Comments for Jim Other sermons.                 

There is a story from the Hindu scriptures about the soul and God. Two birds are sitting together in a tree. One bird is eating the fruit from the tree. The other bird simply sits and gazes. The first bird is the individual soul, and the other bird is the divine. As long as the first bird is intent on eating the fruit, it is entangled with the world - worried about its own survival, anxious about the future - suffering. But eventually this bird turns its gaze away from the world to the other bird. And as it looks on this other bird, it is lifted out of its pain and preoccupation and finds happiness.

True religion, it seems to me, always comes down to two things: the realization that we cannot find happiness by attaching ourselves to this world, and that happiness is found by discovering God within us and all around us.

But here we face a challenging question. How badly do we want to find God? A famous sage once said that you won’t find God until your yearning for God is like that of a person who has fallen deep into the ocean and is fighting to get back to the surface in order to breathe. Most of us don’t live with that kind of intensity of longing. We may feel restless and unfulfilled. We may get exasperated with ourselves when we feel burdened with everyday worries and anxieties. We determine to try harder, to fix this or that, to work around this problem or that annoyance. But as long as we are in this "figuring out" mode, we aren’t letting go of anything. In fact we are holding on even tighter.

I believe that for most of us our situations have to get worse before we feel that real need for God. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that is the way it usually works. Sometimes it takes an illness, a major reversal in life, a loss, something that knocks us out of the illusion that we are in charge. But the point is that we must want God so badly that we are willing to let go. This is what Jesus taught and it is what Jesus experienced. In John’s Gospel Jesus says:

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life in this world will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me, must follow me..

Jesus’ teaching clearly is that to find God we must be willing to surrender. This can mean surrender of our sense of being in charge; it can mean the surrender of our agenda in order to follow God’s agenda; and it may even mean risking our very physical existence. Surrender of self, wealth, life. From beginning to end, this is the Gospel. "Thy will, not mine, be done." "Give away all you possess, and follow me." "Become a servant."

And Jesus didn’t just talk about it as a teaching; he lived it himself. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, we read:

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered;..

The words "obedience" and "surrender" carry a lot of baggage for us, most of it unpleasant. We may associate surrender with the loss of our healthy sense of self-reliance. We think of people coerced into obeying tyrants, children obedient to autocratic parents, or devotees uncritically turning their lives over to charismatic leaders. A sexist culture hypocritically teaches women the virtue of submission while praising male assertiveness. But this is not what Jesus is talking about. It is surrender in the sense of realizing that something about me, something in me, has to get out of the way, if I am to really find God. Surrendering that in order to follow God.

The Bhagavad Gita is among the most beloved of the Hindu scriptures. The book is really a long discourse about life and duty and God. It takes the form of the Lord Krishna teaching his friend Arjuna. In the course of the book it is revealed that Krishna is really an incarnation of God. When all his teaching is completed, Krishna says, "Reflect over what I had said, then do you wish."

This is the invitation to a different kind of surrender, a different kind of obedience. First it is letting go of our self-absorbed selves, but then it is a surrender into connection and compassion. Think of the Iraqi man named Mohammed who repeatedly risked his life to set up the rescue of prisoner of war Jennifer Lynch. Why did he do this? He told of how as he saw her being beaten in her hospital bed, something snapped in him. He said simply, "It cut my heart. A person is a human being, regardless of nationality."

The Prophet Jeremiah teaches that God’s new covenant with us is a new heart set within us. God says:

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the Lord," for they shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sins no more.

This is an absolutely revolutionary statement. In the old days, you found God by being instructed in the law, the rules, the commandments. They had to be imparted to you. But now what I am doing, says God, is writing all this on an entirely new heart, and I am replacing your old stoney heart with this new heart. Really, says God, it is my heart. Now, if you trust your heart, you are trusting God.

Is it only within that we find God? Not at all. Through prayer and contemplation, or through extraordinary times of pain and suffering, we look inward to find God. But as Christians we are taught that even as we look inward, our gaze must extend everywhere. Christ lives not only in my heart and in your heart, but in all creation. To me that is the meaning of Resurrection. The whole creation has become sacred. The whole creation has become the Body of Christ – and that Body includes you and me; and it includes a dying mother in a hospital bed, and her grieving son and daughter at her side; it includes the young people in the military we pray for each Sunday and their courageous spouses at home; it includes ill-equipped Iraqi soldiers now being slaughtered by the thousands; it includes suffering children in Iraq and suffering children here who miss their dads and moms; and that Sacred Body of Christ includes George Bush and Saddam Hussein. All contained within the Cosmic Christ.

The ashram where Lois and I stayed in India was founded back in the thirties by a remarkable sage named Swami Sivananda. He was in his day a real iconoclast who believed in the truth of all religions and from the beginning insisted on total inclusiveness. All who were seeking God were welcome, including women and people from the lowest castes. It is said that a spiritual seeker, one trying to find God, once asked Swami Sivananda this simple question: "Where do you look to see God?" He thought a moment and then said, "Where do I look and not see God?" AMEN.
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