Born Again in Every Moment

Rev. Amy Russell - 2008-03-23

The story of Easter is a story of re-birth, of beginning again. This man called Jesus had the courage to speak about the love of God as a loving, forgiving God. This was a new kind of God for the Jews to hear about. Jesus taught that God expected humans to love each other as they would like to be loved themselves. As a Jew, he taught that humans were more important than religious laws. As a person in society, he befriended the sinners, the outcasts, the people who no one else would befriend. His compassion for others teaches us what tolerance and respect for others is all about.

And then he was crucified. And after three days, his disciples began to see him again in the body, as the story goes, coming back to teach that life is eternal and that God loves us and forgives us everything. This Universalist message – of eternal salvation, eternal loving, for all – is the message of Easter. That we are born again in love over and over. Born to new possibilities in every moment.

The story of an oppressed people, the Jews in Egypt, who escaped from slavery across the Red Sea, is another story of being born again. The book of Exodus describes the triumphant journey of the Jews with Moses and the fiery pillar of fire in the lead parting the Red Sea with his staff so the Jews can cross. The tribe of Jews were led by this fiery pillar that represented God, leading them to freedom.

Both religious stories are key to their religion’s theologies – the theology of salvation for Christians, the theology of God’s mercy for Jews. But both stories when seen as deep cultural and spiritual metaphors promise one thing – new life, new possibilities.

Episcopal Bishop John Spong writes about how the Easter story taken literally does not speak to the kind of God that many people believe in. “To speak of a Father God so enraged by human evil that he requires propitiation for our sins that we cannot pay and thus demands the death of the divine-human son as a guilt offering is a ludicrous idea to our century. The sacrificial concept that focuses on the saving blood of Jesus that somehow washes me clean, so popular in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is by and large repugnant to us today. This understanding of the divine-human relationship violates both our understanding of God and our knowledge of human life.” Spong says that while the Scriptures are not historically accurate and cannot be read as a literal direction from God that they can be seen as a beautiful metaphoric and spiritual inspiration.

Spong believes that the Easter story is about divine love. Christ for him is the point where the divine and humanity come together. “Jesus is the point in the human enterprise where, for me, the divine and the human flow together perfectly, revealing God as the Source of love, the Source of life and the Ground of Being. Jesus is human being where the essence of the divine life breaks forth with a peculiar intensity. Jesus reveals God in loving totally, living fully, and being all that he can be.”

For this Christian, Jesus represents the “call to love, to live, and to be” as he puts it. For Spong, the story of Easter is the story about new possibilities in life. He says “That God calls me into ever new possibilities. I have never met God by retreating from life. I seem to meet God only when I enter deeply into life. That is the God that I confront when I look deeply at Jesus of Nazareth.”

The other story that we honor today, the Exodus story about the Jews fleeing Egypt is the keystone of liberation theology, the theology that promises liberation for oppressed peoples due to God’s mercy. It is another story of new possibilities in the face of difficulties, of beginning our lives again even in the face of oppression.

In honor of the Jews’ saving liberation, Passover is observed. Passover refers to the event described in the Bible where the blood of a sacrificial lamb is smeared on the door to mark the Jewish households before the angel of Death visited the Egyptian households with the punishment of killing all the firstborns.

The purpose of the Seder celebration is to provide an intimate setting for the re-telling of the story of the Exodus and the liberation of the Jews so that everyone who hears the story feels as though he or she lived through it. The Seder scripts tell of the plight of the oppressed Jews who are first told by the Pharaoh that they may go free and then are pursued by the Pharaoh’s army. The parting of the Red Sea is such a dramatic story, that as improbable as it is, the metaphoric symbolism of this story stays with us.

In one of the Haggadah, or Seder scripts it says, “Still we remember, ‘It was we who were slaves, we who were strangers.’ And therefore, we recall these words as well. ‘You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them, you shall love them as yourself.’” The re-telling of this story in every Seder dinner at Passover reminds us of the possibility of oppression and of our own liberation, but it also reminds us that we must safeguard this liberation for others.

Again, the facts behind the story cannot be proven by any historical or archeological knowledge. It is the spiritual underpinnings of the story that have given generations of us from the Judeo-Christian faith an authoritative metaphor for beginning new spiritual journeys. For that is what the forty years of wandering in the desert by the Israelites after being freed represents for us. A wandering of our spirits after having been set free to find our new homes, our new possibilities in life – our re-birth.

