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“God’s
Slow, Invisible Creativity” Meditation Delivered
By Rev. Dick Stetler – December 24, 2015 Centenary United
Christmas Eve There is a lot of
attention given to the Christmas season by special interest groups. We
Christians, of course, desire new insights and fresh applications for
our lives because of Jesus' arrival.
Our diverse political climate has caused publicly elected
officials to focus on not offending those of other faiths.
"Merry Christmas" has become "Happy Holidays."
Advertisers are interested in
luring everyone into spending lots of money on their products.
Where does Jesus' life fit into God's ultimate plan for humanity?
If Jesus' birth
were the ultimate revelation to humanity created from the mind of God,
why did it happen the way it did?
Think about this. God has
unfathomable capabilities to provide people with curiosity to understand
the significance of the road map
Jesus provided through his life and teachings.
God did not make that happen. Even though Christians have always sensed a great urgency
to save people, to
spread the Gospel, God
apparently has not had the same motivation.
By our standards, God has created
at an exceedingly slow pace and has done so with little visibility.
Compared to the Advertising industry, God has done very little
to attract anyone to the blueprint for living the
miraculous life that Jesus knew was possible for all people.
Why has God behaved in this
fashion? Some time ago in Brussels,
Belgium several tents were erected in one of the major shopping
districts. Free
mind-readings were being offered to shoppers by a guru.
A good number of people went to see him. Most of them remained
highly skeptical of anyone's ability to read minds. The readings,
however, were frighteningly accurate and highly specific in their
details for each individual.
Nothing he said had the generalizations that are often associated with
people who claim to have unique psychic powers and abilities.
At the end of
each personal session,
a curtain was
dropped and behind it were several men dressed in ski masks posing as
computer hackers feverously working on their computers.
They had been funneling personal information that they gleaned
from the Internet to the guru's invisible ear buds.
The point of this exercise was to demonstrate the extent to which
advertisers and other vendors are willing to go to obtain as much
information as possible about our personal tastes and spending habits.
(http://www.youtube.com/embed/F7pYHN9iC9I?rel=0)
Very
revealing information about us is available on line simply by entering
our name.
Think about the agonizingly slow pace that God has worked.
Jesus' birth was not extraordinary. He was not born in a major
cultural center like Athens, Rome or Alexandria.
Rather, he was born in one of the poorest and most obscure parts
of the world. At the age of
thirty, he left his carpentry shop to teach people to love their
neighbors and their enemies. His
words were never recorded by him or anyone else.
His listeners were typically those with no formal education. Most
of them were unable to read and write. It is nothing short of miraculous
that any of Jesus' life and teachings survived to the twenty-first
century. He threatened religious leaders with his message that God and
God's purpose for our lives were within each person. That teaching alone
was considered blasphemy.
Jesus was captured in a garden, tried in a religious court, found guilty
and crucified for a capital crime against Rome.
Again, such crucifixions were
common in Roman territories.
Think of how confused Jesus' mother must have been as she watched
her eldest son die on a cross. She
had been promised by an angel, "God will make your son king, as was his
ancestor David and he will rule over the descendants of Jacob forever.
His Kingdom will never end." (Luke 1:32)
From her level of understanding, none of that happened.
So far in human history, God has taken thousands of years to
capture the attention of comparatively few people. Why are today's
advertisers far more successful at luring people to buy their products
than God? The answer
becomes quite clear when we understand that God knows
the real identity of
each one of us. Something quite invisible has been taking place in the
created order.
The human spirit is in an evolutionary process, an incubation
period. God has demonstrated
no concern that billions of people totally ignore
the road map Jesus freely
offered to everyone. Why?
What does God know about us that we have yet to understand? God knows that everyone on earth is on
the spiritual path, but
billions of us are still creeping down
the entrance ramp.
God is exceedingly patient with the evolution of us
spirit-beings because he has given everyone the gift of free will.
God does not manipulate people
like the advertisers do. Free will is just that.
Since the beginning of the existence of our species, God has
given everyone the right to do exactly as he or she wishes without any
judgment coming from God. The
consequences of having free will can be quite dramatic. People become emotionally challenged in countless ways when their
friends, spouses and loved ones fail to live up to their expectations.
People commit suicide. People
retreat into alcohol, prescription medications, gratification through
sexual promiscuity, mind-altering
drugs and sugar-laced comfort foods.
They may demonstrate little or no concern for the health of their
bodies. Free will can become a very difficult aspect of life to
negotiate. The responsibility for
our development rests on our shoulders and no one else's. We can blame
no one or any unique set of circumstances for who we have become.
The truth remains
whether we like it or not -- we are the sum total of all our choices. Can we now understand why God does not need to advertise, lure or
entice anyone to connect the dots on
their true identity?
God knows that no lifestyle, no hidden appetites, no
amount of material wealth, no level of physical pleasure and no
self-admiration for the
magnificence of our physical bodies will bring to any of us what we
want from our lives.
Everything in the external world is constantly changing.
God knows that nothing else works
to give us happiness and fulfillment everyday of our lives without our
also desiring loving and compassionate energy to flow away from us
without expectation of anything in return.
This is what Jesus demonstrated
with his life and ministry.
This is what we welcome this evening and tomorrow as we celebrate his
birth. This truth
has been in front of us since the dawn of history, but people continue to
choose to look for their happiness and fulfillment in places that cannot
possibly give it. A number of
people have mistakenly confused
Jesus' road map, Jesus'
blueprint for living with
religious beliefs. (Luke 9:49f)
This mistaken perception has all but destroyed the universality
of Jesus' message. This mistake has given rise to divisions based on the
false belief that "We have the exclusive path to salvation."
Such a misinterpretation of creation is not God's problem.
God has given all of us an infinite amount of time to figure
out and develop who we are. Christmas is the time when we celebrate the dawning of an
invisible spiritual consciousness that Jesus pointed to with his life
and teaching. God does
not give us the gift of life and then take it back simply because we
never learned how to express that gift's potential.
For thousands of years, people have wandered in the physical
world searching for the dynamic and creative energy that was part of
them since their birth. God allows us to run down every blind alley
until something in our experience
flips the switch to our spiritual awakening. We have forever to learn how to use and expand our spiritual
awareness but only when our free will, our desire, chooses to do so.
We gain nothing by putting off making such a choice until
tomorrow. Most of humanity has
been doing that for thousands of years and that choice has yet to be
made. If we are in
that category of procrastination, why not make it tonight?
Merry Christmas! |