It's me, mike hillebrecht

Talk to anybody in the so-called “Grace movement” who has been involved with it for any extended period of time and the elephant in the room sudden rears its head and blasts out a resounding alarm which by-and-large no really cares about. Welcome to apathy. What’s the alarm: people are lazy. Yup, laziness and apathy go hand in glove. Or do they?

Professionals who deal with mental health issues call apathy the emotionless emotion. They claim that most people react to a variety of stimuli throughout their daily lives. When there is an over-abundance of stimulation some people cope simply by shutting down. On another front, apathy is the product of a depressed state of mind. One of the common effects from apathy is the loss of motivation to perform simple tasks, make or plan for long-term goals. This makes people often appear passive in all their actions which most active people assume to be indifference or detachment.

Religion is a great carrot-and-stick motivator. Programs, seminars, guest speakers, bible studies, choir practice, homeless shelters, food assistance to the elderly, unwed mothers, prison ministry…on and on it goes. To be plugged in to a church means get that person to fill a slot in the machinery of “aiding” the community, not make them disciples of Jesus first.

Of course, all of these programs are your daily reminder that you’re, somehow, not quite at the level you need to be. Being involved is like penance to some people. “I spread the gospel by helping drug addicts because I was one myself. It makes me feel more whole helping these folks.” The more empty you feel, the more you’re urged to accept greater responsibility by being involved in our “new program.” Not that anyone would actually put in that manner to you, they’re more “caring” than that, but the result is the same all the while.

Then suddenly grace hits. (You ever notice how it always “hits” rather than “strolls” in?) Your penance is exposed for what it is: works. The entire host of programs are work-oriented! You realize that you have a life with grace! You suddenly face the shock that whether you do or don’t do something, it doesn’t affect your eternal soul one bit. To top it off, the revelation that this applies to every single person in the entire world, yes, even the homeless, pregnant teenage felon jonesing for another hit, becomes such a shock to your religious system that you…

“Jesus, did it all so I don’t have too.” The apathy of grace exemplified.

Here is the fault with the line in this logic. “…have to…” implies that you still what to or feel an inkling of compulsion to do something under the prior knowledge of how “work of the ministry” was accomplished. You don’t have to do anything, but breath…and pay taxes, unless you’re in a particular bracket, but I digress.

You don’t have to do anything if guilt, shame, or an overly inflated sense of self-worth was your motivation. Grace wipes all of that away, levels the playing field, makes all wrongs…well you know where this is leading.

I think what really needs to be addressed now that grace has taken a big bite out of the religious carrot and snapped the stick it dangled from is whether our programs, our little kingdoms of high esteem, are designed to promote everyone into the family of God according to the measure of grace we’ve all been given.

If die-hard believers suddenly don’t act excited about the message given on Sunday, or seem to disappear whenever a new idea is brought up, or don’t volunteer like they used to, maybe it’s time to show what grace-filled motivation looks like and operates from. Maybe we need to stop doing things (programs, sermons, prayers, worship, ect.) the way we’ve always done it out of religion and evaluate how to get things, and even people, functioning from the realm of grace.

Apathy and depression are very valid responses to the grace message if your entire life has been spent trying to measure up to the things of God by the works that you do which represent the “Christian traditions.” Laziness, or better yet, inactivity is a product of a grace-filled revelation to a person’s eternal identity. It takes time to find an eternal purpose worth getting out of bed in the morning for. Many don’t know where to begin looking for one since their entire focus had been propped up on a works pedestal.

Now I understand that some of you might think that I might be promoting this apathy/laziness approach to grace. You might cite my posting from a few days ago entitled, It Doesn’t Matter, as an example of this. Granted the title might lead someone to this conclusion, but reading the post will be a different story. Grace seems to always get a bum-wrap from some religious, law-abiding, fundamental wing-nut job.

I’m a grace guy through and through. Call it cheap, call it sleazy, call it greasy, call it whatever you like, it comes from a kingdom we know not of, hope to go to and, expect will make a change in the world if the “world” would just lie down and listen us. I’ve experienced this first hand and honestly, time is the only cure for it. A time to stop doing, a time to be aware, a time to listen carefully, a time to rest. The urgency of religion is not the rest of His grace we have all entered into.

