Evolving: a cosmic life, a divine life, life on earth

Biologist Charles Birch (1918-2009) in A Purpose for Everything writes: “Either we and the rest of the creation have no permanent value or else we may say that there is a cosmic life, a divine life, able to appropriate and retain as experiences in its life our lesser lives and that of other individuals of creation. Either we and the rest live for what transcends ourselves or we live without ultimate meaning and ultimate purpose."

"To have self-determination is to exhibit mind. It is to have some degree of freedom, no doubt minute at the molecular level. I am not saying that having investigated the life of the cell and its molecules biologist have found mind. What they have found is more consistent with the proposition that the cell as an entity and the DNA molecule as an entity have internal relations."

"There is but one theory, known to me, that casts any positive light on the ability of brain cells to furnish us with feelings. It is that brain cells can feel! What gives brain cells feelings? It is by the same logic that we may say—their molecules. And so on down the line to those individuals we call electrons, protons and the like. The theory is that things that feel are made of things that feel."

"Because of the unity of life, human love is something that can be extended to the whole creation. The humanist loves his fellow humans and appreciates nature. The ecological model of life implies that human love is to be extended to the rest of nature in the sense of sympathetic identification with the life of other sentient organisms."

"The old notion of a divine being controlling the universe from outside is no longer credible. The relevant question now is, in what sense, if any, is there divine activity in the universe."

"The power of the Christian gospel is the experience of divine love that transforms life. We experience God first and then spend the rest of our lives trying to understand that experience and its relevance to the whole world. The God of the universe touches us as we experience life in its fullness. But God is vaster than our experience. When I go down to the ocean and swim on its shore, I get to know one part of the ocean—its near end. But there is a vast extent of ocean way beyond my ken that is nevertheless continuous with that bit of the ocean I know. So it is with God. We touch God at the near end, yet that same God extends into the farthest reaches of the universe and there too is pervasive love. This is the full meaning of incarnation. The universe exists by its incarnation of God in itself. It is the sort of universe in which God can be incarnate. God could not be incarnate in a machine! The divine Eros works in the universe through influence (literally meaning inflowing) as its universal mode of causation."

"To see the universe as a whole in this way, with the same God working in the universe at large, and in the life of Jesus, and in the lives of all of us, was put in highly symbolic language by the apostle Paul in his letter about the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in Colossians 1. In verse 4 is the phrase ‘In him all things hang together.’ This affirmation is repeated no less than five times in this chapter. It was Paul’s conviction that the same spirit which was in Jesus animated the whole universe. The universal principle of reality is the free act of experiencing. For many people in his time the world was a dualism. Not so for Paul. God is the God of ‘all things.’ Nature as well as human history is the theater of grace."

 

Charles Birch, A Purpose for Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).

Spiritual: "A City Called Heaven"

I am a pilgrim, a pilgrim of sorrow,  

I’m left in this wide world, this wide world a-lone.

I have no hope, have no hope for to-morrow.  

But I'm tryin’ to make heaven my home.

Sometimes I’m tossed, Lord, and sometimes I’m driven.

Sometimes I just don’t know, just where I’m to go.

But I’ve heard of a city, the city of heaven.

And I’m tryin’ to make heaven my home.

 

Renaissance, Bethel University’s Performing Arts Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjA3mesoAVU

I'm Going Home on the Morning Train

 

A spiritual composed and sung during slavery.

I’m going home on the morning train.

I’m going home, on the morning train.

I’m going home. I’m going home.

I’m going home on the morning train.

On my way, to the freedom land.

On my way, to the freedom land.

I’m going  home. I’m going  home.

On my way, to the freedom land.

 

No more troubles, now they’re gone.

No more struggles, my time has come.

I’m going home. I’m going home.

I’m going home on the morning train.

 

The McDonald Sisters - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gox3_GREz_c

Peter, Paul and Mary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKHzfboDYUc

A prayer for life and death

O God of life and death.

May your grace and peace come,

may your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Keep us healthy and humble 'til our time has come.

And as we forgive those who've done us harm,

forgive us for the harm we've done.

And do not tempt but keep us safe from evil.

For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light,

now and forever. Amen

Sharing self-forgetting is like a glimpse of heaven

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, essayist, novelist, poet, and author of an autobiographical account, Born on a Blue Day. The American Library Association in 2008 praised the book about his life with the Asberger syndrome as a "Best Book for Young Adults."

"Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion’s emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who benefit greatly from stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled “Stairway to Heaven; Religion and Belief,” Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying."

"Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial in people’s lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christians beliefs in the early part of the twentieth century."

