What One Man Can Do!

Last Sunday we took a closer look at the concept of Passover as it relates to the Passion Week in Christianity. In Judaism, the Passover calls to remembrance the escape from slavery in Egypt to freedom as the Children of God. Jesus called us to come up higher and experience a new relationship with God, to let go into God, into wholeness. The symbolism of the wine and the bread, representing the lifeforce (blood) and the very substance (flesh) of our being represents the very living presence of the Christ within each of us. Jesus planted the seeds of understanding in the disciples which would bear fruit after the resurrection.

Good Friday represents the final rejection of Jesus by those who refused to accept Him as the Son of God. The Sanhedrin, bound by its rigid adherence to the Law and the temporal power they held, refused to even open up to the possibility of change, to receiving the Living Word of God. The chief priests and Pharisees tried to destroy the message by crucifying the man, thereby maintaining their control over the religious and secular lives of the Jews

.

The disciples, frightened and confused, scattered like leaves driven before the winds of a storm they did not understand. These were men who were dedicated to the man and to the Son of God, men who had given up all that they had to follow him with a deep and abiding love for their teacher. When Jesus breathed His last, the Temple veil was torn apart and earthquakes split the very rocks around them, the Centurion proclaimed: "Truly, this was the Son of God!" I believe that the broken rocks and the torn veil in the Temple represent the breaking up of the rigid power and mindset which had rejected Jesus.

The body of Jesus was hastily moved to a burial tomb and a large stone was rolled across the stone in preparation for the Sabbath. The chief priests and Pharisees went to Pilate to demand that the tomb be sealed and guards placed before it so that the disciples couldn't steal the body of Jesus and then claim that He had fulfilled His promise: After three days I will rise.

The two Mary's returned to the tomb on the morning of the third day to perform the ritual preparation of the body. When they arrived at the tomb, the stone had been rolled away and an angel proclaimed the Resurrection to them and sent them away to tell the others. Joy and hope flew into the hearts and minds of all those left bereft by His death! His disciples had vested all their faith and hope in Jesus even though He had repeatedly told them that they had the same Spirit in them and could do all that He could do. But they could not even conceive of such a possibility while He remained with them. With the Resurrection, they finally understood the wine and the bread of the Last Supper--understood that Jesus was now and always would be with them as the very essence of their being.

His final command to them set them on the path of life:

All authority has been given to Me

in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and

make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them

in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the

Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things

that I have commanded you; and lo,

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew 28:18

Today and everyday, let us remember that the Teachings of the Master are with us always and that our very lives will be transformed by His Word. Carol's solo today carries the power of His message and His life.

What one man can do is dream...

dream a life open to the Word

What one man can do is Love...

the world enough to heal it

What one man can do is Speak

the Truth into being

What one man can do is change the world

and make it new again!

No matter how dark and hopeless it seems before the dawn, remember we were called to come up higher, called to make a difference in the world. Remember, what one man can do, we can do also!

Read more!

Betrayal & Redemption/video

Read more!

Teachable Moments

The Spiritual Journey we take during Lent is just as important as Easter Sunday itself because the process of preparation that we go through during the Lenten Season provides us with everything we need to fulfill our true nature and to allow us to experience and express more of God. So while we celebrate Easter Sunday, the spiritual journey just as important, if not more so. Because without the preparation, there is no resurrection. So we prepare ourselves for a new life, a deeper understanding of and a new relationship with God.
Prepare

Jesus did not come to die for us. He came to teach us how to live--how to live as the sons and daughters of God, to grow in understanding and in the ability to demonstrate the Truth in our lives. He used precepts and parables to teach us, to open our eyes. And it's interesting, I believe, that He used simple, everyday examples and symbolism to point the way to understanding. He would tell us a story and then say "but this is what it means," which gives us a Bible which is the Living Word of God.

The Bible is not words and rules cast in stone, but words with meaning just as relevant today as when they were written down. The underlying principle is eternal, yet applicable to our everyday lives--the Living Word of God. The Bible has layers of meaning and the more we commit ourselves to personal growth with a willingness to work through the layers, the more we recognize what is really there. The more we long to find a way to apply His teaching to our lives the more we open up to our full potential in the here and now.