A number of years ago I read a book entitled God is a Verb. Written from the perspective of Jewish mysticism, it presented several insights that have no immediate bearing with this writing except for the title, God is action. A verb is something being done, activity not accomplishment.

“God is love” doesn’t mean that He represents what love is, like a glass represents a container of water. Love is a verb, an action of God’s character and nature. God’s activities, his involvement in and around our lives is best understood as the performance of love.

“God is righteous” does not signify a moral superiority, it is an event of accomplishment declaring acceptance with everything in His kingdom. All of us became “righteous” in the actions undertaken by God in Jesus, the Christ event in humanity. Anything we attempted, and continue to attempt, to mimic the righteousness we see in God, is a filthy imitation, a fabrication sorely lacking in quality and substance.

“God is just” isn’t a position of judgement but a movement towards reconciliation, from estrangement to sonship. Justice is not punishment but reparation towards responsibility abandoned.

We are encouraged in the book of Ephesians to imitate God, to act like him just as little children pretend to be like their parents. Someone once said that God’s attitudes are His actions. Do our attitudes resemble the actions of the one we imitate? Are we so settled in our accomplishments that we respond from the shallow tide pools of self-reflection or have we embraced the vast sea of humanity in its variegated composition and determined to advance into the fullness of who we have always been?

Yes, God’s ways are higher than ours simply because humanity has lived far too below our original design. We have accepted a state of existence which laughs at any notion we can do the greater works. However, doing, a verb, comes from being, not pretending.

An act of God has been pronounced, is poised over and upon your entire life. It’s time to put on the new you and act like it. Life is about what you’re doing, not what you’ve done.

This will not be an easy read for many of you. However, this admission doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue – you whole-heartily should – just beware that the purpose requires a lot from you. I recall a preacher once who told a congregation after a very provocative and stimulating message that there now rested a responsibility upon the hearer of the message to see to it that what had been said was lived out. Failure to do so was not permitted having heard what had been said. Meaning: There are no excuses allowed when you’ve been clearly informed.

There is a darkness which haunts most of us. Philosopher Ken Wilber calls this in several of his writings our shadow life. We all know that our shadow follows us telegraphing our every move; however, our shadow life is like the shadow of Peter Pan, pulling us in directions we do not wish to go at times when we least expect it. Regrettably, many spend more time in their lives trying to get their shadow behind them rather than looking into the light which always corrects the matter.

What is this darkness and its strange gravitational effect on our present lives? I would like to say that it is one thing, but I can’t with all sincerity. It is a conglomeration of many minute events in our lifetime which have imprinted themselves into our very identity. Singularly, they may not appear important to you today, but when they initially transpired, they left an indelible mark on your psyche. It might have been a lack of love, a betrayal, a defaming of significance, or myriad other impositions that made you feel…invalid.

The wound of these primary events keeps being picked at by subsequent incursions into our identity throughout our daily relations over the course of years, even decades, until today, where these wounds look like vitriol festering pools of putrefied puss. We wince when anything gets remotely close to it and lash out to protect ourselves from the great pain we believe we’ll experience if it were to be touched, poked or prodded.

Many of us have turned inward, built up a series of walls, more like a fortress, designed to enshrine the wound from all foreign incursions. Yet, not understanding the dynamic of how a wound operates, our fortress simply acts as a funnel allowing the spiral dynamic of all our wounds to coalesce into a spinning nova of painful recollections unable to scale the fortified walls we have erected.

Scientific studies have been conducted on this matter and found that we don’t even recall the actual trauma anymore but the most recent memory of the traumatic event. Since many of us replay these events in our mind multiple time during a single day, the only thing we are doing is surfing along the crest of the wave of our last memory allowing the swell from a previous recollection to form our present pain-inducing journey. Rarely are we willing to descend down the face of our wave of trauma into the barrel of over-arching memories crashing upon the shoals of adolescent ignorance.

Yes, ignorance. If you don’t know, then, well…you don’t know. How do you cope if you don’t know how, or that you can? Coping is a skill that develops in the doing of life. Trauma, imprintable memory-moments are rife with non-coping issues not for the lack of trying, but because of the sheer lack of a prior reference in the magnitude of the moment. Coping comes after the event, not during. Often the shock of the trauma will stunt the ability to beginning the process of coping, beginning the spiral of self-examination leading to culpability at one end of the spectrum with being immaculate on the other.

