonstrate that inner freedom is achieved when we bridge the gap between our perception, which reflects the outer appearance of the world, and our cognition, which gives us access to the inner structure of the world. He suggests that outer freedom arises when we bridge the gap between our ideals and the constraints of external reality, letting our deeds be inspired by the moral imagination. . . "

[Sidebar: Thus, it may be seen that Steiner wants us to USE the ego to motivate higher cognition, therefore creating imaginative realities whose purpose is to synthesize or integrate the energies of both flesh and spirit into each other.]

"Steiner emphasizes that thinking is unique in our access in it to the true inner reality of the world at least in one corner. We can be conscious of our thought processes in a way that we cannot be of our feelings, will or perceptions. Because of this, we can be sure that our thoughts are truly what they seem. Naive realism could be said to be true of them. Our feelings appear still as percepts whose interpretation is not a matter of perception. Furthermore, we correct our perceptions (for example, when these include perspective distortions) through our conceptual framework. Thinking is thus necessary if we are to properly interpret our perception."

[Sidebar: The idea of "perceptual distortion" must be sufficiently appreciated by the devotee such that he is constantly on guard against it. We must watch out literal expressions like a hawk for the corrupting intimations of ego.]

"Steiner also emphasizes that modern science depends upon these same two elements of perception and thinking. Perception alone is not science, but is at best the gathering of data. Only when we group and analyze a mass of perceptions can we obtain scientific clarity about it. On the other hand, mathematics is a kind of thinking in which thought itself forms the perceptions; no sense-perceptions are needed to form a basis for mathematical principles. Mathematics could be said to be a science of the inner side of things, in which we need not know anything about their outer appearance."

[Sidebar: Mathematics is a systematic entity that exists as an identity only in the abstract world, the world of ideas; it therefore offers a good example of how the spirit world is interrelated to the physical world. For instance what is 2? Well, we certainly can tell 2 shoes, or 2 eyes, or 2 tiger tanks, but what essentially is 2? In order for 2 to exist in our mundane world it must act on some THING in our mundane world. Likewise all kinds of other abstract entities (or shall we say, “energies”?) only exist for us when they act upon or, shall we say, interact with, physical entities.]

"Though our experience leads us to the illusion of dualism, in reality we are experiencing two sides of a single phenomenon when we perceive it and think about it: two sides of a single, unified world. There are limits beyond which our understanding does not presently go, but both our perception and our thinking can be extended beyond their present abilities. The telescope and microscope offer us radical extensions of the range of our perceptions; we can look to extend our powers of thought as vigorously as we have extended our powers of perception. Steiner thus challenges the philosophy of his (and our) time: it is not enough simply to define the limits of possible knowledge; it is necessary to work to extend these as well."

The “extension of perception” is what I mean when I invoke the discipline of ATTENTION.  I think of the WILL as a force that can act on any entity, physical or spiritual, on which it focuses its attention. Therefore, when I have spoken these many, many times about ATTENTION, I have been speaking, indirectly, about the WILL. Thus, when we “pray unceasingly”, or work to generate an epiphany, the operative energy is the WILL directed by ATTENTION in the direction of whatever end condition is foreseen. By “extending our perception” we are exercising our will to raise mundane realities into spiritual realities. Steiner is agreeing with the proposition  I have made, many times, that we must work to keep our perceptions at a high level of sensitivity so that we do not mistake merely convoluted verbal expressions for divine truth.

So, having arrived at a halfway point, I have NOT discussed very much how earthly food may become spiritual food, but merely emphasized the mechanism by which earthly food may NOT become spiritual food. The ego and the id, those twin whining babies who constantly crab at us for immediate gratification, attention, and, most of all, stability, are the sources of all our failed attempts to rise into the spiritual plane. We know they are there, and we know they try to deceive us--but there is one one more person who knows this--Satan knows this, and he will try his damnedest to use them to mislead us and confound us, while at the same time filling us with a sense  of false virtue. Next week we really will take a look at some of the mechanisms we can use to don the whole the armor of God.

Let us pray: Jesus, we admit the perils that accompany the flesh in which we must reside day after day. Give us the patience and the discretion to recognize the white water of self as it churns us toward the precipice of false truth. Throw out the lifeline of your Word, and let us bury our faces in its comfort and security, even as we move ever upward. Amen.

12The Meat Which Endureth

Today's sermon is based on what Jesus said to the people on the second day of His ministry along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, after feeding them the first time with the magically multiplying fish and loaves. The subject is large, and will take up two installments to get it all in. Today we discuss mainly the distinction between earthly food and spiritual food. Next week we will discuss the methods by which earthly food may become spiritual food.

First the scripture from John:

John 6:26-27

26 Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.
27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed.

This passage is viewed by many as a rebuke of the people; the suggestion is that the people are not following Him because of the quality of the miracles He performed, but merely because they were getting a free meal. I find this interpretation to be far-fetched for several reasons, the main one being, that the people did come out to eat bread, but to hear the Master speak--the food was an incidental side issue, although, clearly an interesting one. Nevertheless, as with every word that comes from the mouth of Jesus, this saying speaks the truth on more than one level, just like every other parable in His repertoire. Jesus might be saying, "This physical food I give you is not important," but He might also be saying, "This physical food I give you is blessed with spiritual significance, a significance which applies directly not only to your daily bread as protein and fiber, but as a symbol of the higher spiritual nourishment invested in this bread by virtue of your own spiritual attention.

The issue is this: it must be admitted that some things have only carnal value, while other things have only spiritual value--but sometimes the same THING can be both carnal AND spiritual, depending on where the attention of the devotee is directed. Verily, verily I say unto you, the temporal or eternal value of a thing is determined not by the inherent quality of the thing itself, but, rather, by the attitude of the observer towards it; the spirituality of the observer transforms a thing from one consciousness state to another by an act of will. In other words, if some big-shot priest writes a large treatise on some religious subject, full of highfalutin' righteous-sounding jargon, but composes it in service of the ego, it is merely an earth-bound bauble, sounding brass, an evocation of carnal nature; while the humblest peasant meditation on a lily of the field, in all its spiritual glory, is of infinite value, and resonates through out eternity. The meat that nourishes the soul may be the very meat that nourishes the body as well, as long as the sanctity of the body is taken into account. All things may be made holy by the spiritual attention we give them.

Thus, Jesus' remark that the people followed Him to get a free meal, is not necessarily a rebuke, but, rather an affirmation of the PRACTICAL value of spiritual blessing. And, of course, the practical value of a miracle, is directly linked to the MORAL value of a miracle. The way spirit informs and directs our social actions is one of the least trivial considerations the devotee must consider as he travels the spiritual path. As I have repeatedly reiterated, I think that miracles in and of themselves are as meaningless as a card trick, or a rabbit popping out of a hat; BUT as the miracle reveals an underlying spiritual truth, nothing could be more significant.

A true miracle may possess merely temporal value if the significance of the miracle is lost on the observer, or if the observer simply forgets the significance of the miracle-- (as I've said before, a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear, may make a sound, but it makes no music)-- but if the miracle makes a lasting impression on the mind and heart of the observer, directing his attention up from the mundane to the divine, then the miracle has meaning. I think Jesus' main point is that a miracle must act on the soul not the stomach, but there is a vital and legitimate connection between the soul and the stomach.

In support of this idea we have this quote from Category Archives, Sep 17: Stacey Campbell
Do Miracles, Signs and Wonders Create Faith?

"John 6:26-27:

"Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed."

The miracles of the loaves and fishes did not cause the people to believe He was the Savior. Some did think He was a prophet, others thought He’d make a good King; after all, He could feed them with little of their own labor. So this great miracle did not produce saving faith. The people did want to know how they too could “work” the works (miracles) of God. Jesus’ response is very telling to our brethren who are besotted with so-called signs & wonders today."

The link between miracles and faith is central to our understanding of this whole subject. However, an important question necessarily arises: which comes first, the faith or the miracle. More on this as we proceed.