During the period when Jesus was born, Israel was so hooked into the letter of the law and a whole system of rules under which the people lived, that they had lost the meaning and message that God is our Father, that He created us in His image and likeness. And that continues to happen today when churches get so lost in the structure of religion, that they forget the teaching and the Teacher.

Jesus came to shift our focus from the letter of the law to the spirit of the law. To shift our focus from a vengeful, tyrant God to a Father who loves us and wants to lead us back to a clear, pure experience of joy. When we long for understanding, our lives become filled with a richness and a love that nothing in the outer can ever take away from us. We can go on working in the world, but we are working from the center, the Presence of God. As Gandhi said: My life is my message. The life that we choose is the life of Truth, a life based upon the Teachings of Jesus and the Father who loves us--not a Father who controls us and dictates our actions, not a Father pulling a puppet's strings, but a Father who has given us free will and the right to choose. When we come to a place where we can live our lives from an understanding of God in our lives, we live a life where love shines through and attracts others to His Word. When we have that inner peace and purpose, people are drawn to it.

The first story this Sunday is the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12, not the Rich Young Man--that's another story.

The ground of a certain rich man yielded
plentifully. And he thought to himself, saying,
'What shall I do, since I have no room to
store my crops?
I will do this: I will pull down my barns
and build greater, and there will I store all
my crops and my goods.'

And then I will say to my soul,
'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many
years; take your ease; eat, drink and be merry!'

But God said to him,
'Fool! This night your soul will be required of you;
then whose will those things be which you have provided?'
Luke 12:16-20

Again, Jesus is reminding us that possessions can possess us, because we need places to keep our possessions safe, we focus energy on guarding them and counting them. But, when it's time to go, they're just stuff! Some of our things may have value to someone else, but in the end, it's just stuff, stuff we've used to build walls around us, to insulate us from the Kingdom.

One of the things I've learned is that there is no free ride, no coasting--just because I've done good in the world in the past is not enough. In the first lesson of the Lenten Series, John the Baptist challenged the Pharisees for believing that their heritage from David and strict adherence to the Mosaic Law was all that was required of them. But yesterday's good work's only count for yesterday. What you are doing now, today, is what counts. If you're not growing and learning and giving, you're dead on arrival. And that feels pretty harsh.

Ironically, or not, I planned for my retirement by setting aside a separate retirement fund, apart from my pension. I made plans for a second career which required a lot of study and preparation, including start-up expenses. But guess what happened to those investments last fall when the markets came tumbling down? And that second career? Okay, the best laid plans.... When my Mother asked me what I planned to do now, I said: "Mom, I'm not planning anything anymore!" Lord have mercy on me! Show me the way, teach me the way you want me to go and I'll do it!

I certainly had not planned for nor anticipated taking on this ministry last year, and yet, here I am! Obviously, God had plans which took priority over mine and what I thought I ought to be doing. So now I'm doing Meals on Wheels and Volunteer Chaplaincy at the hospital and I'm working on quilts for a hospice and I'm enjoying myself while I wait to see what God has planned for me. Now maybe this doesn't sound like responsible behavior, but I've already tried responsible and I didn't like the results I got!

Now that brings us to a series of verses in Luke 12:22-34 which are among some of the most well know and oft quoted in the Bible. The title of this section in my Bible is 'Do Not Worry' and I'm going to break it into sections to make it a little easier to handle.

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about
your life, what you will eat;
nor about the body, what you will put on.
Life is more than food, and the body is
more than clothing.
Luke 12:22-24

Now think about it--the Rich Fool built bigger barns to store all his stuff. All it would have taken was a fire or a flood and all he had would be lost. People in other parts of our country are experiencing precisely that right now. If we think about the manna in the Wilderness in symbolic terms, then the rule allowing the Children of Israel to gather just enough for one day at a time makes sense. They were on the move with no storage and no way to preserve more than a day's worth of food--more would have created problems.

God provides! But not until we get ourselves, our lives in harmony with God do we experience that abundance. This is not an easy understanding to come to, but I think Myrtle Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, expressed it well in Myrtle Fillmore's Healing Letters:

When we develop our soul and express its
talents and capabilities in loving service to God
and mankind, all of our temporal needs will be supplied
in bountiful measure.