Most coping mechanism we employ today will often present us with the opportunity to forgive the transgressor. There is presumption in this motif that it should be conducted on a “forgive and forget” basis. How is that working for you? Not!

If we could forget, we wouldn’t remember it for the next escalation of pain-inducing, scab-picking, festering. Justified in our righteous indignation we hold a ransom over our pain-filled memories. Someone is going to pay for what we’ve had to endure. We don’t know who, but someone…someone…

Forgiving is not about forgetting. Never has been. It’s about giving. It’s about a gift. It is about a great gift given to someone who doesn’t know they deserve it or think that they somehow have earned it. Read that again, slowly. You have to give a gift which isn’t earned and is undeserving. Forgiving is not about you, it’s about the recipient, entirely. Many, if not most of us, find this too daunting a feat to perform. It negates our senses of right or wrong; it flaunts our ability to declare justice served; it besmirches our “us versus them” nobility to the point of utter embarrassment and defamation.

Paul calls us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Many a preacher has offered this concept to his flock expecting a “forgive and forget” mentality as the means to the end. Reconciliation only happens after the battle has been waged. It never happens prior. The conflict, the struggle, the unrepentant taking without authorization is the premise, the foundational underpinning of being reconciled. Great wars with tragic battles are never forgotten by either party in the quest for reconciliation. Rarely, however, will true reconciliation be made with forgiveness, with a return greater than prior conditions warrant.

A battle-wearied man, bruised, beaten, lacerated and punctured by an enemy’s assaults draws ever closer to the brink of death. Memories, bitter, mind-numbing memories from the battle just enacted flood the senses with each labored breath. The jovial, ruckus pantomime of victory waves brilliantly in afternoon winds of the naked embarrassment to an apparent brutal submission and conquest. Identity usurped, dominion apprehended, purpose aborted. Death, the final rest, the final act of darkness swallowing up light awaits. Yet, “…forgive them, they know not what they do…” reverberates in the all-embracing act of reconciliation. The price is paid, the sacrifice made, justice served, love…

“As he is so are we in this world…” Battered, beaten, bruised, punctured. Never forgotten, always forgiven. We don’t deserve it, we didn’t earn it. We gained more than we thought we lost just so we could be who we always have been. No, we don’t forget it all. We forgive it all to reconcile, to brand as right what He has already declared as being right. The choice has already been made; can a shadow of doubt exist in the light of this truth?

“I tooted,” he giggled. Laughter broke out between the two of them as they poked their sticks into the campfire.

“What!” I shot back at him. “Who in the world toots around a campfire?” I guess it was inevitable. Social graces had invaded the sacred realm of manliness. While camping, no less.

“Okay, let’s get one thing straight, boys, men don’t toot. We fart. Got it?”

“But mom says we can’t say that,” the older son responded meekly.

“Mom…is not here. We are camping like men, right? Men fart. We’ve always farted. Women hate that about us, so they try to make it more civilized, more respectable in the company of others, particularly other women. But boys, get it out of your head that you toot. As long as you’re with me, a fart it is, a fart it will forever be.”

A sense of harmony spread across their cute little faces as the entered into the sacred realm of manhood. Somehow, they recognized there was a difference about them, something to set them apart, not higher or lower, just apart, but united.

“Daddy, does Jesus fart?” the littlest sincerely asked poking at an ember.

Trying not the choke on the coffee entering my mouth, my wide-eyed expression confounded my son. “Uh…yes, he does,” I stated with all the reverence I could muster as I wiped the few drops of coffee running down my beard.

“No sir!” shot back the oldest stirring the embers before him. “He’s dead. Mom says that Jesus doesn’t fart.” “He’s not dead,” the youngest quickly responded. “Is too.” “Is not,” the youngest challenged his brother by waving his stick at him, burning tip inches from his face.

“Hold on there for a moment, partner,” I broke in before they escalated the theological debate into a duel. “Put that stick down, sit still and listen. First, Jesus did die…”

“See, I told you,” the oldest proudly announced.