"Chesterton was a remarkable person. At school, his teachers described him as a dreamer and ‘not on the same plane as the rest,’ while as a teenager he set up a debating club with friends, sometimes arguing an idea for hours at a time . . .. He could quote whole chapters of Dickens and other authors from memory and remembered the plots of all the 10,000 novels he had evaluated as a publisher’s reader. His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject. Yet he was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to phone his wife to help him get back home.”

“Reading Chesterton as a teenager helped me to arrive at an intellectual understanding of God and Christianity. The concept of the Trinity, of God as composed of living and loving relationships, was something that I could picture in my head and that made sense to me. I was also fascinated by the idea of the Incarnation, of God revealing Himself to the world in tangible, human form as Jesus Christ. Even so, it was not until I was twenty-three that I decided to participate in a course at a local church . . .. At Christmas in 2002 I became a Christian."

"My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes.’ I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God’s image."

“There are many beautiful and inspiring passages in the Bible, but my favorite is the following from 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient . . .. So faith, hope and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.”

With his gay partner Neil, Daniel write with Neil: “All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.” Like a “glimpse of heaven.”

Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (Free Press, 2006), 223-226.

Seeing "All in all" . . . in the "eternal now"

Groundbreaking scientists in the twentieth century, LeShan writes, recognized that new insights into physical reality required a new concept of wholeness. Max Planck affirms that in modern mechanics: “it is impossible to obtain an adequate version of the laws for which we are looking, unless the physical system is regarded as a whole. According to modern mechanics, each individual particle of the system, in a certain sense, at any one time, exists simultaneously in every part of the space occupied by the system. This simultaneous existence applies not merely to the field of force with which it is surrounded, but also its mass and its charge.”

Einstein explains: “Before Clerk Maxwell, people conceived of physical reality—insofar as it supposed to represent events in nature—as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions [but] after Maxwell they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one in physics since Newton.”

Physicist Werner Heisenberg asserts that: “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.” And physicist Louis de Broglie observes: “In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given in block, and the entire collection of events, successive for each of us which forms the existence of a material particle is represented by a line, the world line of the particle. Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time, which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.”

LeShan finds it striking that neither the mystic nor the modern physicist “can describe his data adequately in the ordinary language of commonsense.” Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer explains: “you know that when a student of physics makes his first acquaintance with the theory of atomic structure and of quanta, he must come to the rather deep and slow notion which has turned out to be the clue to unraveling that whole domain of physical experience. This is the notion of complementarity, which recognizes that the various ways of talking about experience may each have validity, and may each be necessary for the adequate description of the physical world, and yet may stand in mutually exclusive relationship to each other, so that for a situation to which one applies, there may be no consistent possibility of applying the other.”

From her experience as a medium, Mrs. Eileen Garrett says: Awareness becomes concerned with stimuli that occur in a nonsensory field. I have an inner feeling of participating, in a very unified way, with what I observe—by which I mean that I have no sense of any subjective-objective dualism, no sense of I and any other, but a close association with, an immersion in, the phenomena. The ‘phenomena’ are therefore not phenomenal while they are in process; it is only after the event that the conscious mind, seeking to understand the experience in its own analytical way, devises the unity that, after all, is the nature of the supersensory event.

The ‘explanation’ given for precognition in this theory,” she continues, “is that in this metaphysical system pastness, presentness, and futurity do not exist, although sequences of events remain. (That is to say that there are object-object relationships, or sequences, but not subject-object relationships.) The only time is ‘the eternal now.’ Events are, they do not happen, although we may or may not stumble across them.

Christian mystic Meister Eckhardt observes: “When is a man in mere understanding?” I answered, “When he sees one thing separate from another.” “And when is a man above mere understanding?” That I can tell you: “When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.”

Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist (The Viking Press, 1974), 66-85.

Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, 4th ed. (Methuen & Co., 1912).

 

Experiences of grace and going home

Wendy writes: I knew that I had died and would be leaving behind my baby and my husband, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go into the light. I wanted to go home. I felt like a blanket of love was wrapped around me. When I went through the light, all my dead relatives were there. I knew everyone even though then I hadn’t met them before. They were so happy to see me and welcomed me home. Even though they appeared in human form, I sensed that that wasn’t their true form. I had a connection with everyone—like some kind of collective consciousness. {GA, 74}

Sandy, who had a near-death experience at age five, later wrote: The Light was a sparkling glowing cloud. I heard a voice in my head and knew it was God. We never talked about God at my house, and I never went to church. Yet I knew this place, with this beautiful light, was God and my real home. I was surrounded by the light and one with it. It was like being scooped up and held safe by my daddy when a dog was barking at me, only more so. {GA, 121}