Life is not about accumulating stuff, it's about understanding our spiritual resources in God and putting that to work in our world. Life is about finding ways to make a difference, and finding ways to give and to express more of God. That gift, flowing through us, energizing and healing us and giving us that extra little spark, keeps us going and growing.

And which of you by worrying can add

one cubit to his stature? If you then are not able
to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest?
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they
neither toil nor spin;
and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.
Luke 12:25-27

Again, we're looking at physical appearances versus the spiritual, the outer life versus the inner life. It is so easy to stand on the corner, praying to be seen rather than going alone into the Silence with the Father. For children in school, everything is about what they're wearing rather than what they are supposed to be learning. Adults are no different; we're just old enough to know better. When we lose ourselves in worrying about how others see us, we lose the connection with our inner being, our true self.

And do not seek what you should eat or what
you should drink, nor have an anxious
mind. But seek the kingdom of God,
and all these things shall be
added to you.
Luke 12:29-31

This is probably easier to believe on Sunday morning here together than during the rest of the week. But if we seek God within first, before we go out and take on the world, we can hold to what we know to be true. The Kingdom of Heaven is a feeling, a Presence, within us and when we acknowledge that Presence we can take ourselves into life and do what we need to do without getting hooked into the craziness. We can access the Power and Presence of God within to find strength, to find joy and meaning in life.

Do not fear, little flock, for it is your
Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Sell what you have and give alms;
provide yourselves money bags which do not
grow old, a treasure in the heavens
that does not fail, where no thief
approaches nor moth destroys.
For where your treasure is, there
your heart will be also.
Luke 12:32-34

Remember what if feels like to fall in love and lose your mind and all sense of limitation and lack? Fall in love with God and feel that same overpowering feeling of joy! Let the love of God be the treasure of your heart and live again!

Excerpt from Sunday Lesson
Rev. Claudia Naylor

Read more!

Chrysalis

We understand that the Lenten Season is more than simple fasting and releasing. At a much deeper level, Lent is about cleansing mind, body and spirit. We would not dream of putting a beautiful Easter outfit on a filthy body. Neither should we even consider the idea of trying to fill mind and body with the essence of His teachings before flushing out the negative constructs of the past. Unity's Spiritual Preparation for Easter 2009 for today is, in part:

You are filled with wisdom, the wisdom of the ages.
Let your mind be filled with faith and understanding
and your heart with peace and compassion.

Turn within to Me, and you will see your way clearly.
Walk in the light of My love. Live in the way I created
you to live--in peace and harmony with others

Open your heart to Me, My Beloved,
and you will be guided to make wise decisions and
good choices that bless others as well as yourself.

Let's take a moment to fill in a bit of background on the relationship between Jesus, the scribes and the Pharisees. While His message to His followers is of love, repentance and forgiveness, He seems terribly critical and unforgiving of the religious leaders of Israel. Understanding why "Woe to you Pharisees!" or "Woe unto you!" seems to be His standard greeting to them will help us place His ministry in a larger context.

The Pharisees set themselves apart not only from the Romans and Gentiles, but from other Jews whom they considered unclean, thereby creating a kind of caste system. The Pharisees and scribes believed that if they observed all of the laws of Moses and the oral traditions that God would protect them. There was even a belief that if every Jew observed all the laws and all the traditions on one day that the Jewish Kingdom would be restored! The scribes, also called rabbis, were those responsible for teaching and interpreting the laws and rendering judgments to the people.

The scribes and Pharisees saw Him sitting down to dinner with tax collectors and sinners or coming to their table without ritual washing before the meal and could not accept even the possibility that this man could be the Messiah, the Son of God. He allowed His disciples to gather food on the Sabbath and He healed on the Sabbath! The Messiah they expected would never break the laws of Moses, but would bring all peoples to the God of Israel and the trappings of Judaism.