The tremendous thing is that the same miracle can touch our hearts with transforming power again and again, as we are changed again and again. Remember my favorite quote from Dante where, as he describes his own rising up in heaven toward the face of God, he suddenly notices the static, eternally fixed face of God changing and modifying itself into ever new expressive and articulate forms.

"Not that there was more than a simple appearance
In the living light which I gazed upon
And which is as it has always has been;

But my sight grew stronger
As I  looked; and so the static face of God
Transformed itself with every change in me."

Thus, a ritual whose purpose is to transduce spirit into flesh may bless us again and again, as we are changed again, and again, and again. God gives us this day and every day our daily bread, and this is a blessed, miraculous thing. But we must work to remember that this daily routine is imbued with the miraculous EVERY SINGLE TIME, and we must cherish it as miraculous EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Let us now get into some of the discussions I found online expostulating various other interpretations of the scripture.

The following is from the Forerunner Commentary, Bible Tools: Miracles of Jesus Christ: Feeding of 5000
:

"The day after feeding the 5,000 from one boy's lunch, as recorded in John 6, this miracle becomes the springboard for a lesson on where the Christian should go to receive the best spiritual nourishment for his mind. After Jesus perceives that the people seek Him out to be fed physically again, He knows that they do not properly understand what they had witnessed the day before. They do not understand the significance of the miracle in identifying Him as the Messiah, perceiving it merely as a means of getting food to fill their empty stomachs. There they are, hungry again.

In these verses, Jesus cautions His disciples about allowing the wrong focus to dominate their lives because it is so easily done. In this world, providing for our physical life requires a great deal of time and energy for most of us. This necessary activity, in addition to countless other distractions working to grab our attention, makes concentrating on seeking spiritual nourishment a responsibility that demands vision combined with discipline in the use of time."

The word discipline could not be more germane to this subject; attention must be paid, to the spiritual dimension of all worldly entities, with steadfast concentration--the ability to perceive the divine in mundane things is a skill that results from acts of will, which must be endlessly repeated and ingrained, in order for them to be cultivated into a virtue of permanently heightened awareness. Jesus bids us pray unceasingly--this is what He means. In other words, as in all things, practice makes perfect; and the seeker after divine knowledge must watch and wait with patience and uninterrupted focus. The meat that gives eternal nourishment comes at a cost, and that cost is an uncompromising faith in the power to see beyond the limitations of mundane perception. It is an aggressive faith--an insistence on seeing what cannot be seen. It is faith that empowers us; it is the transcendent power of spirit become flesh that enlightens us.

This is a quote from the New Advent website: Homily 44 on the Gospel of John, by Adam Clarke. Here, Clarke insists on the interpretation that Jesus is crabbing at the people for their shallow attitude toward His miracle-making:

John 6:26-27

“Jesus answered them, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, You seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles but because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled. Labor not for the meat which perishes, but for that meat which endures unto everlasting life.”

1. The mild and gentle is not always useful, but there are times when the teacher needs sharper language. For if the disciple be dull and gross, then, in order to touch his dullness to the quick, we must rouse him with a goad. And this the Son of God has done in the present as well as in many other cases. For when the crowds had come and found Jesus, and were flattering Him, and saying, “Master, when camest Thou hither?” to show that He desires not honor from men, but looks to one thing only, their salvation, He answers them sharply, wishing to correct them not in this way only, but also by revealing and exposing their thoughts. For what says He? “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” (speaking positively and with a confirmation,) “You seek Me, not because ye saw miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled.”

He chides and reproves them by these words, yet does not so abruptly or violently, but very sparingly. For He says not, “O you gluttons and belly-slaves, I have wrought so many wonders, and you never have either followed Me, or marveled at My doings”; but mildly and gently somewhat in this manner; “You seek Me, not because ye saw miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled”; speaking not only of the past, but also of the present miracle. “It was not,” He says, “the miracle of the loaves that astonished you, but the being filled.” And that He said not this of them by conjecture they straightway showed, for on this account they came the second time, as being about to enjoy the same (food) as before. Wherefore they said, “Our fathers did eat manna in the wilderness.” Again they draw Him to (the subject of) carnal food, which was the chief accusation and charge against them. But He stops not at rebukes, but adds instruction also, saying, “Labor not for the meat which perishes, but for that meat which endures unto everlasting life.” . . .

Do you desire to receive Me, and to provide for Me a costly table? Provide another sort of entertainment, by giving me a ready hearing, and by imitating your sister's longing for instruction.” He said not this to forbid her hospitality, (away with the thought! How could that be?) but to show that she ought not in the season for listening be busy about other matters. For to say, “Labor not for the meat that perishes,” is not the expression of one implying that we ought to be idle; (in fact, this most especially is “meat that perishes,” for idleness is wont to teach all wickedness;) but that we ought to work, and to impart. This is meat that never perishes; but if any be idle and gluttonous, and cares for luxury, that man works for “the meat that perishes.”

So too, if a man by his labor should feed Christ, and give Him drink, and clothe Him, who so senseless and mad as to say that such an one labors for the meat that perishes, when there is for this the promise of the kingdom that is to come, and of those good things? This meat endures forever. But at that time, since the multitudes made no account of filth, nor sought to learn who it was that did these things, and by what power, but desired one thing only, to fill their bellies without working; Christ with good reason called such food, “meat that perishes.” “I fed,” He says, “your bodies, that after this ye might seek that other food which endures, which nourishes the soul; but you again run after that which is earthy. Therefore ye do not understand that I lead you not to this imperfect food, but to that which gives not temporal but eternal life, which nourishes not the body but the soul.”

Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Clarke, but this last paraphrase of yours is not to be found anywhere in MY Bible, especially the bit about, "Therefore ye do not understand that I lead you not to this imperfect food." This is an example of a perversion of scripture in the service of the ego--Clarke is dedicated  to the proposition that Jesus has a certain attitude toward his audience, and therefore does not hesitate to put words into Jesus' mouth. I do not object to the sentiment therein expressed, but I find that Jesus' sayings are always more open-ended than Mr. Clarke would prefer, out of loyalty to his particular dogmatic slant on things.

This is from BREAD BELIEVERS, #545; another affirmation that Jesus is chastising the people for chasing after the wrong thing:

"JOHN 6:26-27:

 "Jesus answered them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed."

Our text was the answer that the Lord Jesus gave to the question asked by the people who came over the sea to Capernaum seeking Jesus. They were seeking Jesus, but what for? The emphasis that our Saviour is teaching us in this text is that we can truly be seekers of the Lord Jesus Christ and yet seek Him to a wrong end, with a wrong motive, with a selfish spirit.

The question in itself "Rabbi, when camest thou hither?" (in verse 25) was not wrong, but a simple answer to such an immaterial question would not have led to any profit. The Lord Jesus could have answered them by merely telling them when He came. There was nothing wrong with their question except that it was immaterial. The Lord Jesus does not speak any idle words, and He wanted to speak what would be for their profit.
Our text reveals that Jesus was not only well acquainted with their motives, but He understood why they were seeking Him. They were not seeking Him to know and do His will, but they were seeking Him out of a selfish motive. He knew what they were hungering for. "Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled."

Why are we serving the Lord? Are we serving the Lord for something we can gain by it or is our motive to serve the Lord for His glory? Is our motive to serve the Lord to know and do His will for His honor and for His glory? "But because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled," they received something temporal. They were not seeking Him; they were not hungering after Him and His righteousness; they were hungering after the things of this life."

[Sidebar: Again, my problem with this whole line of reasoning is, "So what? What, indeed, should they be hungering after, but the things of this life? If Jesus' teaching does not make this life better, what good is it?"

There is an underlying prejudice here that must be exposed for what it is: a large number of Christians do not believe in the Kingdom of God manifested here on Earth--they are are so enthralled by the allure of a FUTURE Heaven, they deny the existence on Heaven here and now. This error leads to all sorts of logical and spiritual offenses. The separation of Heaven and Earth is a mistake that is characteristically made by people who have not really experienced the spirit in its fullness, who have not felt the flesh permeated and illuminated by spirit, and who have therefore not seen the world through the eyes of God, as a true and perfect creation, a variation on an eternal theme. Perhaps I quibble here, but I would prefer to eat heavenly bread that feeds my physical body, rather than to eat something that has no reality in my daily life.]

