Accept yourself

There’s a story about a parachutist who bails out of a plane and lands in a tree. He hangs there until he spots a passerby, who says: “How did you get up there?” ‘I fell from the sky’ he replies, ‘but where am I?’ “In a tree.” says the passer by. ‘You must be clergy,’ sighs the parachutist. “How did you know?” the passer by asks. “Because clergy always tell me something completely true but utterly useless.”

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t only tell us something true, something which has been around as long as the recession or Cliff Richard, but something which is useful. “Scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat ... do whatever they teach you, but don’t do as they do!” In other words, do the practice.

There’s another story about the devil going for a walk with a friend when they see a man stoop and pick something up. “What did that man just find?” asked the friend. “A piece of truth,” said the devil. “Doesn't that disturb you?” asked the friend. “No,” said the devil. “I’ll let him make a belief out of it.”

There is nothing wrong with belief, unless the belief is small enough to stop you practicing it. So Jesus’ teaching about prayer in Matthew’s gospel warns against external religion, which feeds ego, reputation, fame, concern for the world’s perceptions. “They do their deeds to be seen by others,” he says, with broad phylacteries, those little tie on boxes with scripture in, with long fringes on their prayer shawls, with places of honour at banquets, the best seats in a synagogue, or for respect in the market place, and the desire to be called a Rabbi.

Jesus is also called Rabbouni, or teacher, more than by any other name in the gospels, but he doesn’t start the Lord’s prayer off with “Our Jesus”. His desire is not to talk about himself, but about the life and teaching he embodies, and which we can embody. Call no one your father on earth, he says, you have one Father in heaven. Nor are we to be called instructors, we have one instructor, one Messiah, one true Self, to whom we can say: “Not my will, but yours, or Thy will be done”

The practice is saying a wholehearted yes, accepting what is, not setting up a rival to God which prevents us from being fully alive, which means to be able to say: “For all that has been, thanks, and for all that shall be, yes.” It is as shocking as it is simple. God’s only rival is anything or anyone who weakens the attitude of yes and thanks, which is a gratefulness that makes us happy.

The prayer practice Jesus recommends is to notice we are a mystery to our temporary selves, and all who exalt themselves will be humbled, all who humble themselves will be exalted. We are not our thoughts, beliefs, sensations, bodies. God is the I am of the disciple, as well as the I am of Moses, but the kingdom of God is so difficult to define, Jesus has to use images and parables, like a man who stumbles across treasure in field by accident, then buries it in his sheer joy so he can go and sell everything else to buy the field which contains it, the field of his boundary-less awareness, and have it joyously contained in an ordinary life.

Anyone who wants to find God must also understand the limitations of words and ideas, must look, listen, hear without preconceived images, ideas, or reactions, read scripture meditatively, pass through silence, like suddenly walking into a fullness of being, a moment of joy and enlightenment, so the disciple’s prayer is to give up everything to acquire who he or she really is, like a merchant who sells everything he has, the disciple becomes poor in spirit, not deficient, but un-possessive, to buy one fine pearl of unconditional happiness, even in suffering and evil. He or she doesn’t try to hold anything else, any experience, person, status, he or she accepts, in a free generous open way, so that he or she is one with life, risen life.

As we give up our time bound definitions of who we are, body, clothes, relatives, possessions, and even our reason, we give up something good for something greater, give our full attention to what contains them all, to what really is. We let go of thoughts and live as the One source of all thoughts, images, sensations and daydreams, the One God. We go to the very earliest intuitions humanity has had about what is behind the senses and the mind.

Coming back to today, we are now seeing the effects of not accepting what is, but insisting we need something else, or as a former Bishop put it, encouraging people to borrow money they can’t afford, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t like… people are demonstrating against financial mismanagement and government cutbacks across the world, and a vested interest in ensuring that things are loved and people are used, rather than the other way around.

There’s a story about a woman who is given three requests by God, who is weary of her. She asks for her husband to disappear so she can have a better one. But then she remembers his virtues and asks for him to be brought back again. With one request left she can’t decide what to ask for. What good is immortality without health? What good is health without money? What good is money without friends? So she asks God – what is your will - what should I ask for. God says “ask to be content no matter what you receive.”

St Paul says something very similar in his letter to the Philippians. I have learned the secret of being content, he says, in any and every situation. In Christ, he is no longer at the mercy of growth and decay, success and failure, honour and disgrace, poverty and riches, life and death. Thy will be done.

This is Jesus’ prayer – he is saying prayer is about interiority. We don’t need to use lots of words, he says, because our Father knows what we need before we ask. If he knows… he knows. This gives us trust to be still, to pay attention, just as God is paying attention. Just attention. Jesus advises us not to be unduly concerned about anything else - physical needs and consumer madness, but to look to beauty in the world, flowers and birds, to contemplate.

Set our mind on God’s Kingdom, so everything else will follow. Prayer in Matthew’s gospel is about being mindful, receiving the present, and not worrying about tomorrow. It is moving beyond words into a trusting loving intention which is in us, and more than this which actually is us.