“…however,” I continued holding my hand up to silence any further interruptions, “Jesus, also rose back to life after three days and all of his disciples saw him and claimed him to be alive.” A broad smile beamed from the youngest one’s face directly at the oldest. “So, you are both correct, Jesus died but now he is alive. Now, why would mom say that Jesus doesn’t fart?” The beauty of teaching children is that they don’t know what a rhetorical question is and at that moment I could see their imaginations whirling at break-neck speed to offer an answer.

“I’m sure that you both will agree that Jesus was a man, just like us, right?” They nodded their heads in agreement. “There isn’t anything different between you and him. The skin that you have is just like his; the feet you have, he had also; the mouth you feed your belly through is just like the one that Jesus had. So, there is no difference. If you eat something that doesn’t agree with you, what happens?”

“You puke,” the youngest one shot out, being the recipient of his brother’s vomit from the morning excursion to the pond where crawdads flourished from the entrails of our daily fishing adventures.

“That’s right, you puke. And I’m certain that Jesus did that too, just like us. So, since Jesus was a man just like us, if he ate just like us, if he pukes just like us, then he has to fart…” giggles explode from them both, “…just like us. Agreed?”

Both shake their heads in chuckling agreement, each stirring up the embers of the fire nearest them. Silence descended upon us, broken by the irregular cracking and popping of the fire. “Phhhhttt!”

We all smiled, acknowledging our inner nature. “Daddy, does Jesus poop in the woods?”

Many years ago, I attended a seminar given by the late Stephen Covey, author of the best-selling book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. An entire day was dedicated to learning about these seven habits he had researched. Today, there is only one thing that I recall from that event. It shook me when I heard it and the vibrations have not stopped since. Allow me to give my rendition of this one pearl.

Everyone, every day spends their waking hours climbing a ladder. It can be related to work, school, social gatherings, even PTA meetings. We seem obsessed with advancement, higher levels of responsibility, greater heights of influence. We work hard, sometimes fighting and clawing our way around impediments or people determined to halt our progression. The goal, the prize, always beyond our grasp, keeps us moving upward and onward, until one day, joyfully we reach the mark, the pinnacle of our vaulted success. As we survey the horizon of our garnished accomplishment we might look back from whence we’ve come recalling the journey we have taken to get us to this point only to realize that the ladder we’ve been climbing is perched beside the wrong wall.

Thomas Merton puts it another way, we each live a dual life – our false self and our true self. Our false self is, regrettably, more apparent to all since it is the disguise we feed to keep up our created identity. The false self is the image we maintain while traversing the ladder on the wrong wall. Keeping up appearances is the rational expression to our false self.

However, there comes a point of exhaustion. When appearances be damned, you can’t continue to live the lie. Has this happened to you, yet? Some might call it a mid-life crisis or possibly a crisis of faith. Some don’t know what to call it even as their world begins to unravel thinking how they’ve expended all this energy, an entire life, for what?

Fr. Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward calls this moment the end of the first half of your life. You’ve built things for others to enjoy and be comfortable within, yet you’re not satisfied. You’re drained. Your life has been poured out, as the apostle Paul would say, in the service of others and there isn’t any fruit left for you to partake of or a drop to slacken the stifling thirst to live just one more day.

At this junction you face a choice. Continue to live the lie as a zombie; or decide to find your true self and live a life of real worth, of real passion, of real purpose. The ladder for your true self isn’t your work, it’s your rest; it’s understanding how who you’ve always been never needs to hide behind veiled agendas of hidden motives. The true self thrives in the pursuit of purpose-filled passion.

Have you succumbed to the boredom found in reaching for another wrung upon a ladder laden with the rumpled garments of false appearances? Do you find it difficult to activate any part of your being to accomplish the simplest of tasks which assault you daily? Do you not know what you believe to be true anymore? A ladder awaits. It reaches to places you’ve yearned to experience but felt reluctant to consider. How true, how real, do you want to be? How much are you willing to die in order to live resurrected?

Grace is inclusiveness. No one gets left out at any time, for any cause, for any reason. But you can’t handle the truth of this, can you? It’s okay to admit that this is one of the most repugnant things you know about grace. Some just shouldn’t receive it, right?

It doesn’t matter. Honestly, this phrase has caused more angst to people than any other in the grace realm. Why? Obviously, it doesn’t matter. “But it does matter,” is the response of a person who can’t accept a gift, no matter how priceless, simply because their value system is askew.