Now our Martin Luther quote for the day:

II. The Bread Of Heaven.

"12. The living bread, of which the Lord here speaks, is Christ himself, of whom we partake. If in our hearts we lay hold of only a morsel of this bread, we shall have forever enough and can never be separated from God. The partaking of this bread is nothing but faith in Christ our Lord, that he is, as Paul says in 1 Cor 1, 30, "made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption." He who eats of this food lives forever. Therefore, the Lord says, immediately following this Gospel lesson, where the Jews strove among themselves about this discourse of his: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day."

13. The bread from heaven the fathers ate in the wilderness, as Christ says here, was powerless to keep them from dying; but this bread makes immortal. If we believe on Christ, death cannot harm us; yea, it is no longer death. The Lord utters the same truth in another passage when he says to the Jews: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my Word, he shall never see death." John 8, 51. Here he speaks definitely of the Word of faith, and of the Gospel.

14. But one may say, as did the Jews, who took offense at these words of the Lord: The saints, nevertheless, died, and Abraham and the prophets likewise died. We reply, to this: The death of Christians is only a sleep, as the Scriptures everywhere call it. A Christian neither tastes nor sees death; that is, he is never conscious of any death; for this Saviour, Christ Jesus, in whom he believes, has destroyed death so that he no longer needs to taste it and pay its penalty. Death is to the Christians only a transition of life, yea, a door to life: as Christ says in John 5, 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my Word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life."

15. Therefore, a Christian life is a life of bliss and joy. Christ's yoke is easy and sweet; the reason it seems to us galling and heavy is that the Father has not yet drawn us, and so we have no pleasure in it, neither does this Gospel lesson minister comfort to us. If we, however, rightly appropriated the words of Christ, they would be of much greater comfort to us. By faith we partake of this bread that has come down from heaven, Christ the Lord, when we believe on him as our Saviour and Redeemer."

Here we see that Luther is agreeing with my main premise, that food for the body may be also be food for the soul if our attitude makes it so. We have recently spoken of the second birth into spirit. My contention here is that every time we partake of the bread that comes down from heaven we are born again--every spiritual morsel brings us closer to an unattainable but ever approachable perfection.

The following is from Invited by God to a meal that gives eternal nourishment: The Lord's Supper from a Calvinistic perspective by David R. Bickel, March 15, 2005:

"The problem
The main goal of the Christian is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. That is why we were created. We want to know him, to know his love, grace, mercy, righteousness, justice, power, and majesty. We want to respond joyfully to his gifts with thankful praise for who he is. We want to enjoy the foretaste of his Spirit and expectantly long for the fullness of fellowship with him in the age to come.

"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." We cannot fulfill our purpose through human willpower alone, so we must pray that we will not fall into temptation, trusting God to do the impossible, to free a slave of sin, to give sight to the spiritually blind, to resurrect the spiritually dead. He gives us what we ask for since we pray in the name of his Son, who came to free the captives, heal the blind, raise the dead, and proclaim the good news of forgiveness. Indeed, he demonstrated the power of his Father's kingdom over Satan's when he cast out demons and healed the sick by his word, proving that he could forgive sins by his word. When we pray that our Father would forgive us and deliver us from the Evil One, we pray for him to do so through the word of his Son.

We pray that he would reveal himself to us through that word, and we not only read his word, but we also hear it from his representatives. Even then, we sometimes find ourselves doubting it or becoming bored with it. We know that the words of Jesus are the words of life, and yet they only seem to lead to a greater knowledge of facts, not to knowing him more deeply. What is missing?

The solution
To those who desired earthly bread more than his word, Jesus said, "Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you... This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent" (John 6:26-29). Instead of seeking things that pass away in this life, they were to believe in Jesus to obtain the food that lasts forever. Jesus then told them to eat that food:

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh... Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. (John 6:51, 53-57)"

[Sidebar: Notice the reference to "true food" and "true drink"; surely this true food comes from God, as does all food. What is it that makes it true? God? Surely not, because all things come from God. It is we ourselves who make it true, by first acknowledging its source, and then focussing on the blessing inherent in it. If we seek, we find, if we do not seek we just get fat, more and more encumbered by worldly attachments.]

"They could not have understood him to refer to the Lord's Supper since it had not yet been instituted. Jesus first said that they must "labor" for food that gives eternal life by believing in him, and then he said that only those who eat his flesh and drink his blood have eternal life and will be resurrected on the day of judgement. The fellowship of believers with Jesus is so intimate that he described it as his being in them and as their eating his body and drinking his blood. In fact, he called himself "living bread" because those who ate and drank him had life from him as he had life from his living Father.

In other words, just as Jesus lived because he had the life of God in him, those who believe live because they have the life of Jesus in them. The eternal life that believers have is the life that Jesus lives. There is no other eternal life since eternal life is defined as knowing Jesus and through knowing Jesus, knowing his Father (John 14:8-10; 17:3). Those who believe in Jesus through the word become one with him and his Father (John 17:20-21).

What was missing? The original readers of John's Gospel immediately made the connection between eating and drinking Jesus to the Lord's Supper since they were reminded that the holy bread was his body and that the holy wine was his blood every time they met as a church. By recording that message of Jesus, John taught them to share the life of the risen Lord, eating his body and drinking his blood in the Lord's Supper, not in any literal sense, but by having faith in his body given for them and in his blood shed for them, for the forgiveness of their sins. John taught them to take in the life of Jesus spiritually as they ate and drank the Lord's Supper physically, to realize that such close fellowship with him is eternal life. They could experience that deep knowledge of Jesus every time they met as a church, looking forward to its completion in their resurrection."

This is from When Our Seeking Goes Astray (November 1) Nov 1, 2011, by Gary Henry:

“Jesus answered them and said, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal on Him’” (John 6:26,27).
AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POPULARITY, JESUS HAD NO LACK OF “SEEKERS,” BUT MANY OF THOSE WHO SOUGHT HIM DID SO FOR WORLDLY REASONS. After He miraculously fed the five thousand, the multitude came back the next day. On that day, however, Jesus did not feed them with loaves and fishes. Rather than another meal, what the crowd got from Jesus was an encouragement to elevate their concept of what He had come into the world to give them. He exhorted them, “Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life.”

What this tells us is that even when we are seeking God, our seeking can go astray. Just when we begin to believe that we are seeking Him, we may look into our hearts and see that what we’re really seeking is the procurement of certain physical blessings. He has blessed us in the past, and we’ve greatly enjoyed His blessings. And so we return just as the multitude did, seeking Him the next day. But is it God whom we seek or have we returned to Him because we “ate of the loaves and were filled”?

The danger of concentrating on “the food which perishes” is that too little of our hearts is left over with which to focus on God. As Charles Spurgeon said, “A man’s heart has only enough life in it to pursue one object fully.” To whatever extent we seek the food that perishes, that much less energy will be available for seeking “the food which endures to everlasting life.”

It simply cannot be said too often: we must seek God with our WHOLE HEARTS. It is a SINGLE-MINDED focus on our Heavenly Father that will ultimately get us where we want to be: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). So however tempting it may be to devote ourselves to temporal needs and enjoyments, we must not let our seeking go astray. If it is not God whom we seek, then our seeking is bound to come to a bad end.

C. S. Lewis wrote: “God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way.”"

To reiterate my main point for today: it must be admitted that some things have only carnal value, while other things have only spiritual value--but sometimes the same THING can be both carnal AND spiritual, depending on where the attention of the devotee is directed. Verily, verily I say unto you, the temporal or eternal value of a thing is determined not by the inherent quality of the thing itself, but, rather, by the attitude of the observer towards it; the spirituality of the observer transforms a thing from one consciousness state to another by an act of will.

