The Path of Life

Sunday, November 17, 2024 – Mark 12:38-44, also 1 Kings 17:8-16, Psalm 34:1-8, Hebrews 9:24-28.

In talking about vulnerability and living on the edge, I shared last week about a time when I was financially insecure and followed an intuition. That Spirit nudge led me to an action and a connection that brought me grace and a gift.

I asked if we could trust in God’s love even when the future seems uncertain.

Little did I know that less than a week later, my own life would radically change, and I would once again be thrown into a place of uncertainty.

Just this past Thursday, I learned that my other half time job where I direct a program for a nonprofit organization is being eliminated in just a little over six weeks. And while general wisdom tells us that we should have three to six months of savings to cushion such times, that is not my reality.

But here’s the crazy thing. Other events this week have shown me that God is moving in my life, and that I can trust what’s happening even though it’s scary.

In our lessons today we read of chaotic times, God’s protection, and Jesus’s sacrifice for sin. Today, I want to talk about these themes to open us to new ways of understanding our connection to God’s life.

Let’s start with sin. We’ve heard terms like “original sin” for a long time in the church, often believing they mean that we humans are wretched and corrupt, that an angry God holds us in contempt, and that without Jesus’ death on the cross, we would be sentenced to eternal conscious torment in the fires of hell. (That’s not exactly Lutheran teaching, but many Christians believe this.)

But those ideas don’t square with a biblical account of creation where God says that the world is “good” and that humans are “very good.” It also doesn’t square with the New Testament claim that God is Love or with the Way of Jesus, who showed us infinite compassion for our failings.

Historically, alongside that narrative of sinfulness, we have another narrative of original blessing and our unbreakable relationship with God. So many of us still think of God as a bearded man in the sky sitting on a throne. But we can also think of God as the All, as the Wholeness, and as the foundational Presence from which everything in this world arises.

Here on Earth, it’s so easy to forget the Wholeness, because in this embodied life it appears that we are all separate beings living separate lives.

And we can fall into deep despair and loneliness when we feel alienated and lack the connections we yearn for. But what if that separation is really the lie?

In his book, The Power of Myth, (and the 1988 PBS series that preceded it) Joseph Campbell talks about the idea that at creation, God, the Wholeness, split into the opposites. Meaning that in order for there to be a world, God had to separate into opposing forces like light and dark, earth and heaven, male and female, etc. It’s the boundaries that create things.

But what if those boundaries aren’t really real?

What if they’re just a trick of perception? What if we can understand sin, then, as the illusion of separation? Maybe this perceived splitting into separate things is required for there to be both a loving God and a creation that is loved. It’s necessary so that there can be real things and real beings in the world. Therefore, we might understand original sin as the necessary illusion of separation. Sinful acts can then be understood as any actions that are rooted in that illusion and that separate rather than unite.

And all those who are working to divide us are those Jesus warned us against.

In this light, we can understand the incarnation as God stepping into bodily life as the separate individual of Jesus so that God could take on the illusion like a suit of clothes. And because Jesus doesn’t live from the illusion but from the truth, he can willingly sacrifice his bodily life. In that radical act of surrender, Jesus shatters our illusions of separateness and shows us the truth once and for all that there is no such thing as separation from the One that he called “Abba.”

That’s why Hebrews can talk about Jesus’ sacrifice as the last sacrifice. Of these verses, Bruce Epperly writes,

…due to Christ’s sacrifice, we can come to God with confidence. We no longer need to worry about the past or our sins, for God’s grace covers over and transforms our sin into salvation.”

With this new understanding of sin and salvation we can read that last phrase as “God’s grace covers over and transforms our illusions of separateness into wholeness, into wellbeing and oneness.”

Both our first reading and gospel talk about apocalyptic periods of upheaval. I see such periods of chaos as the necessary time when all the illusions and all our ways of being that are based on the illusion, will fail us and fall. At these times, our illusory understanding of the world crumbles into dust, so that a new understanding based on wholeness and love can arise from the ashes.

Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was the point of conception of a new heaven and a new earth. And since then we have been in a 2,000-year gestation period. But one day all the walls that we’ve built to separate us from each other and from Love will come tumbling down.

In the meantime, our Psalm tells us that we can take refuge in God, that we can rest in hope, that God will not abandon us to the pit, and that God will show us the path to life. Here, Bruce Epperly writes that

We are in God’s hands and God wants good things for us. We don’t need to be afraid but can accept the blessings God has envisioned for us. Confidence in grace inspires us to gather in community and to excel in care for one another. Grace leads to graceful living. Confident in God, we can ask great things of God and great things of ourselves. Atonement is not a matter of pleasing a wrathful God but opening to God’s grace and becom[ing] a conduit of the grace we have received.”

Last week two widows were living on the edge. This week, I joined them. Maybe we’re all living on the edge. But it’s those edge times that force our ears and hearts to be tuned to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

The edge times require us to trust that Spirit of God even when the future is uncertain.

I have no idea what my total work life will look like in January. But I feel in the core of my being that God is using this period of chaos and collapse to move me into a great adventure that will lead me toward more joy and more ways to serve God’s purposes than I can even imagine right now.

God’s promptings always lead us away from the illusions of separation and toward love and connection with others. That is where being a conduit of God’s grace takes us. It takes us toward connection, toward wholeness, and puts us on the path of life.