The theme of re-birth at this time of the year is an ancient one beginning with the oldest of all faiths – the early pagan religions. The spring equinox that we just passed a few days ago represented to early peoples who lived in Northern climates a time of hope that they had survived the difficult winter and could now expect a re-birth of the greening Earth that brought them nourishment. For these people, the greening of the Earth was a true miracle and a sign that the gods loved them for they would not have survived without the coming of spring and new plants growing. There are many pagan myths of god-like men who were born of virgins, had power over the success or failure of the crops, and who died and were resurrected each year as a sign of the returning fertility of the earth. In most of these pagan stories, there is a central theme of resurrection, of re-birth of a king who represents fertility and growth of the tribe’s crops.

The new beginnings, the stirrings of starting again that we may feel when the moist warm air rises from the newly awakening earth is a universal motif for resurrection or beginning new life with new possibilities.

This birth of new possibilities is the central understanding in a modern theology called process theology. It had its beginnings in the new age of reason in the 17th century when people began demanding observational proof for the reality of something. For the first time, philosophy and theology could no longer give adequate accounts for reality. Theology which had been describing why things are the way they are now had science to explain this. People had to choose whether science gave an adequate explanation for reality, therefore they didn’t need theology, or whether theology could be a companion to science. But suddenly theology had a competitive partner in discussion about reality.

In late modern thought, science is the controlling cultural paradigm that humanity uses to explain reality. Science has superseded theology in controlling the way people view their universe.

Because of this, ways of viewing reality have changed. Discussions about theology have changed. Out of the competition between theology and science come several discussions about the creation of the universe. Theology has always pointed to God as the Creator of the Universe. One day nothingness, six days later, boom, the creation of Earth as we know it. The theories of evolution have destroyed this notion that the life forms on this planet were created at one time, but instead have postulated through scientific evidence that the life forms evolved slowly over millions of years and will continue to evolve. In other words, everything in the world is in constant flux and change, growing and developing.

Process thought began to be developed in concert with the “rational” school of thought, which saw logical thinking and empirical observation as the way to view the world in which science had become the new theology. Process theology was developed in response to the new cultural paradigm, which said that ideas, which can’t be proven by logical thought and empirical observation, are no longer relevant in this world.

Relevance of theology became important because people had begun to leave standard doctrinal religions that had ideas fashioned after the Platonic ideas of dualism, and the Christian ideas of human sinfulness and atonement. Because these ideas had no way of proof through observation, they were no longer relevant. Paradigms that could be explained by methods of empirical observation were needed to form relevant theologies.

Change has become the only thing in life that we can actually experience in reality. We know that change is what the world is about. Everything is in a state of flux. We are born, we change, and then we die. These things we can count on. Through logical reasoning and observation of events every human being can observe change, growth, and decay. Everything in life is becoming. If God is truly a part of reality, then God must be a part of this process. In this process, there are no fixed outcomes, only potentialities. All the possibilities of the next moment beckon us onward. If God is not “being” but part of this process, what part of the process is God? Is God the actual creative spark that lures us onward toward growth?

A Unitarian who had a significant part to play in the development of what is called process philosophy or theology today was Charles Hartshorne. He saw these constantly changing systems in the universe as “events” which could be seen either in the large macrocosm sense or in the smallest goings on in the universe.

Hartshorne began with the hypothesis that nature is composed of creative, experiential “events”. All events are creative in that they are influenced by previous events, but have new possibilities of creation. Hartshorne sees the organic and inorganic world made up of these “events”.

In this model of reality, we as “events” are also a part of the system. We are constantly changing, growing, dying, perhaps being born again. We are a part of “God” or of the eternal changing universe. We make decisions and take actions that affect the change of the system. We are not only in flux but are a part of the flux. We are co-creating the universe, as process theologians would see it.

Where the possibility of a kind of God experience is evident in this view is as the possibilities inherent within each event. This does not restrict the freedom of the event. In fact, God or the Creator of the Universe creates the freedom possible within the event by creating the potentialities possible for each “actual entity” to experience. God, as the creator, is the creative possibility innovator of all of creation. God in this theology is the yeast of the universe, but not the chef. Because it is the individual that makes the decision about how the event is completed. Freedom exists in that decision process. This makes all of creation co-creators with the Creator. This does not mean that the Creator is a Being thinking up these possibilities. It means that, as nature would have it, that there is a creative potential in all things that make life what it is.