The ability to perceive the divine in mundane things is a skill that results from acts of will, which must be endlessly repeated and ingrained, in order for them to be cultivated into a virtue of permanently heightened awareness. All things may be made holy by the spiritual attention we give them. The humblest peasant meditation on a lily of the field, in all its spiritual glory, is of infinite value, and resonates through out eternity. Jesus bids us pray unceasingly--this is what He means. The seeker after divine knowledge must watch and wait with patience and uninterrupted focus.

But the meat that gives eternal nourishment comes at a cost, and that cost is an uncompromising faith in the power to see beyond the limitations of mundane perception. It is an aggressive faith--an insistence on seeing what cannot be seen. It is faith that empowers us; it is the transcendent power of spirit become flesh that enlightens us. 

Let us pray: Jesus direct our attention to the signposts so liberally strewn along the spiritual path, so that we may see the divine in everything, and make everything in our lives divine. Reveal to us your mystery in every breath, your truth in every word, your love in every passing, eternal moment. Amen.

11 You Must Be Born Again

Today's sermon explores the implications of the message, "You must be born again." In particular, we will try to describe some of the evidence that you have been born again, and, also, some of the outwardly discernible effects of being born again.

First the scripture:

John 3:1-8

 1There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:
 2The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.
 3Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
 4Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?
 5Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
 6That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
 7Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
 8The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

It will not be surprising for you to hear that there is disagreement about the interpretation of this scripture, especially the part about water and Spirit; the disagreement concerns the precise meaning of the word "water". You will hear them expounded in full as we read on, but, for now, here is a summary of the two main interpretations:

1. If we say we are born of water-and-spirit--both at once, together--then we are referring to "water" as the primary magical ingredient in the act of baptism, the ritual cleansing, the washing away of earthly residue, i.e. sin.

2. If we are FIRST born of water, THEN of spirit, a two-step process, then the word "water" refers to the earthly birth, the birth out of the water of the mother's womb.

The water birth, referred to in this second interpretation, is the birth into Earthly life, into the flesh dominated by the inherited original sin. If we adopt this interpretation, we must conclude that Jesus is saying this: to enter the Kingdom of God we must first be born of the flesh, THEN of the spirit.

One argument, that supports the idea of a two-step process, is Jesus' own words just a few lines down, when He says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Here, He is clearly enunciating the concept of a two-stage career on Earth, beginning with incarnation and ending in transfiguration. However you slice it, the significance and the problem of incarnation, vis a vis the Kingdom of God, is a knotty one, loaded with all kinds of implications about the immortality of the soul.

And what about this Kingdom of God we are entering? It is - - - what? A consciousness state that accepts souls who have first experienced the tempering fires of Earthly passion and sin, but who have come through the fire, and attained Heavenly grace on the other side? Is it really, as it is so often represented, a final reward, or is it simply a natural consequence of the victory over the flesh represented by a birth into spirit, and therefore just one more step in an infinite number of steps THROUGH Heaven and beyond? Either way, was there a soul, a consciousness BEFORE birth, that needed tempering, that was capable of tempering? If we are indeed immortal souls, we exist outside time, just like God. There is no other conclusion to come to than that we were made by God; but how can we say, "At this one particular moment in time we were made," when we were made in a dimension outside time? And if we are immortal, how is it that we are not immutable, fixed in eternity like God? What is the real purpose of this Earthly sojourn?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. But I know God knows. Maybe one day I will know, too.

Goethe said, "To be a traveller in this world you must know how to die and come back to life again."

Before we go on, I want to spend some time with the very end of the scripture:

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

Spirit and wind are often associated with each other, in at least a metaphorical way. Many times, while attempting to impress upon my violin students the necessity of muscle relaxation, I have likened musical energy to the wind in a flag: when you watch a flag being blown by the wind, you can see the shape of the wind, you can see the effect of the wind, because the material of the flag is supple and responsive, not rigid and inflexible; but you cannot see the wind itself. If your body is relaxed and, thus, able to respond to the subtle pressure of wind--of spirit on flesh--the music will ever-so-gently impress its divine message on you. However, if your body is stiff, you don't have a flag, you have a weathervane--a weathervane that can reveal the general direction of the wind, but not its richly subtle, intelligence-packed undulations.

Thus, the indiscernible wind is capable of lifting the willing Spirit into ever higher levels of consciousness; and thus, the born-again devotee is endowed with heightened sensitivities to spiritual reality, as the invisible becomes visible. Furthermore, by sensing the higher reality in itself, the born-again soul, like a light bulb that has become brilliantly illuminated from within, cannot help radiating some of this heightened consciousness back into the world. It is one more of God's many blessed miracles that, by the mere fact of existing in both worlds at once, the lower and the higher, the new-born soul becomes a conduit between Heaven and Earth, and transduces spiritual power into the physical dimension. The born-again experience not only blesses the born-again soul, but it blesses the world as well.

One of the many ways the world is blessed, by the elevation of the soul's attention to the realm of spirit, is simply the moral effect it has on the devotee. The born-again Christian is blessed with a plethora of heightened sensitivities, INCLUDING sensitivity to right action. The born-again soul cannot help projecting enlightened attitudes into its daily life, translating carnal instincts into spiritual affirmations. Among other things, these spiritual affirmations inform the devotee that spiritual acts include the action of thought on both matter AND spirit. The following Steiner quote dwells on this effect; of particular interest is the idea that thoughts are just as potent ACTS as physical acts:

Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment:

"For every one step you take in pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character."

"A further point of importance is what spiritual science calls orientation in the higher worlds. This is attained when the student is permeated, through and through, with the conscious realization that feelings and thoughts are just as much veritable realities as are tables and chairs in the world of the physical senses. In the soul and thought world, feelings and thoughts react upon each other just as do physical objects in the physical world. as long as the student is not vividly permeated with this consciousness, he will not believe that a wrong thought in his mind may have as devastating an effect upon other thoughts that spread life in the thought world as the effect wrought by a bullet fired at random upon the physical objects it hits.

He will perhaps never allow himself to perform a physically visible action which he considers to be wrong, though he will not shrink from harboring wrong thoughts and feelings, for these appear harmless to the rest of the world. There can be no progress, however, in the path to higher knowledge unless we guard our thoughts and feelings in just the same way we guard our steps in the physical world. If we see a wall before us, we do not attempt to dash right through it, but turn aside. In other words, we guide ourselves by the laws of the physical world. There are such laws, too, for the soul and thought world, only they cannot impose themselves on us from without. They must flow out of the life of the soul itself."

Thus, the born-again soul, when it achieves its heightened consciousness state, not only discovers that it now has access to a vast array of spiritual pleasures and freedoms, but, at the same exact moment, it has become encumbered with a bundle of moral imperatives, the significance of which may not be ignored or even underemphasized. The law of Moses has lost its power to govern, but the law of Spirit rules with absolute sovereignty. I suggest, here, that the sovereignty of spirit is a function of a natural process of step-by-step integration of the articulate Human self into the inarticulate Divine Self; that we all go, in stages, back to God.

The role of REASON in the process of rebirth is tricky to describe. On the one hand, spiritual reality is beyond reason, beyond the Word's power to express; and yet the Word does undergo a transformation into a level of higher resonance, just like everything else in the spirit world. Reason comes from the abstract consciousness state, and must therefore contain the seeds of Divine Truth, if not the full flowering of It.

The following excerpt from The Screwtape Letters speaks of reason as a component of the higher spiritual reality. C.S.Lewis was adamant about the idea that Christianity MAKES SENSE. He was determined that all spiritual truth could be encapsulated in arguments that can, at least partially, satisfy man's need for expressions of a priori truths--concepts that are self-contained, self-evident, and rationally stable. Here, we hear Screwtape expounding on the idea of reason, and on Satan's war against it:

"The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting, He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason: and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by 'real.'"

The following is a ridiculous article which I offer merely so I can ridicule it; it is a prime example of the evils of proselytizing and evangelism. The dogma wars that rage among so many Christians is indeed a Holy War, but is also as stupid as spit. It is an example of the use of spiritual language (jargon) in the service of the ego. Evangelism is really nothing more than dogmatic rhetoric run amuck. One of the things I appreciate about this place is that everybody is entitled to his own opinion. The problem is always that the idea of ONE GOD seems to imply the idea of ONE THEOLOGY--this is, of course, a cultural impossibility.