What Jesus criticized in these leaders was the rigid mindset and self-righteous 'look at me and see how holy I am' stance which put them apart from and above those whom they ought to teach and lead. And He was also warning each of us to be wary of that same condition within ourselves, for none of us is immune to such thinking. If we pray to be seen by others, if we claim the best seat in the sanctuary to be seen by others, then we have forgotten the true purpose of prayer and worship. He challenged the Pharisees and scribes to come up higher and find a new relationship with God.

Jesus came to fulfill the Law, to cast aside the barriers to understanding and connection to God which the Pharisees and scribes had erected with their laws and traditions. He came to open a way for all people to praise, to love and to worship God. Last week, in the story of the Prodigal Son, we saw the Elder Son rigid in his adherence to the letter of the law, while his brother , who went into the world, awakened to a deeper understanding of and a new relationship with his Father. When we cast aside what we 'know' and seek a deeper understanding of God and the teachings of Jesus, we open ourselves to personal transformation and a life richly blessed by the love of the Father.

Now, let's take a look at The Lamp of the Body as an example of what Jesus wanted them to understand.

No one, when he has lit a lamp, puts it in a secret
place or under a basket, but on a lampstand,
that those who come in may see the light.

The lamp of the body is the eye.
Therefore, when your eye is good, your
whole body also is full of light.
Luke 11:33-34

The first verse above can be likened to the way in which the Pharisees did precisely the opposite in focusing on their own personal holiness rather than teaching and opening up the wisdom and laws of God to the people. Because we want more than just external illumination, we seek to open ourselves to the light of God, to see as God would have us see. And when we do, we often say, "Oh, I see now!" referring not to external vision but to understanding. If we are filled with light, there is no inner darkness, no doubt, because we have come to know God.

A certain Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner, setting up the next lesson when Jesus failed to perform the ritual cleansing required before eating.

Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup
and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed
and wickedness. Foolish ones! Did not He who made
the outside make the inside also?

But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue
and all manner of herbs, and pass by justice and the
love of God.
Luke 11:39-40,42

Jesus accuses them of performing the outer ritual, the letter of the law and tradition, while ignoring the very task to which they have been called. They have failed to seek inner purity and the love of God and see nothing wrong with that! This is what Jesus illuminates for all of us through the use of this example with the Pharisees. We must not perform for the praise of others, but truly seek to know God. to love God and to live God-conscious lives.

The final section today deals with the scribes, the lawyers, whom He also accuses.

Woe to you also, lawyers!
For you load men with burdens hard to bear,
and you yourselves do not touch the burdens
with one of your fingers.

Woe to you lawyers!

For you have taken away the key of knowledge.
You did not enter in yourselves,
and those who were entering in you hindered.
Luke 11:46,52

What worse condemnation could be made against those who were called to be teachers? The burden of so many laws and traditions and the guilt for failing to fulfill the full law denied the people any hope for the love of God, the kingdom of God. And because the scribes and Pharisees never sought to understand the spirit of the law, they denied access to those who wanted to know and to understand.

Jesus came into the world as the light of the world, to fulfill the law and bring all people to the love of God and the knowledge that each one of us is a child of God, heirs and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. Eric Butterworth explained it this way in his book, Discover the Power Within You.

The Christ in you is you
at the point of God... you must make the
decision to act as though you are a spiritual being.

I'm sure that all of us are familiar with the idea of the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. One caterpillar says to another,

"Look up there at that butterfly.
You'd never get me up in one of those things!"

And he's right! As long as we are stuck in the mindset of the caterpillar, we can't see ourselves as anything more than we appear to be. As Butterworth writes:

It is self-evident that the caterpillar and the butterfly
live in entirely different worlds...yet we know that they
are simply different levels of expression of one entity.

Jesus wanted us to grow into the fullness of being, which would allow us a deeper understanding of God and the wisdom to express our true selves. Imagine the joy of awakening to your true self, unfurling the shimmering wings of light and experiencing the Kingdom of God!

Read more!

Coming Home

The Lenten Season is a bit like old fashioned Spring cleaning, though in this case you're not only cleaning out your physical home, but your spiritual home as well. Now, while I'll readily admit I'm not all that fond of cleaning house, it makes a lot of sense in this instance. We want to rid ourselves of all the clutter, inside and out, getting rid of the dust bunnies under the sofa and the cob webs in our heads.

