bread

1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done. [Psalm 78, ESV]

Recently, I told a friend that I have come to appreciate the story of the Passion as the central part of an intentional service. Being raised in a Protestant background, I have sat through my share of lectures, lectures, lectures. There is nothing that compares with the narrative passed down of the Lord’s Passion and what that means to us. It is the opening chapter of the story of the Church, to which has been added stories of saints through the ages. There is only one Church in heaven and earth, comprised of all the saints who have ever lived. This is where community and persons meet — our stories added to theirs.

But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, [Heb.
12:22-23]

The institutional churches usually limit their concentration to either the community story (e.g., Roman Catholic) or the personal one (e.g., Evangelical “personal testimony”). Why can’t we have both? I think we can have both just as surely as we can have intentional worship and organic spiritual life. They are all the heritage of the Church. The Church does not know its own heritage so it wanders like an orphan in the wilderness. It’s time to wake up and know that we come from spiritual fathers whose story belongs to us and to whom we add our own story.

We share the passion of Christ; His story is our story. Paul viewed his own suffering as a continuation of the suffering of Christ, that the Church might be built up:

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: [Col. 1:24]

Jesus also said:

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. [Luke 6:40]

The way of our testimony is the way of Christ. We are his witnesses on earth that we know Him and are known of Him. And further, Paul tells us:

For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. [1 Cor. 10:17)

Put these together. It begins to make sense. Our tearing is the sufferings that fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ…for his Body’s sake, which is the Church. We are added to the bread that is Him… A friend of mine reminded me of Amish friendship bread where one person makes a starter out of which come multitudinous loaves of bread when passed around. (Remember when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?) My first thought was something my aunt taught me years ago about the reason wine is to be preferred over grape juice for communion. Wine has spirits that continually reproduce much like the yeast in Amish bread. It represents the eternal life of Christ.

The point is that we, as members of the Body, have stories to add to the parables and dark sayings of old — things that the Lord has done for us that will not be added to the record until we tell of them. Like yeast and spirits, one person’s testimony is the starter for another. The individual story must be understood in the context of the starter story. The narrative is preserved and treasured in the community life, but it is developed in the personal life. We must have experiences that speak to our hearts alone but we must also have a story to share with those who have no story.

In the next post, we will look at the how-to of passing down the story and we will examine our spiritual roots. (They may not be what we think.)

Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. (Mat 15:32)

Many have heard the good new of Jesus Christ and what He has done but have never dined on spiritual manna. Evangelization is a wonderful thing, and I have always envied those who are so good at it. Our concept of what “evangelization” entails seems to me rather limited, though, if we confine it to no more than getting someone to “close the deal” with a sinner’s prayer. Not all who say the sinner’s prayer follow Him afterwards, and some come to know Him without ever being asked to close any deal with a prayer. One fellow I know stopped his car on the highway one day and said, “Jesus. I don’t know where You are, but I need You.” That we want to know Him and that we are aware of our spiritual poverty is a valid first step on the thousand mile journey to really know God.

When I was young I saw many people who seemed to know God. I had said a type of sinner’s prayer myself, but was frustrated that I did not really know Him or trust Him. He seemed so far away and I wondered how other people could be so sure of what God wanted. Many years have passed since then, and I see that repentance and believing in the provision of God in Christ is not the same as knowing Him. We might compare such a condition to inheriting an estate from an uncle we never met. The inheritance is real and our relation to it is real, but we scarcely know what it means and cannot carry on our uncle’s business.

Multitudes have begun to follow Jesus, but I fear they have continued with nothing to eat and will faint in the way. Jesus described Himself as the Bread of Life:

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (Joh 6:51)

I knew a young woman many years ago who had grown up in a missionary home. She had been involved in “ministry” since she was born and could pray in tongues and bring down Holy-Ghost-and-fire. At the same time she was a combination renegade and prima donna who vied with me for attention and flirted with too many males (she was married). If God had tried to get an edge in word-wise through a “project” like me she couldn’t have heard Him. Our relations were somewhat strained before she moved away — there was no give and take.

Later when she was dying of a cancerous brain tumor I called to see how she was getting on. Something had changed as she lay dying. She told me that she felt as if she was absorbing God and being absorbed into Him. I wish I could have talked more with her on the topic of the Cross before she moved away, but she could not have heard it at the time. Why does it take a death blow to move us into that reality?

It strikes me that all of our needs are doors the Lord opens. We see a giant negative looming before us — a great big “No!” to all our hopes and dreams. But God wants us to enter into something greater than we have ever imagined. Normally we can’t enter in until we have gotten rid of our greatest obstacle — ourselves (which is what disasters tend to do for us). Why is it so difficult to lose our lives in Him without going through such destruction? I would like to say that we have a choice to walk through these doors at any time, but perhaps we don’t.