Was Martin Luther A Born-Again Christian?
By Rick Ritchie

"
Martin Luther was a Protestant. He was the father of Protestantism. Martin Luther was an evangelical. He defended the authority of Scripture and restored the Gospel to its central position in the church. Martin Luther was a Protestant, and an evangelical; but was he a born-again Christian?

Absolutely Yes! Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born-again to enter the kingdom of heaven (John 3:3). Clearly, in order to be a Christian, one must be born again in the way Jesus intended. If Martin Luther was a Christian--and he certainly was--then he must have been a born again Christian.

Absolutely No! In twentieth century America, there are many zealous Christians whose experience of the faith bears little resemblance to that of Luther. We may think that if we just strip away the cultural accretions that have attached themselves to today's born again Christianity, we might discover the type of faith that Luther advocated, but that is mistaken. When all the cultural layers are peeled back, what is revealed is, at best, the faith that Luther left behind in the monastery when he discovered the gospel. If Martin Luther was a born again Christian in the biblical sense, he was not a born again Christian in the modern sense.

Born-Againism Versus the Gospel:

The thought of pitting born again Christianity against the gospel is bound to strike some as bizarre. If it is not the born again Christians who know the gospel, who does? How many times have we heard of staunch church-goers who were converted at a Billy Graham crusade after years of spiritual deadness in their mainline churches? Are we to discount all of these stories? If not, what does it mean to say that born again Christianity is in conflict with the gospel?

It is not its emphasis on evangelistic outreach that the born again movement is to be faulted for. Its evangelistic crusades and campus ministries are probably responsible for more unchurched Americans hearing the gospel than all other means combined. The born again movement is to be commended for preaching the cross to those who have not heard, wherever it has done this faithfully. The real problem is that this movement preaches not only two births, but two gospels, and is not even aware of it.

One gospel tells us of our estrangement from God and how, while we were dead in sin and hostile to God, God reconciled us to himself on the cross.

The other gospel tells us how we can be saved by making a decision for Christ and asking him into our hearts.

Most of us were taught to think that these teachings were two parts of the same message. When we study the life of Martin Luther, we find that the Reformation occurred when Luther abandoned the second message for the first."

This little piece is richly stuffed with jargon and implied prejudices which sort of bob around its peripheries like peeping toms. The question of whether Matin Luther is born again, THE WAY JESUS INTENDED, is such a ridiculous quibble, its triviality forbids further comment. It DOES, however, in its suggestion that there are TWO GOSPELS, point to the literal disagreement I mentioned at the outset of this sermon. The implication here is that the act of taking Jesus into our hearts is somehow in conflict with the state of Grace that came into being when Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross. I really don't get it. Maybe I'm just dense and am missing something, but I tend to think that Rick Ritchie is stuck in a quagmire of contradictory verbal structures, like so many people who use the Gospel in service of the ego, and that he would do well to step back and try to let the Spiritual Word inform the literal word.

Here is Martin Luther's comment on the meaning of baptism. Of particular interest is how he affirms the same idea that I have been expressing, about the relationship of the Divine Word to the Human word; he insists that faith is the mechanism by which the human mind may apprehend the oral proclamations of spirit:

The Small Catechism of Doctor Martin Luther
The Fourth Chief Part: Baptism
The Meaning of Baptism
What does such baptizing with water mean?

"Such baptizing with water means that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts; and that a new man daily come forth and arise, who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever. Where is this written? St. Paul writes, in Romans 6:4:

“We are buried with Christ by baptism into death, that just as He was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

People are so foolish as to separate faith from the object to which faith is attached and bound on the ground that the object is something external. Yes, it must be external so that it can be perceived and grasped by the senses and thus brought into the heart, just as the entire Gospel is an external, oral proclamation. In short, whatever God effects in us He does through such external ordinances. No matter where He speaks – indeed, no matter for what purpose or by what means He speaks – there faith must look and to it faith must hold. We have here the words, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved.” To what do they refer but to baptism, that is, the water comprehended in God’s ordinance? Hence it follows that whoever rejects baptism rejects God's Word, faith, and Christ, who directs us and binds us to baptism."

This is by Pastor Harry A. Ironside:What Does It Mean To Be Born Again?
[Dr. Harry Ironside was one of the most famous preachers/pastors of his era (early 1900’s); he greatly struggled with the ‘holiness’ doctrine (even to the point of being in deep Depression), but eventually came to the scriptural conclusion that even though he was indeed saved, he would still sin.  Here is a brief article on being ‘born again’ by Dr. Ironside]

"This term first appears in the Bible in John chapter three.

To understand this Biblical term, it is necessary to understand that there are TWO BIRTHS. The "first" birth is the PHYSICAL BIRTH when you were born into this world from your mother and father. When the Bible speaks of being "born of water," it is speaking about the physical birth (NOT baptism). The "second" birth is a SPIRITUAL BIRTH, which means to be born of the "Spirit" (God's Holy Spirit). Why does a person need to be born spiritually? What is a "spiritual" birth?

The Bible teaches that man is created in the image of God. God manifests Himself to mankind in the Persons of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Likewise, mankind is composed of a body, soul, and spirit. Our body is the "tent" you could say of the soul and spirit (the body is a temporary dwelling place). Our soul is composed of the heart (to feel), the mind (to think), and the will (to decide)."

[Sidebar: I have never before read more concise summary of the functions of heart, mind, and will.]

"Our spirit is dead in sin when we are born; that is, we are born void of God. No person is ever born with God. The only exception is the Lord Jesus Christ Who came as God in the flesh (1st Timothy 3:16). Our spirit is dead in trespasses and sin the Bible says...

"And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:1,2)."

[Sidebar: This last bit about the "children of disobedience" recalls to mind the statements we made earlier about the moral imperatives that come with being born again. We see here that the state of the flesh is one of sin, the "course of this world" is an evil course, one permeated and infected by the self-centered Earthly orientation.]

Ironside goes on:

The unsaved person cannot understand God, nor His Word.
 

1st Corinthians 2:14):

"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned"."

[Sidebar: Here the "natural man" is an object of denigration.]

"The reason why you need to be "spiritually" born is because you have never been spiritually born to begin with. So when the Bible speaks of being “born again,” it actually means “born for the second time.” You were born physically into this world, but you were born without the Spirit of God in your soul (spiritually dead). Yes, God created you, but He gave you a freewill to decide for yourself where you will spend eternity.

God never forces anyone to accept Jesus as their Savior. He simply offers a warm invitation to anyone who wants to have their sins forgiven and go to Heaven. Salvation is a free gift (Romans 5:15), paid for by the precious blood of Jesus Christ (1st Peter 1:18,19). We must accept God's gift of eternal life or it WILL be forever forfeited when we leave this world (die).

God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:17, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Notice, God said they would die “the day that thou eatest thereof.” Interestingly, Adam and Eve DIDN'T die physically the day they ate the fruit and disobeyed God's command.

The reason is because they died SPIRITUALLY. Sin had entered the human race. The Bible teaches that from Adam until present time, mankind has been born spiritually dead, inherited down from Adam's sin. This is why humanity MUST be born-again. This is only possible through the Holy Spirit of God, which makes us alive again (quickeneth the Bible says) by faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior.

Eph 2:5 Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)

To be “spiritually” born means that God's Holy Spirit “quickens” (or makes alive) our dead spirit. When a sinner believes on the Lord Jesus as the Christ, trusting Him alone to forgive all sins—then God the Father and God the Son come into one's heart in the form of God the Holy Spirit (John 14:23). The “Holy Spirit” is “God within us.”
I have God living in my body in the form of the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:9 tells us that the Spirit of Christ dwells within every believer. I am not God, but I have God's Spirit living in my body. The Godhead indwells every believer. The Holy Spirit of God guides me, comforts me, teaches me, rebukes me, chastises me, convicts me, encourages me, empowers me, loves me, strengthens me, and so much more. The Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to do these things. This is why it is critically important for every believer to live in their Bible (and make sure you have a reliable Bible—I only use the King James).