Process thought speaks of divinity containing both absoluteness as well as relativity. This is very different from Christian thought, which has traditionally seen God as ultimate and creation as changing and relative.

Process thought relates God to the natural world as it is observed and sees this God as responsive, changing, and ever-present in reality, in fact, God is reality. A God who responds to creation with love and empathy is a God who is dependent in some ways on creation. And in fact is creation with all its possibilities for change. Responsiveness makes this God vulnerable unlike the omnipotent, omniscient God who has only one face of absolute power. This makes a God who is not fixed and unchanging but vulnerable, learning, growing. This is the side of God that looks like “process”.

Christian process theologians like to describe this kind of God as a God who is “with us” in our suffering and who suffers also. This is so unlike the powerful God that we hear about in the Hebrew Testament who struck down the Egyptians because they were oppressing the Jews. This kind of God would be with the Jews as they fled Egypt and suffered with them in the desert, but would also be suffering with the Egyptians who were thrown into the sea.

God suffers with us, even because of us, process theology says. God increases the potential for humanity’s fulfillment in providing more complex and intense possibilities which have more potential for happiness as well as for suffering. In fact, we could say God is us as the individual making choices for fulfillment, which sometimes result in suffering. God could be seen as the choice and as the resultant effects on the universe. When individuals suffer, God suffers too. Burton Cooper writes:

“It is not the sign of a lesser love but of a greater love that God, in creating a world whose end is a kingdom of love and goodness, can only be that Creator through the anguish of sharing in the responsibility for the world’s evil and suffering.”

(Cooper, Burton, Why God?, p. 63)

This week as I considered these ideas, life happens as it does. Last weekend, my daughter called up to say that she was in Atlanta and lived through two tornados in one day. She heard the train sound and everything. Oh, God, I’m just glad I didn’t know about it. Then when I woke up on Wednesday I could hear the “plink, plink, plink” of water leaking down from my ceiling after our three days of rain. I felt like I needed an ark.

So, my life has been chaos this week. During my typical chaotic life, I tried to figure out what significance all this process theology stuff has to my chaotic life. I mean if theology doesn’t relate to life, then what good is it, anyway?

Then I started thinking about the possibilities that the universe has offered me. And I realized that the universe has offered me incredible potential for co-creating my life. Even when daughters who are far away are in danger, and even when you face the ever-changing problems of keeping a roof over your head that doesn’t leak on you, you still have so many potential ways to start again in my life. And for this week, anyway, all my family members are safe and I will soon figure out the roof problem.

But sometimes we don’t know that everything bothering us can be fixed. Sometimes things happen that can’t be fixed and people you love don’t get well. Then how do you start again, how do you become the creator of your own universe?

Well, my experience tells me that even when you feel like winter will never end, or that you will never be able to recover financially from a difficult situation, or even when someone you love dies – even then, the universe offers up possibilities. The possibilities offered to us in every moment are the result of the creative potential of the creator of the universe and our own limitless creativity as well. Resurrection from death, or freedom from slavery are huge new possibilities that are metaphors in our religious heritage. If we can find the possibility that breathes new hope into our life, then we are born again. That might mean looking at the possibility of a new job when we are bored with our present one. It can mean sitting down with our partner during a time of conflict and misunderstanding and asking if we can begin again. It can mean dealing with our grief over a loss every day one day at a time until one day we begin to see that our life will go on in new ways. There are also possibilities for peace in the Middle East that seem so far away today with the players making everything but peaceful choices. It often seems as though there isn’t any hope in that world. But even there, creative possibilities exist if the part of God who is present in all of tragedy could be discerned by peacemakers as another hope. All of these possibilities offer us resurrection in the face of death, offer us a new path when we are escaping from slavery.

If the possibilities that the universe or some would say God creates for each of us represent a new life in the next moment, then we are being resurrected in each moment. Born again in each moment.

Prayer for Easter:

O God of Creative Possibilities,

In our Good Fridays we sit in our despair in our sadness and losses. We feel no hope and see no end to our lot.

Then, perhaps, the spark of energy of creative possibility is born in our minds. We may only feel a glimpse of the possibility of the light. Maybe then another spark is born, and another, and another.

Spirit of Life, help us to open ourselves to these possible Easter moments that we are offered. To be transformed by the creative potential inherent is us, and within the world as participants in birthing our own lives.

Amen.