Jesus used parables as one of His teaching tools--a familiar kind of story with multiple levels of meaning. He used the fifteenth chapter of Luke to present three different stories about repentance and redemption in response to another challenge by the Pharisees and scribes.

The Pharisees, who were too uptight and rigid in their self-righteousness and ritual stunted mentality, objected to Jesus ministering to tax collectors and sinners, even breaking bread with them! They were too full of themselves to become empty vessels receptive to the Word of God.

In these three parables, the shepherd lost one sheep out of one hundred, the woman lost one coin out of ten and the Father 'lost' the youngest of two sons. Jesus used these parables to show that God loves and values every single one of us equally. While the sheep mindlessly wandered off as they will do and the woman lost her coin through carelessness, the Prodigal Son left the Father's house by choice not chance.

How many times have we set out on our own, claiming "I can do it myself!", only to find ourselves up against a hard place, singing a different tune? "Ok, God, I messed up again. What are we going to do to fix it?" Sound familiar? Or maybe we try playing the blame game again, you know the one: "I didn't do this to myself, no way! It was ......" Just fill in the blank. Of course, we can't grow through the lesson and the pain until we accept responsibility for the choices we've made--just like the Prodigal Son.

A certain man had two sons. And the
younger of them said to his father,
"Father, give me the portion of goods that
falls to me." So he divided to them his livelihood.
And not many days after, the younger son gathered
all together, journeyed to a far country, and there
wasted his possessions with prodigal living.
Luke 15:11-13

Perhaps the son set out with the intent and expectation of succeeding on his own terms, a real desire to know and to learn more than he might in his own home. Of course, he may well have just wanted a chance to get away from his Father's rules and restrictions and see the world. Clearly, once he reached the far country, he lost sight of his true self and any good he might have accomplished on his own. It's easy enough to be distracted by bright lights and city ways, even when we know better.

But when he had spent all,
there arose a severe famine in that land,
and he began to be in want.
Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of
that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.
And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the
pods that the swine ate, and no one gave
him anything.
Luke 15:14-16

Not only did the son waste all that he had in loose living, but the land where he lived was faced with serious famine of its own. Which meant, of course, that jobs and food were hard to come by during that time, forcing him to do what no Jew of that time would dream of doing--tending to a herd of swine. He had hit bottom and, worst of all, the very swine he fed ate better than he. Sometimes, we don't switch off the auto pilot until we slam into a wall or find ourselves at the bottom of a pit.

But when he came to himself, he said,
How many of my father's hired servants have
bread enough and to spare, and I
perish with hunger!

When he came to himself, when he remembered who he was, his first thought was of his Father and the way home. There are times in our lives when we lose ourselves in other people, in other places, and find ourselves someplace where we never meant to go. When we finally return to our senses, we remember who we are--the sons and daughters of God, made in the image and likeness of God. Eric Butterworth put it this way in Discover the Power Within You:

The "image" is man as God sees him.
The "likeness" is that which must be worked out
in man's own mind and made manifest in his body
and affairs. It is man's destiny to produce a
likeness in the without of the image
within himself.

The son not only came to himself and remembered who he was, but he acknowledged his mistake to himself and to the Father.

I will arise and go to my father,
and I will say to him,
Father, I have sinned against heaven and before
you, and I am no longer worthy to be
called your son. Make me like
one of your hired servants.

Luke 15:18-19

All too often, the temptation is to say "Whoops, help me!" and never truly come face to face with the error thinking which brought us to this state. Until we peel away the layers of denial and accept responsibility for our choices, we will not be ready to grow through it. Repentance and redemption.

The Prodigal Son returned home to a joyful welcome and the healing balm of his Father's love. He was quickly enfolded in his Father's robe and shoes placed upon his feet, for only slaves went barefoot in those days. And his Father placed a ring upon his finger, symbolizing his place in the Father's house.

The Elder Brother, not unlike the Pharisees, saw the Younger Brother as a sinner who should not be welcomed into the Father's House. The Elder risked nothing and gained nothing. The Younger risked everything and gained a new understanding of and a new relationship with his Father.

Read more!