Learning to practice is the same as learning to be. Distraction is unhappiness, and the cure is to pay attention. To give yourself to the moment, and to let go of the hundred thousand things contained within it. They are arising and passing within you. You, like God, contain them, so… accept yourself.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit +

Life, in all its fullest

Would you like to hear some children’s prayers?

Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.

Dear God, I bet it is hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.

Dear God, if you watch in church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes.

Dear God, I found out how babies are made. It doesn’t sound right to me.

Finally, and remember this one, Dear God, instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?

It is easy to mock the three-tier universe and the other now legendary anachronisms of the Christian tradition as childish, but this last prayer is not childish, because death throws everything we think we know into question. It makes us all children.

So don’t ever let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow for resurrection. Our best physical theories about the cosmos suggest a profound connection between a nothingness from which we originate and an infinity in which we are engulfed.

And when someone dies, they seem to become nothing. But what is no-thing?

Modern physics shows us that nothingness is in fact a seething mass of virtual particles, all appearing and disappearing trillions of times in the blink of an eye.

Using lasers in a vacuum chamber, science shows us that electrons within atoms are wobbled about by a deep and mysterious energy filling every single apparently empty space in the entire universe.

To put it another way, creation is full of God’s essence, as energy, and this is in fact just how the Orthodox Church does put it.

It isn’t just that the study of the physical world at its smallest levels can mathematically and scientifically predict these fluctuations in such a way that they exactly match the measurements in a vacuum chamber, but that a fluctuation within nothing can actually cause a universe full of matter.

And since God is not a thing, the light released after the Big Bang shows us how this nothing seems to have the most incredible potential.

So I repeat, even though it is easy to mock literal interpretations of much of the Bible and Church tradition, don’t let anyone tell you that the physical world does not allow resurrection. On the contrary, tell them how it does, since as far as our physics can tell, the physical world is actually spiritual.

The world allowed resurrection two thousand years ago, and it still does. New life still comes out from despair and destruction, whatever that is, for you. Resurrection, here-and-now, and not only for this life.

As St Paul says, if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

What do I mean? Well, for example, in her book, On Life After Death, which you can still buy, the pioneer in the field of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, shares a provocative personal experience about her meeting Mrs. Schwarz, a woman she worked with who had died ten months earlier. At the time, she, Elizabeth, was about to give up her work. She was exasperated.

And she says this: “A woman walked straight toward me and said, ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back. Do you mind if I walk you to your office? It will only take two minutes.’ But this was the longest walk of my life. I am a psychiatrist. I work with schizophrenia. When patients would have hallucinations, I would tell them, ‘I know you see that Madonna on the wall, but I don’t see it.’ So I said to myself, ‘Elisabeth, I know you see this woman, but that can’t be.’

"And all the way to my office I did reality testing on myself, and when we reached my door, she opened it with this incredible kindness and tenderness and love, and said: ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back, to thank you, and because you cannot stop this work on death and dying, not yet.’ I looked at her, and I don’t know if I thought by then, it could be Mrs. Schwarz. I mean, this woman had been buried for ten months, and I didn’t believe in all that stuff.

"But I finally got to my desk. I touched everything that was real. I touched my pen, my desk, my chair. I was hoping that she would disappear. But she didn’t. Then the scientist in me won, and I said something very shrewd. ‘Reverend Gaines would just love to have a note from you. Would you mind?’ And this woman, knowing every thought I had, and I knew it, took the paper and wrote a note.

"Then she got up, and ready to leave, repeated, ‘Dr. Ross, you promise,’ implying don’t give up the work. So I said, ‘I promise.’ And at that moment, she disappeared.”

Don’t let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

You may not personally have seen it yet, but as the gospel says, blessed are those who have not, and yet have come to believe.

Blessed, because a life lived in the hope, the trust, the intuition, the knowledge, or yes, even the experience, that death is not the end of life, is life lived closer to perfection.

The Bible says that through believing in Jesus you may have life in his name, but what does this actually mean?

It means to believe in the life which he represents.

The life of your true Self, not your ego.

That life which is both before and after you.

Your real life.

Spiritual life.

Matter is in life, not the other way around.

Which is it to be then?

St Paul says if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.

And what does that ‘in Christ’ really mean?

‘Learn Christ’ says the letter to the Ephesians.

Not ‘learn Christianity.’

The first chapter of Colossians and Ephesians says that the whole universe is in Christ. It doesn’t mean the whole universe was in Jesus, the man who walked Nazareth, but in the cosmic mind principle he embodied, and we can too.

Because as St Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians: The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised 'pneumatikon soma', a spiritual body.

So do not let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

Physical death, whenever and however it happens in a life, as an emotional psychological death, or as full brain death, throws everything we think we know into question.

It makes us all children.

But that’s OK.

The remarkable thing about children is their very deep trust in life. Let this be your trust.

Not a 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but I actually prayed for a puppy', but a thank God, thank God for life in all its fullest.

The life which was in Jesus, and which still is.

In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen+