ALIVE IN YOUR POST-CROSS INHERITANCE

In the incarnation Christ is in us and with us and the trinity have made their home in us as disciples of Christ. The effect of the incarnation is that the personal presence of God is with us in our persons, our activities and our life-journey in the Body.

Jesus invites us to join His life in the communion with Father and Holy Spirit. Jesus’ salvation is for all but the prize is for those who accept His invitation to join His life.

The glory of our salvation is that God has not mediated religion to us or the law, moralism or a series of pieties. He has mediated the fullness of God and His infinite life to us by drawing us into the communion of the trinity.

NO SEPARATION
Jesus has, in Himself joined us to Father and Father to us so that God is where we are and in us – never in some holy realm or religious compartment in time and space. There is no separation in Christ Jesus. God is not divided between the Father and Son. They are one substance and two persons. Jesus certified that earth is one with God in the person of Himself. We need to be done with Platonic ideas of sacred and secular to live in the truth that Jesus has made all things one in Himself. In Jesus we are one with essence of God and the Creation. This means that we can have more than an affinity with nature. We can enjoy it has an expression of God’s love and joy on account of the Ultimate Personhood behind it.

REALITY OF UNION
Leanne Payne writing of the Real Presence and Healing Presence asserts the foundational truth that in the post cross age we live in union with God. As such we must repent of and forsake religion that assumes separation, when the gift of God that is already ours is belonging and oneness with the trinity. God is not contained in holy times and holy places. He lives in us and includes us in His Communion in the similar manner in the way Jesus and Father are one.

IS RELIGION OK?
In the light of this, why have religion? I found this helpful article in the Pacific Journal of Baptist Research. I am not sure who wrote it but what is more important than the author is that it has the characteristics of wisdom and the Holy Spirit. I have selected excerpts from the article as points of discussion.

STATE OF BEING MORE THAN A CLUTCH OF PROPOSITIONS
1 “Faith is more than the adoption of a series of beliefs about God. It is a response to God. As a result, all belief statements must be held lightly, since they may signify the character of God, as religious symbols, but they must never take the place of God. The same is true of the church and any other religious community or group. The church is not the object of our faith. We may practice our faith through the life of the church, but the church is neither the object nor even the source of our faith.”

Because God is present with us and so present that Jesus is the Groom and we are the Bride an attachment to other husbands as the source of our life is idolatry. The only thing worse than having another husband who is not Christ is having several – like our inherited ideas, a loyalty to our church that we conveniently equate as loyalty to Christ and an identity that comes not from union with Christ but from some status we think we have as part of an institution or denomination. The object and source of our faith is Jesus Christ.
FOLLOWERS OF THE LIVING-WAY

2 “The first element [in what we may call religion] is discipleship. The character of faith arises from the call of Christ, in what Barth called the “determination” of the human person by the Word of God.” In community we not only follow Christ as the way. We encourage each other in the apostle’s doctrine and spread the word of life in Christ together.

YOU DON’T STOP AT YOUR BORDERS
3 “A faithful response to Jesus Christ means that the disciple is just that, a follower, a learner, one who is not in control or all-knowing. There is an essential humility in this situation .. Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” implies the elements of “anti-idolatry” and “anti-fundamentalism”, each expressing this humility. Those who are disciples of Jesus will not confuse God with their belief system.. Nor will they set God and their faith over-against the world, as if to “save some room for God in the world”.

LISTEN AND LEARN
We are not like the hard political right whose beliefs have contracted into a stagnant formula. As disciples we are listeners and learners. Our minds have not coagulated in the beliefs of our fathers, nor are we ideologues who live to pump-up our inherited religious beliefs. Because we are open to God we follow Christ everywhere He leads. We are not contained by our beliefs and because we are one with God we advance into and absorb His unfolding truth.

BEYOND SUPERFICIAL GATHERING
4 “A feature of faith beyond religion is community. The literal meaning of community is “life together”, a common life. In Bonhoeffer’s thought.” While no one is bound to belong to an institutional church we grow in Christ and express His life in community whether this be a small group or a larger congregation. Whether this is lived in the church on the corner, or a house church or in an entirely casual enjoyment of friends who love Jesus, is not the point. A house church can become just as ‘institutional’ as a standard established church.

RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE A BURDEN
Being together in the Christ in whom we are one is a delight when celebrated with people who live in oneness with Christ rather than oneness with religion. You will not grow in your faith and enjoyment of God in a church that is subtly an idol in which the form of religion is the perpetuation of the church. Oneness with Christ leads to oneness with each other. A religious view of church will facilitate a shallow version of community. The new creation advances in communities that are the expression of Jesus and His relationship with the trinity.

LORD OF ALL LIFE
5 “Bonhoeffer’s [has] the conviction that there is no longer a “sacred” and a “secular” sphere. This is part of what is meant by the “end” of religion, but that does not mean the end of the “sacred”, or the impossibility of living by faith. Rather it means that all of life, in every sphere of activity and concern, is seen in the light of Jesus Christ.” There is a joy to had when fishing or waiting for a wave when you are conscious that such pleasures are part of Christ’s life.

DUALISM BE GONE
Bonhoeffer is correct. The notion of sacred and secular belongs to the knowledge of good and evil and the dichotomous reality that it postulates. This bisected realm is the effect of Greek dualism and has no place under the sovereignty of Christ and the Kingdom of God. The trinity is in you and where you are. When Christ is our life, holiness is where we put our feet.

This does not exclude the manifest presence of God or the coming among us by the Holy Spirit. But it does mean that there is not a separate realm of the ‘anointing’ and that the gifts are not silo-ed off in a realm separate to the incarnated - all of life domain of the Kingdom of God. The effect of the incarnation is not that we live a religious life but that we live an everyday life filled with God’s spirit and life.

SPIRITUALITY NOT CONTAINED IN A BURROW
 6 “There is no separate part of life that is “the spiritual” realm or the preserve of “religion”. There is neither sacred nor secular, only the context in which we live in response to the revelation of God in Christ. Life in the world becomes a “community of faith”, the context for a religionless Christianity.”

It may be argued that we cannot escape the human structures of being together in Christ and nor should we. The intent of what has been written is that these are not substitutes for Christ and must not be allowed to be false christs. In any case, to strive to divest ourselves from religion by postulating a ‘pure’ state of being is to enter yet another form of dualism. Christ is in and with us in our life together.

THE CONTAINER
Richard Rohr talks about the container of the first part of life that prepares us to transition int0 the real self as the second part of life. He’s talking about the new birth. The same applies to our life together. God can incarnate religion by our agreeing with Him that He has come in our flesh. But God is not religion any more than your hat is you.

NEW CREATION
The adventure of incarnated spirituality is that it is alive in normal life. Never pious, effete or moralistic, it is nevertheless holy, wholesome, healing and life-multiplying. The effect of non-religious living is that it is unencumbered by accretions of lifelessness and at the same time the agent that ignites all our living with unlimited spirit and life. It’s the new creation.

I have been in church all my life. Over the years I have seen that it matters less what denomination one is in – if it is not a cult. What makes this difference is a passion for God in an actual intimacy with Jesus. Those who have this are the life-givers in the church and in society. Religion can smother a relationship with God. Christ our life – life in the Spirit will smother religion and make us real disciples who are agents of Christ’s kingdom and such Life-givers called Joan and Sam who live their best selves by being a manifestation of the Christ.