A person cannot understand the Bible without the presence of the Author, and God is the Author. When you become born-again (or born for the second time), God's Holy Spirit comes into your body (1st Corinthians 3:16), never to leave (Hebrews 13:5), and you will understand many new things for the first time in your life…:

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
2nd Corinthians 5:17

It is ONLY through the Precious Word of God that anyone can be born-again. Surely, no one can be born into this world again physically... there is no turning back the hands of time. However, you most certainly can be born again, spiritually, into God's family through the Spirit of Christ...

"But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his" (Romans 8:9).

The way we become "born again" is found in the Word of God...

"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever." —1st Peter 1:23

We are born again by the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God.

The following statement sums it up pretty good:

If you're born once, then you die TWICE; If you're born twice, then you die ONCE.

Regeneration (being "born again") is the transformation from death to life that occurs in our souls when we first come to God and are justified. He washes us clean of our sins and gives us a new nature, breaking the power of sin over us so that we will no longer be its slaves, but its enemies, who must fight it as part of the Christian life (cf. Rom. 6:1–22; Eph. 6:11–17). To understand the biblical teaching of being born again, we must understand the terms it uses to refer to this event.

The term "born again" may not appear in the Bible. The Greek phrase often translated "born again" (gennatha anothen) occurs twice in the Bible—John 3:3 and 3:7—and there is a question of how it should be translated. The Greek word anothen sometimes can be translated "again," but in the New Testament, it most often means "from above." In the King James Version, the only two times it is translated "again" are in John 3:3 and 3:7; every other time it is given a different rendering.

Another term is "regeneration." When referring to something that occurs in the life of an individual believer, it only appears in Titus 3:5. In other passages, the new birth phenomenon is also described as receiving new life (Rom. 6:4), receiving the circumcision of the heart (Rom. 2:29; Col. 2:11–12), and becoming a "new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).

This is from Bible Tools: Commentaries: Forerunner Commentary by John W. Ritenbaugh. This piece presents arguments in support of the water-and-spirit equals baptism idea:

"John 3:8 expands on the sovereign character of God's personal involvement in each person's new birth. At the same time, Christ teaches us that we should judge what has happened in the born-again person's life by what it produces. He illustrates this by saying, "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

This is another verse where people jump to a wrong conclusion, concluding that Christ is speaking of a post-resurrection situation. They do this by assuming that a person is not born into the Kingdom of God until the resurrection. At that time, they will indeed be composed of spirit and be invisible like wind. With that as their assumption, they give themselves the "hatpin test," saying, "I can't possibly be born again yet because I'm still human." We must not fall for this line of reasoning, though, because such a thought directly contradicts the exceedingly clear Colossians 1:13,

"Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:"

as well as other scriptures. Once again, people who have concluded this have not correctly analyzed another of Jesus' figurative illustrations. The Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35)!

"If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;"

There is another answer, a right answer.

Interestingly, the Greek word underlying "wind" is the same as the one underlying "spirit": pneuma. This truth supplies one facet of proper analysis because wind and spirit share a few characteristics: They are both invisible to human sight, and neither can be controlled by humans. In other words, each is sovereign and independent in its actions. The wind does as it pleases. No human can direct where the wind comes from, nor order where it is to go or what it is to do.

However, even though wind is itself invisible, its effects can be seen. In addition, the sound of its movement can be heard, and the changes it produces—such as trees swaying, dust blowing, and clouds passing across the sky—can be seen. In this same manner, the invisible Spirit, by which a person receives spiritual birth and produces spiritual fruit, operates.

Notice in verse 8 that the definite article "the" appears before the word "Spirit." In this case, "Spirit" is not used as a mere general term, but Jesus draws attention to a particular Spirit—the One who causes our spiritual birth, our Father in heaven. He is spirit (John 4:24), and He is holy (I Peter 1:16). Who can order Him about and direct the course of His actions? He does as it pleases Him. His operations are sovereign, and He has power over even the most hardened of sinners.

We can witness the changes that He produces in people by noting that the formerly sinful person is becoming holy; the immoral person is becoming moral; the stubborn, obstinate person is becoming gentle, thoughtful, and helpful. In other words, just as with the wind, we see the effects of an invisible cause. The Father grants regeneration and repentance, and He reveals Himself, bestowing His Spirit and spiritual growth on whomever He will (Romans 9:15-16). He does these things at the times and in the ways that please Him.

The born-again person knows his life has changed and enjoys it, but we do not always grasp how God operates on our hearts to subdue our wills to His. However, if we take up the challenges of God's calling, understanding comes. As Paul says in I Corinthians 2:10: "But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God."

It is small wonder that Nicodemus was perplexed by Jesus' instruction. He apparently had never dreamed of such a personal, intimate, and continuous relationship with the Creator God."

Regeneration in John 3:

"These different ways of talking about being "born again" describe effects of baptism, which Christ speaks of in John 3:5 as being "born of water and the Spirit." In Greek, this phrase is, literally, "born of water and Spirit," indicating one birth of water-and-Spirit, rather than "born of water and of the Spirit," as though it meant two different births—one birth of water and one birth of the Spirit.

In the water-and-Spirit rebirth that takes place at baptism, the repentant sinner is transformed from a state of sin to the state of grace. Peter mentioned this transformation from sin to grace when he exhorted people to "be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38).

The context of Jesus’ statements in John 3 makes it clear that he was referring to water baptism. Shortly before Jesus teaches Nicodemus about the necessity and regenerating effect of baptism, he himself was baptized by John the Baptist, and the circumstances are striking: Jesus goes down into the water, and as he is baptized, the heavens open, the Holy Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove, and the voice of God the Father speaks from heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son" (cf. Matt. 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–22; John 1:30–34). This scene gives us a graphic depiction of what happens at baptism: We are baptized with water, symbolizing our dying with Christ (Rom. 6:3) and our rising with Christ to the newness of life (Rom. 6:4–5); we receive the gift of sanctifying grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13; Gal. 3:27); and we are adopted as God’s sons (Rom. 8:15–17). . . . ."

The distinction between "ADOPTED SONS OF GOD, and "THE ONLY BEGOTTEN SON OF GOD" may shed some light on the quandary that has fretted me on the subject of our immortal soul's return to God, and our place in the Divine Hierarchy. Clearly, Jesus, as the only begotten Son, claims a distinction above all other created souls, and yet, how much less dear is an adopted son to God than a begotten one? Here Screwtape summarizes God's attitude toward Humankind:

"One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself--creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them, but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."

Thus, the birth into spirit endows the soul with enlightenment AND bestows, in brilliant manifestation, the birthright that is every Human's implied destiny, but which is not automatic--this birthright must be claimed by an act of will--an act of ATTENTION. The blessing is always there, waiting to raise us up into Heavenly light, but we must accept it.

Let us pray: Jesus, thank You for making this birthright accessible to us, throughout your magnificent sacrifice. Give us the courage and the heart to accept the gift with open hands. Amen.

10 Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead? 

Today's celebration of the glory of the risen Christ centers on a question that appears only in Luke, "Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?" The operative word in this expression, for me, is "seek"; and it is the subject of seeking that will occupy our attention for the next few minutes. We will talk about why we seek, how we seek and where we seek. We will once again emphasize that it is attention--attention of the WILL on the supernatural dimension of existence--that reveals spiritual truth to the mundane mind, raising the physical into the spiritual; the Word to flesh, flesh to spirit.

 Perhaps the linking of the ATTENTION to the WORD is of more significance than we have yet realized. Perhaps the focus of the "attention of the Will on the Word" is the defining action that calls into being a place (a place!) for flesh and spirit to meet; this attention of the Will creates a meeting place because the consciousness of the Will is super-literal, and can therefore assimilate the power of the spiritual Word with even greater clarity and precision than the mundane mind. This "place" is therefore outside time, but still connected to a kind of vaguely (or slightly) articulated literalness that offers an entry into a small corner of the human mind without submitting to the human minds' limitations. Perhaps the human mind, seeking beyond the limits of the literal consciousness, raises ITSELF to a higher plane of consciousness, and therefore can glimpse the vastness of the Divine Word through the Will, which may be thought of as Man's tiny piece of eternity? Perhaps we are talking about very small increments of increase on a continuum that stretches into infinity?