Consider that a long time ago, in a realm far, far away, you and I occupied a place of complete and absolute peace and harmony, filled with an overwhelming, incomprehensible presence of love. We were accepted fully just as we were, but more importantly, accepted for “when” and “how” we would become.

The “when” aspect was our birth into the world at some point in time. Notice how our acceptance pre-dates time, meaning that when we arrived on this orb called earth, we arrived perfected in love. What occurred to us from that moment forward is the “how” aspect.

If we don’t know we’re loved and accepted, the strangest thing happens: We create a false reality to mask love and acceptance. This false reality becomes our earthly persona, a coat of armor which we wear to protect ourselves from the self-induced perception that we aren’t loved and accepted. Regrettably, this armor also becomes our prison since we find it so hard to believe an eternal truth when posited in an earthly existence.

As long as we allow the armor of our thoughts to dictate our actions we strengthen the idea that we are not loved, or that others aren’t loved as much as we are by our false identity. Judgement, personal and directed at others, is our battle weapon to secure the thoughts which continually tell us we’ve been abandoned.

How we look; how old; how smart; how rich; how poor; how tall; how short; how thin; how fat; how much we own; how much we don’t like people; how much we like certain people more than others; plus, myriad other nuances swirl around us living this life within the armor of self-deception. Yet, it doesn’t matter.

Let me provide an example. The other day, I happened to see two individuals attack one another about racism. Each held the extreme position for and against it in a particular situation. The more I watched, the greater my agitation for the dialogue increased. I don’t hold any of their positions. My agitation rose because both of these people were of the same ethnicity and each was determined to enforce their belief upon the other, and all of those watching, without stopping to consider that a false identity of being unaccepted and loved is the genesis of this entire issue. Whatever their particular point was in this matter, ultimately, they both were correct: each lived from the deception of being unaccepted and unloved. They each had developed a deep reliance in living from the opinion of how others saw them rather than the truth of who they were.

Now I know that some, if not most, of you will take exception to this example and might feel that the best thing for me is to roast my hide for exposing this condition. However, first recognize that I wouldn’t be writing this way if I didn’t believe it so much that I’m able to live it. Second, I’m not taking a position either way, simple because it doesn’t matter. Each of us should reach a point in our life where we’re free to let the armor of our false identity fall to the ground and expose the truth of love and acceptance which resides within and is us. True, many will not like what they see, their helmet of saving face obscures their vision to reality. Grace.

If you’re issues in life don’t matter because you are loved and accepted by God, why should they matter to me to a greater degree? Don’t feel that I don’t care about you simply because I don’t jump on your self-deceptive parade of angst. I demonstrate my care by not adding to your circus. That might not appear to be what you think you need, however, until you understand of how greatly you are loved and accepted, your actions, which are trying to convince me otherwise, well…it doesn’t matter.

There is a day, no, a moment in a day, when out of the blue, it hits you right in the gut: you’re saved by grace. You’ve heard it more times than you can count, even claimed it ‘til you’re blue in the face; yet now, it means something tangible, something of value, something worth telling others about – but not like the little boy who cried “wolf” which, now, all of your previous attempts seem like. Sudden the revealed truth casts a bright, broad light on beliefs you held and championed which now don’t seem to fit within the realm real grace occupies.

For a while you get by playing the role you always had around fellow believers and friends. However, there is a gnawing inside of you, a clawing like nails on a chalkboard which wells up whenever your past belief system is expressed by someone else in your faith community and you see the dissonance. You begin to hold back in conversations, allowing others to express their beliefs of themselves, their lifestyle and their version of god simply because it now seems…appropriate.

You find yourself spending moments thinking about things which include rather than exclude. Your viewing habits shift as you find it difficult to entertain all the hatred and contempt which flows every minute of every hour on and in all forms of media. Even who and what you listen to is affected by this change. Allegiances you staunchly supported melt away because you understand how they arose to keep the “other” out.

Suddenly, people matter. Sure, they might have meant something to you before, but only in the context of how they added to how you viewed yourself and your success. Now, though, they matter simply because they have nothing to add to or take away from you. Their lives matter independently of race creed, color, religion, sexual orientation or gender preference. They’re people in a larger scheme, larger then you or they realize, yet all a part of a whole, a being of one. You recognize faintly at the beginning how no one comprehends this sense of being one, but you’re compelled to experience it with them even from a distance.