Another NDE survivor treasures this memory: On the other side, the arms of my loved ones welcomed me home. The feelings weren’t of this earth. {GA, 14}

After becoming unconscious during a grand mal seizure, Stacy recalls: I was totally relaxed, calm, and peaceful, and I knew I could comprehend everything about my life. I was home in God’s arms, and I was being given a peek at Universal Knowledge through the eyes of God. {GA, 115}

Words are inadequate to describe Heaven, Diane says, recalling her NDE experience. But I knew I was home. I knew this was where I’d come from. {GA, 151}

And another NDE survivor remembers: At the top of this mountain was a beautiful city. I knew some of the people there, but couldn’t make out the faces of others. I started walking up the mountain to get to the city, but a voice behind me said, “No, you can’t go up yet; it’s not your time.” I argued with the voice because I felt that if I could get to that city, I would be at home. {GA, 23}

After recalling in her NDE being “cleverly mean” to a childhood friend, and feeling remorse, Carol writes: Then I was embraced by love with layer upon layer of compassion. It felt like Home! Like coming inside from the snow to a warm fire, the smell of good cooking, and the laughter of family. I was euphoric beyond anything I’d felt before or anything I’ve felt since. {GA, 100}

These are not experiences of ordinary consciousness, for everyone having a near-death experience is dying and suffering cardiac arrest or in a coma or unconscious due to lack of oxygen or a general anesthetic or brain trauma. Breathing has stopped, the heart is no longer beating, eyes are closed—and yet the dying person “sees” and “hears” words that are unspoken, and also and has strong feelings as well as enduring memories. Furthermore, many NDE survivors remember that during their extraordinary experience separated from their human bodies, they were “back home” in the heavenly realm of Love and Light.

These NDE affirmations reminded me of African-American spirituals that refer to “going home” after death. “Swing low sweet chariot,” which tells of the prophet Elijah being taken up to heaven (2 Kings 2:11), is followed by the words: “coming for to carry me home.” The chorus of “Steal Away” is: “Steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here.” And all the verses of “Precious Lord” end with the three words, “lead me home.”

Also during slavery, at the end of the 17th century, two English Christians wrote hymns that remain popular, perhaps because of the image of going “home” after death. Isaac Watts, minister of a Congregational Church in London, wrote “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past,” with opening and final verses that end by affirming God as “our eternal home.” John Newton, a former slaver trader who after his conversion served as curate in the village of Olney, wrote the words to “Amazing Grace.” It’s third verse reads: “Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come; ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

These experiences and hopes challenge our faith and beliefs. Is our everyday consciousness an embodied and limited experience of the greater consciousness that we each are? Do near-death experiences reveal an eternal Consciousness that gives purpose and meaning to our embodied experience? Do the experiences of near-death survivors verify that our real home is a transcendent realm of timeless Light and Love? 

{GA} quotes from Jeffrey Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (2016).

NDEs have renewed my Christian Faith

Not long after my mother died, my father during surgery suffered a cardiac arrest. As the physicians worked on his unconscious body, he “awoke” floating above the operating table―seeing the physicians working frantically to revive him and hearing their voices. Then he found himself moving through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, where he saw my mother, smiling and waiting. As he came near to her and into the light, he felt an overwhelming sense of being loved and forgiven. But my mother communicated to him that it wasn’t his time yet, and then he floated back through the darkness and into his aching body.

For several years my father didn’t tell anyone of this extraordinary experience, but finally he shared it with me. Trained as a scientist, he had no way to explain his near-death consciousness during his cardiac arrest under general anesthesia. His life was altered, however, by what he experienced and remembered. My father was not a religious man, but his near-death experience (NDE) left him without any fear of death. Also, I believe, he became more loving and accepting. At age 90, when a second stroke left him unable to swallow, he told me his time had come. He asked that his IV be disconnected and that a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order be entered into his medical record. After a day without water or food, he slipped into a coma and three days later died peacefully.

My father’s NDE not only changed his life, but mine as well. Since his death I have read many accounts of near-death experiences and studied the research reported by physicians and other scientists. My father’s experience and my research have also affected my recent writing about faith, consciousness, and science. My essays are available online primarily on two of my four web sites, but especially on the web site at www.doingfaith.com. I cannot adequately summarize all these readings and how they have changed my thinking, but here are few paragraphs that try . . .