 But more on this later. Now the scriptures.

 [Notice that we have returned to the Synoptic Gospels for this, and, although Luke is the only one with the line, "Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?", the other two gospels mention something else I want to consider for a bit--you guessed it: angels.]

Luke 24:1-9  

"1Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.  2And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. 3And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.  4And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:  5And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?  6He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,  7Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.  8And they remembered his words,  9And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest."

St. Matthew 28:1-6

"1  In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Mag'dalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. 2  And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. 3  His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: 4  and for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. 5  And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. 6  He is not here: for he is risen, as he said." 

St. Mark 16:1-6

 "And when the sabbath was past, Mary Mag'dalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salo'me, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.   And very early in the morning, the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.   And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?   And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.   And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him." 

 "Behold the place where they laid Him." The place where they laid him is a place of death. The living would never remain amid the mouldering stench of the dead. Dead is dead. Why are you looking--because you want life too, right? because you saw something held out to you in loving hands that completed you, that gave you back to yourself, that made you free, free from yourself, free to be your own vast universe, that's why. And now you are seeking that in a place of death? Get real! Think about it. If dead is dead, let's go look for a party, let's get some light!

The following is taken from Sermon #108. The Resurrection (Luke 24:1-12) by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson:

Exposition

How do you talk matter-of-factly about an event so mind-boggling as the raising of a person from the dead, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Hollywood would use special effects to impact the viewer. Novelists would employ powerful prose. But the Scripture just tells the story of the disciples, both male and female, as they discover this unexpected and life-jolting joy. And the Scripture tells it simply, clearly, and convincingly. The historicity of the Resurrection is crucial to the Christian faith. Our own eternal future hinges on this question. Paul writes in (1 Corinthians 15:14-15, 17, 19):

"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.... If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." 

[Sidebar: Here again we see this tendency to validate the divinity of Jesus through the power of miracles. We have often extolled the power of parables, and myths, why not the power of miracles? I generally resist the attractions of phenomena, I try to take the spiritual world so much for granted that nothing miraculous, that ever happens to me, is ever surprising (however wonderful); but one possible virtue in attaching inordinate significance to miracles occurs to me: you have to have faith in tales of miracles because they are something you didn't see directly; if you had witnessed them directly, you wouldn't have to have faith; faith is the evidence of things NOT seen, not things seen. When higher reality is visible and accessible to direct experience, faith is unnecessary. Furthermore, the discipline of SEEKING higher levels of attention makes such direct experiences more and more available. I ran across this Joseph Campbell quote that says it all in a nutshell:

 “I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.” 

This reminds me of the Luther sermon about John the Baptist: he is not a prophet foretelling the coming of the Messiah, he is the herald, the very trumpet call announcing the living Human presence of the Messiah. All the little miracles of life add up into the one big miracle, all made possible because Heaven came down to Earth and delivered us from illusion.]

Back to Ralph Wilson:

"Each of the Gospel writers adds specific details to the story of the resurrection. Occasionally, it is hard to understand just how all these details fit together. But we're studying Luke's account, so I won't try to weave in everything included in Matthew, Mark, and John. For example, Luke doesn't mention the Roman soldiers who guarded the tomb (Matthew 27:62-66; 28:11-15). We'll focus on Luke's telling of the story. Perhaps you've heard the story of Jesus' resurrection all your life. Pray now, and then seek to read and study it as if for the first time. Let its truth touch your heart afresh.

The Women Come to the Tomb (24:1)
"On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb." (24:1)

The first day of the week for Jews, of course, was the day after the Sabbath -- Sunday. This is the third day (24:7, 46) since Jesus' burial. While modern westerners might measure days in 24-hour periods, the Jews measured time differently, counting each portion of a day as a whole day. The Greek adjective used in verses 7 and 46, tritos means "third in a series." Looking forward the third day would be the day after tomorrow. Looking backward it would be the day before yesterday. This is the third day counting parts of three days -- Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

The women begin their trek to the garden tomb very early indeed. The Greek adjective batheos, "at the extreme of, very, exceedingly," modifies the word for "early morning."

Early that morning the women buy spices (Mark 16:1). The Greek noun aroma, refers to "any kind of fragrant substance, fragrant spice, salve, oil, or perfume," especially used in embalming the dead. Now they are prepared (Greek hetoimazo) to provide whatever additional care is necessary for Jesus' body following his hasty entombment late Friday afternoon.  

The Stone Is Rolled Away, the Body Missing (24:2-3)
 "They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus." (24:2-3) Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses (Matthew 27:61; Mark 15:47) had witnessed Jesus' burial on Friday evening. They are sure of the location; there was no mistake about that. And since it is a new tomb, there is no confusing either the tomb or which corpse belongs to Jesus. But when they arrive the large stone blocking the door has been rolled away and the body is nowhere to be seen.

Two Angels Appear to Them (24:4-5a)
There may be chattering between themselves at this point or maybe struck dumb from the shock of finding no body. "Wondering" (NIV) or "perplexed" (KJV) is the Greek verb apareo, "to be in a confused state of mind, be at a loss, be in doubt, be uncertain." But, whatever the case, they aren't in doubt for long.

"While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground." (24:4-5a)

 Suddenly, two men are standing beside them. In contrast to the mournful shadows of the tomb, their garments are brilliant and seem to illuminate the sepulchre. The words "gleamed like lightning" (NIV) or "shining" (KJV) translate the Greek verb astrapto, "flash, gleam." The word is used of the flash of lightning, and a similar word exastrapto, is used to describe Jesus' clothing at his transfiguration. These are angels and their garments are shining with the Shekinah glory of God (Exodus 33:11; 34:30; Acts 10:30; Revelation 15:6; ).

The women are terrified. "Fright" or "afraid" is the Greek adjective emphobos, "pertaining to being in a state of fear, afraid, startled, terrified." Quickly they bow down with their faces to the ground in utter obeisance before the majesty of these angels.  

[Sidebar: Notice the presence of angels in these three gospel versions; none of them say quite the same words, but all three stories include angels--two of them! Does this address the question of "Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?" Clearly the message being sent is "Look up, look up! What has happened is beyond your literal understanding; you must look to another kind of understanding in order to get this!" Angels exist in a supernatural dimension that is only visible to Men who look beyond the veil of physical reality into the timeless eternal. There we are more alive, more radiant, more real. That seems like a good place to look.]

Back to Ralph Wilson:

"He Has Risen (24:5b-6a)
Now the angels speak:

"But the men said to them, 'Why do you look for (Greek zeteo) the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!" (24:5b-6a) 

The angels ask a startling question: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" They are in a tomb looking for a dead man. But a grave is no place to find the living Christ, the angels declare with some irony. A grave is the last place to you look when you are seeking Life.

He is risen! "Risen" is the Greek verb egeiro, "to cause to return to life, raise up" or "to enter into or to be in a state of life as a result of being raised, rise."

To followers who have been stunned by his crucifixion, hearts heavy with dejection, and eyes puffy with tears, these words are like an explosion. Risen! Raised to life! Their emotions are now wrenched again with the news. It must be true, coming from angels! But how can it be?

Jesus Foretells His Resurrection (24:6b-8)
The angels continue:
"Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again (Greek anistemi).' Then they remembered his words." (24:6b-8) A second Greek verb is used to translate "be raised again" -- anistemi, "rise up, come back from the dead" -- though the sense of both anistemi and egeiro is very similar.

The angels recite to the women Jesus' own prophecy that this should take place, which we read earlier in Luke:

"The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life (Greek egeiro)." (9:22)

"He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again (Greek anistemi)." (18:32-33) 

The angels speak as if the women have heard these words personally. Though on some occasions Jesus communicates this to the Twelve alone (9:18; 18:31), it is quite possible that these women heard him say it, since they also traveled with the disciples on some trips (see Matthew 17:22-23; Mark 9:30-32). At the very least they have heard of the saying from the Twelve.