Now that people have taken a place in your life, systems, processes, regulations and the institutions which utilize them become abhorrent, simply because they artificially control the people who now have value. Law-abiding unexpectedly means freedom suppression. Pomp and ceremony to the status quo become vignettes to a ruling class structure which no longer appeals to your sacred duty to uphold but rather tires your sensibilities and causes you to wince like a sour note played during a child recital.

Questions now rule since the day grace uncovered you and you’re comfortable with that. Where answers drove you onward and upward, the awareness that all you need, all you seek, all you desire already encompasses you has soothed the angst of unknowing. Wisdom and truth no longer tickle your intellectual palate as much they massage the sense of peace which dwells richly inside of you.

Grace is not a life style but a life lived regardless of your style. It is a process, not a movement. It grows and develops within you naturally without any artificial contrivances designed to excite the emotions or stimulate a sense of duty and honor. Grace levels the playing field of lives, all lives, pre-believers, believers and post-believers alike.

Sense and sensibilities from your pre-grace life heroically got you to this point so don’t get so fired up to discard them as being antiquated. Look at them as the life support system you needed to survive into grace. Others still are hooked up to these systems so don’t be so eager to pull their plug unless you’re ready and prepared to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a very, very long period of time.

There are many below and fewer above you; however, you occupy a unique space in this time. Grace at a level never experienced before about the globe is poised to overtake humanity and it won’t happen because a human-inspired doctrine of it is universally accepted. This is a divine appointment recorded on an eternal calendar.
You are being crafted into the ambassador grace will be displayed through. It is a position you have always been destined to live so allow it grow on you. Grace tends to do that, like yeast in dough; like the kingdom you’re from.

On the heels on my last post on duality, I feel compelled to jam this level or stage thing down the throats of a few tight-lipped, high-collared individuals who thumb their ever up-turned noses at the notion they might be pigeon holed into a category beneath their well-manicured image. But then why should I deal with this matter without the evidence already staring them in the face?

Heb 6:1-3 Wherefore let us cease to speak of the first principles of Christ, and press on unto perfection; not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, (2) of the teaching of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment. (3) And this will we do, if God permit.

Forgive me for a moment while I collect the facts found in this passage. This is written first and foremost to the Hebrew people, a group who was dealing with their entrenched beliefs and about how what God had done through Christ in their lifetime affected those beliefs. It declares the apparent need to stop talking about the first principles of Christ. Now obviously this leads me to ask if there are first principles, would that not also imply a second, third, fourth, to the nth principle too? It would appear so from all indications found in verse 3.

It also seems to appear that the first principles of Christ involve instruction on the subjects of repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrections and eternal judgement. I’ve been in church services for quite a few years now and even seen my fair share of sermons on the tv; but not once have I heard anything OTHER THAN this. Meaning: No one appears to know what the second, third, fourth or nth principles are. IF you don’t know, well, then you don’t know how to teach them.

I find it interesting that this writer can list six steps in what could be described as a level or stage of coming into the knowledge of Christ. However, due to the time in which he was writing, there is the understanding that God somehow can determine when a new level is to be presented to the reader.

What if one or more of these levels already occurred in God’s timing and no one could recognize it simply because it had never been seen before? What if God had permitted a multitude of unveilings designed to lead us onto perfection but our dogmatic insistence that if it wasn’t in the bible it wasn’t God kept us…no, constrained us from living up to the character of Christ?

500 years ago, a great protest arose against the church. The 95 theses that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral fractured the only known church of the world into the denominational fox-hole of a mess we have today. While all claim to be the true path to Christ, none will risk moving beyond the first principle. Honestly, what do they have to lose as congregants leave the first principle on their own in search of…well anything that doesn’t resemble “church” as they’ve known it.

If you are a pastor or teacher in a local fellowship, I challenge you to ask this hard question to yourself. “What are the remaining principles of Christ I don’t know and can’t teach to others?” James says if you lack wisdom ask for it. But be prepared! The answer will challenge everything you’ve built around the little kingdom of first principles thinking that you’ve somehow already arrived.