First, I am now convinced we are souls having a human experience, rather than human beings who some believe have souls. By “soul” I mean living-perceiving-meaning moments of consciousness that come from (and in this life continue to be part of) the sustaining timeless source of all living-perceiving-meaning. NDEs such as my father’s verify an enhanced consciousness that is not the result of brain activity—and in fact seems to require the loss of ordinary consciousness. NDE survivors affirm we all are part of an enhanced and endlessly creating consciousness.

Physicists describe this unfolding or evolving consciousness as the nonlocal background for all that is. In the words of Christian teaching, we “live and move and have our being” in “the kingdom of God.” This kingdom, of course, is immaterial, but hints of it enter our material experience. NDEs especially reveal the power and purposes of this spiritual realm, or what several of the authors in this collection call “the Other Side.” I believe the Light my father and millions of others have experienced during an NDE confirms the Christian witness that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”—whether we are Christians or participate in other religious traditions or are agnostics or atheists.  

Second, I know that our purpose in this life is to grow in the Light of this unconditional Love. In every moment, in the trials of living and dying, and in all our relationships, this is our challenge and opportunity. We always have a choice to love creatively, with courage and hope. We can strive to be forgiving, as we have been forgiven. We can embrace our living and dying with gratitude and joy. Each of us has our own fate—a calling to our individual quest to wrest faith and hope from suffering. Yet, we all are One in this extraordinary adventure.

Along the way each of us will have guides from the Other Side—from loving angels or caring ancestors or other beings. Or from what psychologists identify as our unconscious. This guidance will usually be ambiguous, as we each must find our own way. Our evolving-loving-consciousness is part of the timeless evolving-loving-consciousness that gives meaning and purpose to all reality. I encourage you to look for your guidance in prayer, meditation, humor, art, music, and children, as well as in your disappointments.

Third, I am filled with hope that we come from and will return home to the everlasting Light offering unconditional Love. We enter life on earth with a purpose, I now believe, and whether or not this purpose is fulfilled we will end our embodied experience on earth with a forgiving life review and new insights into the meaning of our cosmic adventure. 

 

The photo shows my father and oldest child, Kim Traer. I'm grateful for the lessons I've learned from each of them.

The NDE experience of grace

Kenneth Ring is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), and founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. His other books about near-death experiences include Life at Death (2013), Heading toward Omega (2012), The Omega Project (2012) and Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (2008), and Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience.

Ring is an early NDE researcher who also taught a course about NDEs for many years at the University of Connecticut. In his course and in this book he argues that sharing NDEs with others may provide some of the emotional and spiritual benefits, and even personality changes, that have been verified as likely for NDE survivors. In other words, a person doesn’t have to have an NDE but may be influenced by hearing about NDEs to lose their fear of death, or to be convinced that death is not a time of divine judgment. I know pondering my father’s experience and reading about NDEs have affected me in these ways, and this is in large part why I am trying to share these experiences with my children and grandchildren.

Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, writes in a Forward to the 1998 edition of Lessons from the Light: “If any one person can claim to be an authority on near-death experiences (NDEs) without having had one, that person must surely be Kenneth Ring. Ken dares to writes frankly in these pages about the meaning of NDEs, inferring teleological conclusions from his empirical studies. In violating the scientistic taboo against mentioning such concepts as meaning and purpose, Ken honestly confronts a topic most scientists pretend plays no role in their thinking. As the biologist Ernest William von Brück put it more than a hundred years ago, ‘Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.’

Some theologians “have decried NDEs for holding out the false promise of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace,’ the unconditional forgiveness of sins without any required contrition. ‘Cheap grace,’ wrote Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, ‘is the deadly enemy of the Church.’ But is that in fact what NDEs promise, or is that a misreading of its message?
 

In reality the grace that is bestowed upon NDErs comes hand in hand with a very costly discipleship. The unconditional love NDErs report in their experience does not by any means gloss over their sins or excuse their future behavior. Quite to the contrary, NDErs experience firsthand in their NDEs the painful consequences of their sinful behavior, and return to earthly life as confirmed disciples, who understand from their own experience that their behavior does indeed matter, far more than they could have imagined."

Bruce Greyson, 1998 Forward in Lessons from the Light, xv-xix. The photo above is Greyson.

 

Greyson is a co-author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), a book that Eben Alexander highly recommends in Proof of Heaven, his NDE account.

---

Christ as a bridge

James Hillman writes: “There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us. Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed. So the rationalized mind prefers the chasm to the bridge; it likes the cut that separates the realms. From inside its concrete debunker, all invisibles appear the same—and bad.

