"The Heart Beat Of The Church"

Moses’ experience of the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6) links action and contemplation as the very starting place of the Judeo-Christian tradition. His encounter is surely an inner one, but it immediately drives him outwardly, this is what a deeper inner experience tends to do.   It is a transforming experience and in this very first incidence with Moses, note that it is based in nature rather than a synagogue or temple. Not saying it cannot happen in Church folks.   Often it is in the open spaces of the natural world that the inner world is most obviously recognized.   Spiritual Masters like Jesus, Buda and others used the natural world in their stories and parables to remind us.  This is also the tradition of all aboriginal peoples of our world.

Immediately after Moses had his heart-stopping experience, the Creator of the Universe said to him: “I have observed the misery of the people who are enslaved in Egypt.  Now, go! Tell the Pharaoh to let these people go” you can read about this experience in Exodus 3:7, 10 of the Hebrew bible.  The Creator gives Moses an experience of an unnamable presence, and it has immediate practical—and in this case socio-political—implications and direction.  Rather than invite Moses into a worship experience or attend a church service, The Creator says to Moses!  Get up off your knees and you go make a difference in the world.  You see a transformed listener is called into action after leaving the temple, synagogue or mosque. The non-transformed are entertained and only feel the call to worship.    

The fire first burned for Moses, but then it began to burn within him, and finally through him.  Sunday morning every week folks is just not enough for the truly transformed.  We are called to  “Go Make A Difference”  The core of any church lay in its mission not its message.  Yes first you must hear the word but then you must act or you just didn’t hear the word.   

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of inner conversion leading to outreach of service for others.  In Bill Wilson’s twelfth step, alcoholics learn that they will never really come to appropriate the power and importance of the first eleven steps until they personally take it upon themselves to give it away to at least one other person.  This necessary reciprocity is an essential hook from which too many Christians have released themselves and we all have suffered because of it.  This just may account for the many who have fallen away from traditional church to seek an active group who have heard the call to serve.   In avoiding their need to pay back, many Christians have lost whatever they might have gained in their private devotions.

Love is like an electric circuit; it can never flow in just one direction.

If I have grown at all in my time as clergy, it’s in part through this role of being a preacher and teacher.  I have had to stand before a congregation and describe what I thought I believed, and then I often had to ask myself, “Do I really believe that myself?”  And in my attempt to communicate it, I often found that I had only scratched the surface of my own understanding.  In sharing what you have experienced and learned with and from others, you begin to own the Gospel message beyond what you ever imagined.  It is in the giving that you are recharged.  Actions speak louder than word.

Regardless of our different political opinions and values, we must admit that the tenor of public and even private discourse in the western world is often infantile and usually dualistic. Yet many people know of no other way of thinking. No one told them about the wonderful alternative, a third eye, it is a way beyond fight or flight.  It is the Way of The Christ, a universal way to wholeness for all people.  Good religions teach it.  Miss guided religions frown upon it, thinking only in terms of themselves.  It is for the most part a world of us, against them.  This tells me that much of Christianity in the West has not been presenting the Gospel in a way that really changes people.  May l suggest taking a serious look at meditation and contemplation as a way to open up the pathway to transformation.