Jesus said to the church at Philadelphia:

I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name. (Rev 3:8)

Seeing that open door is half the battle. By the time we recognize what a great big doorway is the Cross to God the Father, we have generally begun to blame the institutional churches for blinding us all those years. And yet, no one can see to enter into what God is doing in the midst of us until He opens blind eyes. At this point some of us become exposed to what is termed “Christian mysticism”, though the term can cover a lot of colors that don’t belong together in the same box of crayons. We realize our need to know God in a way we never did before, but the watershed between mystics seems to pit sophistry and psychic disturbance against the revelation of God in the canonical scriptures and the true loss of the self-life described therein.

At this point in history, old manuscripts are being rediscovered and the same old questions are being asked once again: Isn’t this scroll older than anything we currently have in the canon of scripture? Why isn’t this gospel being taken as seriously as the biblical gospels? Which gospels are true? What words did Jesus really speak? What about archeological evidence in the age of the documents and their evidence for the authenticity of the Bible?

I think I may be able to shed a little light on the confusion. Some of the rediscovered manuscripts are thought to be older and therefore more authentic than the present canon. After all, we no longer have the oldest parchments from which the biblical gospels were copied. There seems also to be a sense that there was always this book called “The Bible” that appeared out of nowhere and now needs authentication. What is not understood is that the New Testament consists of scrolls from original archeological evidence that trumps the rediscovered gospels being touted today. That fact, in addition to the tradition of their continued use, is the reason they were accepted into the present canon. They are Abrahamic according to the flavor of all that preceded them in the Law and the Prophets.

Much that is in the “new” gospels is decidedly Dharmic. Had God intended a Dharmic gospel, He need only have stopped with Siddhartha Gautama. He didn’t need a Moses, a Jewish nation, or a Jesus of Nazareth if the truth was that the Jews were following the wrong guidelines all along. Clearly, the various gospels were accepted or eliminated because they were flatly incompatible with all that had ever been understood of the character of God in the Abrahamic strain. The Gnostic gospels attempted to grasp for themselves the unknowable things of God through sophistry. Spiritual discernment is paramount when combing through “mystic” literature, as much of it is peddled by those of undisciplined mind and undiscriminating sensibilities. All mystic experiences and teaching are not the same.

I came across a reference to German mystic Jakob Bohme the other day. I had heard of him but never read his stuff. He was said to have been a “gentle dissenter of dissent” in his day. He sounded plausible enough — I certainly have dissented from dissenters myself at times. But when I tracked him down, what I found gave me a very uneasy feeling. Sometimes you must look at things closely to know whether you are having a knee-jerk or whether you actually understand what they are talking about. I expressed surprise on a public forum that his works were included in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. I received a gentle handslap for proclaiming Bohme a bit “weird” — after all we are all on a journey, they say. I checked Bohme’s works out further to make sure I wasn’t dismissing him for no good reason.

I think a few romantics are too inclined to defend a cause because it is adventurously outside the societal norm. They ought to check more closely into its legitimacy. I returned with this observation:

Here is a synopsis of what Jakob Bohme wrote: http://users.erols.com/nbeach/boehme.html He was very influential in the development of Freemasonic thought and Swedenborgianism which drew heavily on spiritualism. Call it a “God journey” if you like, but it sure sounds like sophistry to me. No less a poet than Elizabeth Barrett Browning was convinced of this mystic thing called “New Church” in her day and her house was filled with seances and rappings after that, to the consternation of her husband, Robert Browning. The house in which she practiced these things had to be exorcised some years ago — I’m not surprised. I am close to someone who had some dealings with this place. In the “Christian” faith, there are mystics and there are mystics. They aren’t all of the same stripe.

I find the wholesale acceptance of anyone “outside the system” in some places completely naive and ripe for a huge deception. I sent this comment to another person to check my sanity:

Does this sound like gnostic sophistry to you? http://users.erols.com/nbeach/boehme.html
See the part under “Principal Philosophical and Theological Ideas”.

His response nailed it for me:

“The Secret things belong to God… And stuff like this is all conjecture which might be entertaining but can never be ascertained to be true. Since God didn’t feel the need to discuss it with us, it falls into the realm of problematic ‘Knowledge’ which Lucifer uses to seduce humans with and distort to his own ends. Therefore I think it’s at best, a waste of brain cells, and at worst, a devilish deception which may start off small but would culminate in dramatic errors if followed to it’s logical conclusion.”

I would be remiss if I did not offer an example of a legitimate “Christian mystic” against which to measure all others who wear the same label. The original “Christian mystic” can have been no other than the Apostle John who wrote the most spiritually comprehensive gospel in the New Testament. Although the others, particularly the gospel of Luke, offer many details of the earthly life of Jesus, the gospel of John expresses the spiritual life of Christ in the most arguably “mystic” terms of all scripture.

And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. (John 17:22-23)

John’s ideas continue the Abrahamic strain incipient since Genesis 1, completing the end of the Law and the Prophets without the Dharmic contamination found in the debatable lost Gospels. The fourth-century church and the sixteenth-century Reformers would have been astounded at our present-day indifferentism. It is clear that spiritual food of two different strains is served and eaten without reserve. I fear that the multitudes who have followed Christ are ready to faint from hunger and from contamination by that which is no food unless they learn to taste of the Bread that comes from heaven and compare.