“According to the teaching of St. Paul, discrimination of the spirits is a sign of true spiritual consciousness. You have to be able to tell one invisible from another. One method the Catholic Church used for refining this discernment is its proliferation of official angels and saints. The variety of figures showed many qualities, a host of different natures and areas of operation. (The more recent rationalized church has been downsizing the invisible realm, submitting its imagination to historical criteria. Every invisible saint had to have a visible forebear with a historical pedigree. So we lost St. Christopher and others who were ‘sheer myths.’)

“Then in the kingdom (or is it a mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Hölderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Søren Kierkergaard. Not even that will do for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand; the greatest bridge, some say, ever constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.

“Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ deaf and dumb and dead consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.

“Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge), because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. Centuries of huge and vicious debates have attempted to split the unity by coming down on one side or the other: Jesus is really a divinely inspired but visible man; Christ is really the invisible God borrowing human shape.

“Some glue, some independent link was required to hold these two theological incommensurables together, a third term that was different from the other two and that could join mortal and immortal. This third person, Christian theology named the Holy Ghost. But this figure, too, belongs among the invisibles, which still tilts the balance away from the world. So the debate goes on, as it should, because the relation between these two terms gives rise to metaphysical speculation and religious practices that keep the problematic idea of the invisible from slipping away. Besides, the debate gives rise to this chapter’s focus upon the often strained relation during school years between the invisible acorn and the life of the person with whom it lives.

“The great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles attached, the gods smiling and pleased: to invite them to remain by propitiations and rituals; by singing and dancing, smudging and chanting; by anniversaries and remembrances; by great doctrines such as the Incarnation and the little intuitive gestures—such as touching wood or by fingering beads, a rabbit’s foot, a shark’s tooth; or my putting a mezuzah on the doorpost, dice on the dashboard; or by quietly laying a flower on a polished stone.

“All this has nothing to do with belief and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 97-127.

A New Testament Prayer

O God of love,

may your grace and peace come,

may your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Keep us healthy and humble ‘til our time has come.

And as we forgive those who’ve done us harm,

forgive us for the harm we’ve done.

And keep us safe from temptation and evil.

For you are the Way, and the Truth, and the Light,

now and forever. Amen.

Your will be done on earth as in heaven

Your will be done . . .

You, who Jesus called father

Your will for all creation

A doing we can do

Will do

 

As in heaven . . .

Your eternal realm

No where or when, but real

Our home too

With you

 

On earth . . .

Here and now

Your will becoming our will

Amazing grace

Now we can see

And we will

"Let the dead bury the dead"

When Jesus is about to cross to the other side of the Sea of Galilee with his disciples, one of them says to him: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus responds with a very well known but surprisingly harsh statement: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Mt. 8:21-22)

Not surprisingly, this text from the anonymous gospel attributed by the early church to the disciple Matthew is almost never read in church. If asked to explain it, a Christian preacher or teacher is likely to describe the words attributed to Jesus, or spoken by him, not as criticism of observing rituals to bury deceased loved ones, but as an exaggeration intended to emphasize the importance of following Jesus.

I suggest, however, that the words attributed in this text to Jesus should be understood in the light of the Lord’s Prayer recorded in the gospel of Matthew, which affirms: “Our Father in heaven . . . Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.” (Mt. 6:9-10) This prayerful appeal, known to every Christian, clearly affirms that “following Jesus” involves a faithful way of living with God now physically on earth, and also after death spiritually “in heaven.”

The gospel of Matthew uses the phrase “the kingdom of heaven” for the phrase “the kingdom of God” in the anonymous gospels attributed to the colleagues of the apostle Paul, Mark and Luke. In the earliest of these three gospels, Jesus begins his ministry by proclaiming: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and have faith in the gospel.” (Mk. 1:15)

In the gospel of Matthew, this declaration becomes: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Writing for Jewish readers, who out of respect for God do not utter God's name, the author of the gospel attributed to Matthew replaces the word God in Mk. 1:15  with the word heaven (Mt. 4:17). The kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of God) is a choice we may make. Following Jesus is choosing to do God’s will “on earth as in heaven.” (Mt. 6:10)

Deuteronomy 21:23 in the Torah requires that someone executed for a crime must be buried “that same day,” and rabbis interpreted this to mean that no corpse should "remain unburied overnight.” (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3842-burial) So, the disciple’s request to bury his father before following Jesus across the Sea of Galilee was his attempt to fulfill his duty according to the Law of Moses.

The reply of Jesus, therefore, seems to require his Jewish followers to ignore this duty under the Law of Moses, when fulfilling one's duty interferes with “following Jesus.”

In the light of the Lord’s Prayer, we also learn that “following Jesus” involves repenting to enter eternal life in “the kingdom of heaven” that is “on earth as in heaven." 

The image above is from the Coptic Christian Church, which dates to the first century.