If you’re just a pew warmer, take the same challenge. It is about time that the body of Christ put a flame to the feet of those who claim to lead us. The best way to do that is to demand an answer to the same question. If you go to church on Sunday and the minister starts talking about repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrections or eternal judgement, ask them when they are going to begin on the second principle of Christ. But be prepared! Churches don’t cater to people who want to grow up in Christ, no matter how much they say they do. They want you to obey and follow the rules that they’ve created to maintain order within their little kingdom. You, however, come from a much greater kingdom, one which reside within you. Ask and you shall receive. It just might not arrive from the source you’re expecting it to come from.

Now I realize that there might be some of you who think that what I’m proposing is rebellious in nature. You’re right. Sometimes the only way to get a mule out of the rut it has created is to keep kicking it good and hard in the ass. If the shoes fits, one must also be prepared to feel it.

Be forewarned: I’m not done with this level thing yet. As a matter of fact, I’m just warming up.

Jam 1:8 A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

Church is filled with unstable congregants. It doesn’t help that those congregants are taught and lead by unstable pastors and teachers – it is merely a by-product of being unstable. Most of these fine folks will pin the culprit on eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, this passage from the book of James is dealing with the very subject of knowledge, godly wisdom, and church folk just plain miss the point that surrounds them and makes them so unstable. The times, they are a changing.

Evolution. There I said it and a bolt of lightning hasn’t crashed down upon me from the heavenly smiter. Believers of all shades have taken Darwin to task for his employment of this term in relating it to human/animal relationships while ignoring the simple fact that humans have evolved, advanced, and grown up over the course of humanity’s reign on this planet.

IF you have a strong objection to this claim of mine, then might I suggest that your ignorance is amplified in this area simply by the very fact that you are reading this, a talent that has only been available to the mass of humanity for the last 150 years. But wait, consider that you’re also reading this on a device that 50 years ago didn’t exist. Evolution seems to be all round you yet ignorance of its foothold testifies to your instability.

I’m certain that many of you reading this will be unfamiliar with the works of James Fowler. He conducted a huge study which he published in a book entitled, The Stages of Faith. The book documents the growth of a person’s faith through six different levels or stages. It follows upon the work of other human developmental professionals such as Piaget, Maslow, Graves and Loevinger, each of whom spent their lives studying and documenting the growth of human nature from birth to death.

Fowler’s study pinpoints how each of us believer’s transverse the spiritual journey and what are the various indicators, or markers, of where we’re at, similarly to a map with points of interest clearly designated along the route. What is apparent in reading his work is that many, if not most, have never even made it half way through the stages, a phenomenon which is corroborated by the studies of every human developmental professional in their particular area of interest. Yes, it seems we humans, each of us on this journey called life, are constantly evolving into the next stage of growth – possibly.

Allow me to expand that thought for a moment. Let me introduce you to a form of these stages of growth through the use of the following terms, which while not specifically drawn from Fowler’s work, are a composite drawn from multiple studies and represents a workable model for this brief introduction.

1) Archaic – the beginning stage; think of a newborn child
2) Magic – Toddlers
3) Mythic – Seven to ten-year old’s
4) Modern – Teenagers
5) Post-Modern – College Age
6) Integral – Adult

You can see here that I’ve associated certain age groups with the various titles, however, do not get attached to this because I’m only using this as a means to demonstrate the natural progression we’ve already encountered in these titles. Also, I hope that you can recognize that generalization of this nature cannot fully address the complexity which each of these stages might reveal. Furthermore, while I use six stages, human developmental professionals might have more or less levels which they claim we work through. Remember, this is an introduction, not an analysis of which is more beneficial.

So many Levels

Where do think you are in these levels? Initially, most of you might say that you’re at level 6, an adult. If age were the only criteria, then yes, this would be an appropriate answer. However, I know of a number of adults who continually act like toddlers, as I’m certain you do also. So, the first item to recognize here is that we are all at various stages in our life. Stages show up in our emotional development, our basic intelligence, our relational development, our body health development, verbal intelligence, and many other places which we grow into every single day. To say you are at level 6 in every area of your life is denying the realities which we all face every day.

Recall, I stated that Fowler’s work demonstrates how most of us aren’t even halfway up the stages of faith he categorized. This would put many of us at a level 3, maybe just moving into level 4. Simply stated, your faith level is mythic, moving into modern. Honestly, how do you feel right now? Not as big a spiritual champion as you thought, right? Don’t fret, you’re still evolving.