The women have a glimmer of recognition. "Then they remembered (Greek mimneskomai) his words" (24:8). "To remember," says commentator Joel Green, "consists of more than cognitive evocation, but includes the nuance of understanding or insight." It is clear that the women now believe that Jesus is risen." 

The expression, "nuance of understanding or insight" is interesting. Always, trying to figure out how to look for Divine Truth in the mundane world is a trick. The world is filled with so many illusions, (so many things that look like fun on TV but really aren't), that eluding deception can take one's full attention. Again, I invoke direct experience as the prime authority in any spiritual matter, but, to be sure, we cannot always distinguish certain subtleties between various levels of experience. My teacher Herbert Brun insisted that any act, that owes it pedigree to some earlier act, is invalid--only the truly anomalous is true. Of course, this idea languishes in the virtual impossibility of the human mind ever coming up with anything that has never been thought of before; nevertheless, the main point is that: an act must be pure--an act must spring from the Divine Will which is not encumbered by time or causality--which therefore bears few of the trappings of physical reality, the signifiers of a reality fixed in time, and therefore, by definition, DEAD.

The following is from: Organic Faith – Searching for intimacy with God in a postmodern world

"A handful of women (Luke 24:1-12) dealt with their grief the only way they knew how. They sought to honor Jesus through service. They brought spices to treat His body. And they were stunned by what they found – an empty tomb. These women went to the tomb expecting to find the dead body of their Messiah. Instead two men in shining garments met them and asked, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” It can be easy to miss the significance of this question. How many times do people have preconceived ideas about God and His plan only to discover that their first inclinations were wrong? Our expectations can get in the way of understanding God’s plan. We frequently look for God to move in the wrong places. We seek living fruit in places where there is only death. Nothing works out like we had planned and then we begin to doubt God’s promises."

[Sidebar: The idea that "Our expectations can get in the way of understanding God’s plan," deserves comment. As mentioned above in regard to artistic originality, our acts must be pure. So, too, must be our expectations; the visions we project into the future are very much the realities we get back in the present. Thus, just as there are many levels of consciousness, so must there be just as many levels of expectation, that is: expectation understood as an act of Will, a reaching of the divine into mundane principalities. Expectation also serves as an index of WHERE we are looking for the living. Are we looking with physical eyes in physical places, or are we looking with spiritual eyes in spiritual places?] 

Back to Organic Faith:

"The angelic messengers reminded the women of Jesus’ words. He talked about his suffering on the cross. But his followers missed the point. God wants us to understand His plan. Prophecy has existed for years to guide those who would have ears to hear. But frequently we miss it because we look in the wrong place.

The one thing we think could never achieve God’s plan is the exact thing that God uses. To the Jews, the idea of a king conquering through dying as a common criminal on a cross seems completely absurd. Kings conquered through conquest not suffering a shameful, barbaric death.

If you are faithful to serve despite the pain of your circumstance, like the women at the tomb, you will see the power of God materialize. It may not happen in your timing or how you would do it. But God rewards those who are faithful by visiting them with His presence and power."

The following is from the: Daily Exegesis Bible Commentary:

"Then, as they were afraid and bowed their faces to the earth, they said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen! Remember how He spoke to you when He was still in Galilee, saying, 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.'" And they remembered His words. And the good news really begins! The messengers in the shining garments are angels, messengers with a message for them. Indeed, such a message is this! "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Forever we remember these words, and the angels begin the task that starts this day: the words of Jesus are recalled and illumined for them. And my study bible adds, "He is risen! The news of great joy, heralding the new dispensation, resounds throughout the whole world, transforming the creation and the lives of millions of men and women." 

The following is: Publication #00.128 WHY SEEK YE THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD? by Elwin R. Roach

"...Why seek ye the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). Indeed, why would anyone seek the living among the dead? The cemetery is not the place where heart-beating bodies are generally found. You might find the gravedigger, the groundskeeper, a preacher or two, or perhaps people in a funeral procession; but all in all, the graveyard is not the best place to look. Life does not abide therein. Any place but among the tombs would be where life is generally found.

Even so, people of the world scout every avenue and back alley of death, looking for some form of life, hoping to stave off the hunger pangs of their empty souls. Eating husks along with the pigs is not a good diet for anyone, and this concerns us greatly. We are pained until they are all delivered from those dead places of futility.

It is obvious to anyone with any insight at all that the worldly masses are looking in fruitless places for life, and such vain attempts are expected of them. But we would not expect our brothers and sisters also to look for the living among the dead, but they do. Christians of all faiths spend much of their time exploring catacombs, digging in graveyards, musing through lifeless tombs, and admiring whited sepulchers. They are like the archeologists who scour the earth for evidence of the dead past, who search and dig with much interest and vigor. It is their life and livelihood. For some reason, death fascinates them. However, should that be the lot for those called by the name of Christ? We should say not! For there is no value in death, not one breath. Only with the living is there truly anything of worth."

I've saved John for last because he gives us the answer to why, how and where all in a single paragraph:

The Gospel according to John 20:11-16

11  ¶ But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, 12  and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. 13  And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. 14  And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. 15  Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. 16  Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabbo'ni; which is to say, Master."

"Master." The moment of recognition--epiphany. This is such a moving and resonant moment in the story for me. The moment when the veil of illusion is lifted and the truth of spiritual life spills over into human consciousness. I believe this to be a moment of realization that all Christians have had, because a Christian is someone who has met Jesus face to face. Without that personal experience all our theology is sounding brass. We must meet Jesus face to face in His Transcendent Form. It is so beautiful to think of Mary Magdelene as the very first human to have that experience; as such, she becomes the heroine of her own myth, and a model for us all.

All this talk about recognition, "epiphany" stuff, reminds me of a passage in the Screwtape Letters, the part at the end where Screwtape describes how the human hero dies, and how, at the moment of his death, the hero sees, in a single moment, both the demon who has been working for his damnation, and his Savior:

"How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (And let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like teeter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirty and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure-stretching their eased limbs! What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing? . . . .

 As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degradation! -- that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not "Who are you?" but "so it was you all the time." 

Jesus was to be found among the dead after all. Mary was the first to find something we all seek.

The "why" was Mary's great grief, her longing to be filled by the One whom she had come to need as the fulfillment of her highest self;

 the "how" was in the pursuit of the familiar, with attention focused on the super-familiar;

and the "where" was--ANYWHERE, even among the dead. 

 If the message of Jesus is "there is no death", then the answer to the question, "Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?", is that there are no dead--if we look beyond to the perishable dimension into the eternity of spirit that denies the claims of death on anyone who merely turns his face toward the light of life and embraces the gift of grace.

 Earlier we read the words, "Behold the place where they laid Him," and we suggested that the place where they laid him is a place of death. And yet, there He was not in a place of death but in a dimension above death, such that a place of death becomes yet another place of rebirth.

You see, the presence of Jesus in the tomb directly contradicts the implication that Jesus is not in the tomb. I can just imagine the arguments between John and Mark: "I can so too remember Him saying, "Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?"" "Did not!" "Did so!" But the beauty is this: even after the crucifixion Jesus can do this thing He does of getting a saying or action to mean more than one thing. Multiple layers of meaning and spiritual power run all through Jesus' message to Humankind. No, He is not in the tomb, but yes He IS in the tomb, but this tomb reaches beyond the tomb of earthly death into the glory of eternal life.

And thus, we need to face the world, the evils of the world, the death of the world. LOOKING THROUGH AND PAST the articulate surface features of the world to the heart of the world wherein beats the warm, loving, protective heart of the Christ, speaking words of power, reaching out to us with cleansing hands.

Let us pray: Jesus, we thank you every day of our lives, for the gift of grace you have made available to us, through great sacrifice. We thank You for your messages, of word and action, which grow and are magnified in us every time we experience them. Please direct our eyes to the proper level of consciousness, for the proper day, and bless us with reminders of your presence at every hour. Let us find you wherever we look for you, and let us look for you in all things. Amen.