I was shopping a few
weeks ago for some cheap craft materials, and took a whole pile of things up to
the till. Each item was only a pound or two, and the whole bill was less than
£10. After I had paid, I thought it actually seemed a bit too good to be true,
so checked the receipt - sure enough the cashier had missed some wool off .
Woohoo, a freebie!
No, I thought, do the
right thing and go and pay for it.
It's only worth a couple
of quid, I thought next. What's the point? And she'll think I'm really strange
going back to pay for such a low cost item. I hate it when people think I'm
strange.
But the right thing is
to pay for it so I'd better go and do it, I thought, a bit begrudgingly. Ok,
God, I'll do it for you, I said in my head.
No, said a
thought that popped into my head unbid, You're not doing it for me. You're
doing it for her.
I took the item back and
paid for it, and she did look at me a bit funny.
Since then, I keep
thinking about what happened, and the sudden thought I had: You're doing it
for her.
Over the past three or
four years, I've felt out of sorts with the faith that I have been raised in,
and the explanations I've heard for what it is I'm meant to believe in. One of
the big things for me is the separation of humankind and God that seems to be
lurking in the background all the time. I'm increasingly convinced that we've
got this wrong, and lost touch with a vital part of our spirituality.
I'm convinced that the message that Jesus taught, is that God dwells in humanity, and makes his home here. And not just with the good people, the church people or the religious ones, but all of us. After all, he's the God who called himself 'Emanuel' (meaning 'God with us'.) Isn't the message of the incarnation that he's a God in human skin, with human bones and human blood, just like….
...everyone?
We so love to divide and separate and sort
things into categories. It gives us a sense of control in an uncontrollable
world. Jesus taught against this sort of thinking when he said about God's
presence, 'You won't be able to say, 'Here it is!' or 'It's over there!' For
the Kingdom of God is within you."
I've been taught to immediately apply some
divisive thinking to that piece of teaching: "Ah yes, he's talking to
Christians, of course. The presence of God is definitely within
Christians. But not anyone else, we all know that. That's the problem."
Except that when Jesus was alive, there weren't any Christians, so whoever
he was saying that to, it definitely wasn't a church-goer. So Jesus is telling
someone who has never stepped foot in a church or prayed a special
prayer, that God's presence is 'within you.'
One of Jesus's earliest followers described
the spiritual journey as one in which we increasingly discover and live
out of our truest, deepest selves. He said that our true selves reflect the
reality found in God, and so we need to move beyond the division and separation
that we involve ourselves in, because 'here there is no Gentile or Jew,
circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ
is all, and is in all.' It's a new way of seeing. A unifying,
pulling-together-rather-than-separating kind of seeing.
This man, Paul, went around blowing
conventional seeing and thinking out of the water. It was controversial. In his
day, it was the Jews who thought they had something other people (the
Gentiles) didn't have. In my circles, we Christians have been taught that it's
us who have exclusive access to the presence of God living within us. (Which
means we then feel the need to go round telling everyone else what they have to
do to get what we think only we have got. Which is stressful.) But Paul went
out of his way to dismantle this kind of thinking. 'There's a mystery!
It's been hidden from previous generations, but now we can see it clearly! God
has wanted to make known the glory of the riches of this mystery among
the gentiles (i.e., among everyone, ever. Let me just restate
that - the beautiful, glorious, mystery is among the 'gentiles'. That's
everyone.) And the mystery is this: CHRIST IS IN YOU.'
Woohoo, woohoo!!!! Christ is in you!!! Whoever
you are, wherever you are, Christ is in you! The suffering, compassionate,
tender, patient, loving, beautiful, powerful, gentle, wise, ageless,
life-giving, thirst-quenching, tear-drying, spirit-lifting one is within you!
Just say yes to what already is, and what always has been true. That's all
that's needed. He wants to show you how to live in his ways, which are all just
different ways of being Love. Listen, and he'll show you.
When I think like this,
some of the other stuff Jesus said starts to make more sense. He said that when
I finally meet my maker he will say 'well done' for the time I went to visit
him in prison. What? But God, when did I visit you in prison? Well,
when you went to visit Llewelyn that time, actually that was me, because I am
Christ within Llewelyn. (And it means he might also say, I was
hungry and you ignored me - where were you?)
If God identifies
himself with people, then when I love people, I love God. Or to put it a
different way, if I want to love God, I have to love people. If I want to serve
God, then I have to serve people. If I want to know God, I have to know people.
It doesn't make sense
anymore to divide and separate my world into 'things I do for God' and
'everything else'. When I took the ball of wool back to the cashier in the
craft shop and paid up, it wasn't extra holy or extra special because I did it
for God. It was good because it was for a human.
This is The Way that Jesus calls us to. A life spent loving people and loving God, because God is in people and people are in God.
It's messy and
unglamorous, but it's rich beyond measure.