Ok, so let’s take a moment to look across the broad sweep of humanity and see what the landscape looks like through our level names. Today, most people would agree that humanity has reached the 5th level known as post-modern. Granted, not everyone is there, but by and large, a huge segment has reached this stage. It is demonstrated in how we conduct ourselves in schools, businesses, and governments across the globe. Regrettably, it is not the picture of our interactions in the church and herein lays the basis for the instability I’ve been trying to show you.

Many of us believe in documents which were written when humanity was at level 2 moving into level 3. Consider how most of the “civilized” parts of the planet never even reached the opening parts of level 4 until about 500 years ago. Even level 6 didn’t come onto the scene until around the 1960’s! So, while society has grown into these higher levels, the church has stunted its growth to level 3. Yes, intentionally kept itself at a seven to ten-year old.

Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to get people “in the world” to relate to your fascination in the bible or church? Do you feel you have to hide your Christianity at work or school because of the ridicule it might cause you to suffer? How would you feel today if a ten-year old told you that knew how to live life to its fullest despite what you might think is right? Do you ever wonder why so many teenagers who were brought up in the church, leave after they graduate high school?

Six days a week, believers function quite proficiently in the level 5 environment of school, business, government, and even social media. However, one day a week, sometime two, they eagerly enter an environment founded and static at level 3. All the teaching offered is designed to promote the nature of a level 3. The interaction of the church community culture is based on a level 3 paradigm which promotes excluding anyone who is not like us, just like every group of ten-year old’s do. At the end of the day, back into the reality of a level 5 milieu level 3 believers return, unstable in all their ways.

Do you want to be relevant to the world? Do you believe that your belief is more valid than someone “in the world?” Do you believe… Grow up! Seriously, grow up. Your instability, founded on a level 3 doctrine, has as much relevance as a flat-world believer does to an astronaut. Someone, obviously, knows better.

Duality is not knowing right from wrong, or good from evil. It’s about living a lie just to say you’re a believer. Yes, a lie which requires you to deny that you’re living in a world which has long since passed the level of your belief into a realm which the writers of the bible could only imagine in prophecy.

It’s time to evolve your belief to align with the Truth which transcends time and hasn’t intentionally constrained itself to a flat-world paradigm. The universe lays before us only if we don’t keep people from moving towards the edge of what belief looks like. “Greater works than these…” can only be done by people who accept that levels need to be ascended beyond the small steps of man, and into the giant leaps of the kind of man Christ calls us to be.

Silence.

 
Uncomfortable, isn’t it? We are inundated by noise. From the moment we come into this world, we are forced to contribute to the cacophony of humanity while being encouraged to also be quiet. Quite a paradox.

Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you. This is the golden rule described by Jesus and promoted by grandmothers across the span of history.

Silence is golden. Another issue grandma kept reinforcing amidst the squeals of a horde of children.

What if silence is the golden rule? Consider how if you never said the things that cause anger, grief, shame and humiliation to someone else, they would have no cause to do it to you. What if instead of finding fault in others we kept silent and thereby didn’t have to suffer the slings and arrows of reciprocity ourselves? Not possible?

Let’s take a moment to travel back in time. Before the entire creation event, the creative spoken word or big bang. Before there was a Word. Now that will confound many of you religious folks simply because you’ve always thought that the beginning was the Word. However, before any spoken word is the thought of the words which will convey the thought. Thoughts are found in silence. You and I have always been a thought born in silence and expressed in the Word. We were in the thought of the Word before the foundation of creation, silently abiding, silently communing, silently loving the love. Don’t you remember?

Many – no, most – don’t. Why would we?

Silence. We abhor it. It causes us to face the noise of our discontent. Now some may feel that they aren’t discontent, dissatisfied or unhappy, however that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being disconnected from the kingdom of grace, grace which has always resided and is expressed in the art of being silent. Be still, be quiet, be silent and know…

Consider how much you speak. What is the purpose? Is it often delivered to support your ego, your opinion, your belief, your rights and will? Do your words paint the décor of your life, construct the frame of perspective, tear down and demolish the nether world imposed by others upon you? Do you need words to affirm the illusions of your world and the activities you employ to keep it revolving? How would any of this be accomplished in silence?

How would you remember your original creation without words? How has silence…