Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue Berkeley, California 94705
(510) 845-6830 

New Life Eternal

Transcribed from the sermon preached June17, 2012

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: 2 Corinthians 5:1-17, Mark 4:26-32

Our lectionary returns once again to Paul’s address concerning the eternal Spirit, death and resurrection.  How do we approach life and death as Christians?  Note that all of this language is metaphor; Paul reaches for a way to explain the unexplainable, so he uses words like “a building from God, heavens, heavenly dwelling, clothing and judgment seat.  But just because life eternal may not be literally a house up in the sky doesn’t mean that Paul is not pointing toward the truth.  
The key to the message, I believe, is that we have been given the Spirit as a guarantee.  Fred Harvey likes to make the distinction between faith and belief.  We believe something we can be sure about.  We have faith in something we cannot be sure about, but it seems and feels right and true.  So Fred says he doesn’t believe in God, he has faith in God.  I agree that this is a good distinction, especially since those who say they believe too often allow their certainty to look like arrogance and justify ignorance.  But after thinking about this distinction and I have discovered that I in fact believe there is a Spirit greater than ourselves that gives us life, moves in and through us and connects us to others and all life.  Knowledge and experience of this Spirit makes all the difference in the world, it is to me the most important truth we can know.
Now there is a lot in the Bible I do not believe.  Much of the language we use in our liturgy and hymns, our doctrine and scripture readings just sounds like people trying to hard to get a handle and capture what cannot be captured.  Our attempts to describe and prescribe the Spirit of God are inadequate and caught within our own cultures subjective attempt to ascribe meaning.  One very basic example is the description of God as Father.  Now this metaphor works when it ascribes to God the best of what a father can and should be: We come from his seed, we are nurtured and encouraged, protected and challenged by him to grow and thrive.  But as soon as we try to claim that because God is male, males are like God and should dominate, then we have distorted the true nature of God and the true nature of men.  In short, it is a bunch of garbage, and if we value the Spirit of God in women and men, then we would not believe.  And though Jesus was a man, there is nothing about his maleness that saves.  It was his likeness to the Spirit, which saves, and the Spirit is neither male nor female, and both male and female.  Even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer that way.
Last week I mentioned that while the Spirit is in all life and yet greater than the sum of its parts, it also feels relational.  That is one of the qualities of life and the Spirit of life, relationship.  And so while the Spirit is much greater than some imaginary father in the sky, it does feel like the Spirit of life cares about us personally.  If we are open to this Spirit, we discover we feel loved.  Now this is one of the great mystical truths we can believe.  So it is quite natural that in looking for ways to describe this Spirit we would come up with Father or Mother.  But no way is the reality of the Spirit held captive or pinpointed by these metaphorical descriptions.  If God is that small, then I don’t believe in Him either.  While it can cause us to tilt our head like old Yeller to use or hear new metaphors and language rather than those words which have been passed down forever and ever, just to remind ourselves God is larger than our image of her, we should force ourselves to use other names.  “Our Mother, who art in Heaven, hollowed be thy name…” We may just use particular language and images for God, like Father, out of habit and the comfort of language and ritual, just like we may like the old hymns and classical music and not that new fangled stuff, but it an exclusive use of particular words can easily become a form of idolatry, God in an image formed by man.
The truth of the Gospel is that the Spirit of life and love can be, was and is embodied by a human being in history.  Yet the body filled with the Spirit points to the Spirit, is led by the Spirit, lives by the Spirit, loves by the Spirit, saves by the Spirit, is resurrected in the Spirit.  Our body and its accomplishments come and go.  It doesn’t matter whether a dead body is male or female, it can’t love.  It is the Spirit within us that loves, and it is the same Spirit no matter whose love.  The Spirit is our guarantee.
Now religions have their problems, their distortions; Hinduism has justified the cast system, and as Japanese women if Buddhism is less patriarchal than Christianity.  But the mystics of whatever stripe come upon a very similar Spirit that transcends our particular cultural baggage.  
"There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything,” says Mahatma Gandhi in his “Spiritual Message (On God), “I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power, which makes itself felt, and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent. Even in ordinary affairs we know that people do not know who rules or why and how He rules and yet they know that there is a power that certainly rules…
“I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates. That informing power of spirit is God, and since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent, for I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is life, truth, light. He is love. He is the supreme Good. But He is no God who merely satisfies the intellect, if He ever does. God to be God must rule the heart and transform it. He must express himself in every smallest act of His votary… Exercise of faith will be the safest where there is a clear determination summarily to reject all that is contrary to truth and love.
To the degree that we isolate our identity as if we were just us, this ego in a human body, and to the degree that this ego pays attention only to itself, its narcissistic needs and desires, then we split from God.  When we die, the terror and judgment comes from that ego self-falling away, being torn off because it cannot travel with the Spirit.  This is the falling through the dark into a bottomless pit dream.  But to the degree that we are open to our nature that is of the Spirit, which is God and connects us to others and to our true selves, then flight of our soul or Spirit at death is, while frightening because unseen with physical eyes, also like coming toward a longed for union, or to use Paul’s language, a heavenly home.  Using baptismal imagery, it is returning to the womb of Mother Spirit to be born again.  The grace of Christ gives us new hope, that though our ego self has selfishly isolated and grasped for its own desires and survival, we are loved and given access to this Great Spirit anyway.  We still have the pain of truly knowing what we have done wrong or failed to do or failed to know what or how to do, yet that is not ultimate; the Spirit is ultimate.  By feeling this grace, in thanksgiving we want more, we want to tap into the Spirit and allow it to guide and live our life.  In Buddhist language, when we stop grasping, we receive.  As we receive, we want to give.  But this is Christian language too.  Listen to CS Lewis, the literary genius convert to Mere Christianity:
"Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

I do believe in eternal life, though I don’t believe the metaphors we use to describe it literally.  I am comforted by the fact that we can remember each other, and the impact we have had on each other continues to be felt and to influence after our death.  But you are going to die too, so your memory is of little comfort in my hope for a life not lost to death.  My comfort comes in the assurance that my Spirit isn’t really just about me, and instead points toward the Gracious Spirit of all life.  Let me swim in the sea of God’s eternal love, and all the other little details can be dust in the wind.