Author: Roberta Grimes

God and Science

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself.
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient,
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand.

But now I can say, If you are discouraged,
Struggling just to make it through another day,
You got to let it go, let it all go,
And this is what you have to say:

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).

My father-in-law died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1998. My mother-in-law used to visit him every day, but one day she was arrested and taken off the road because she had eluded four police cars in a long and very low-speed chase on a two-lane road with roof lights blazing, which is actually a funny story: she later told me that she didn’t stop for them because she was so sure that she had done nothing wrong, so then they had to force her off the road and they took away her license. At that point, I began to visit Dad daily on my way home from work. He was comatose and very near death, he no longer knew who any of us was, so we thought he wouldn’t mind not having her visiting him every day. But late on one afternoon, to my surprise, I stepped into my father-in-law’s nursing home room, and I found him lying there wide awake and looking right at me. I sat down at his bedside, and I spoke to him slowly and clearly. He locked his eyes on mine. Amazingly, he was fully awake and aware! He said to me, “Bobbi, you know I’m still in here, right?” I about fell off my chair. Two days later, my father-in-law died.

What was happening to him was actually a well-recognized phenomenon called “terminal lucidity.” And it is surprisingly common among people like my husband’s late father, whose  brains have been fried by disease or damage. They will often come fully to their senses again as they approach their deaths, when they will then be able to speak quite normally. Scientists have no explanation at all for terminal lucidity, other than to try to claim that of course it is impossible, so that proves that it must never happen. But you and I realize that of course terminal lucidity makes perfect sense. As our bodies are dying, our internal energy bodies will begin to separate from the material bodies that we will be leaving behind, in a process that can take many hours to complete. And as this happens, our energy minds will blessedly separate first of all from the material brains which once served us well, but which now are badly damaged. And as our energy minds separate from our damaged brains, we can have a blessed few hours, or even as much as a day or two while our energy bodies are still separating from our material bodies. It is then that dying people’s energy minds can interact with the living and they can speak quite normally.

This is a fact that only an afterlife research scientist really can understand. To no other scientist does it make such clear sense. I guess it is past time for us to accept the fact that we are at an odd juncture in world history, when by default we have divided the field of scientific research into three categories, based upon the limiting dogmas that we have long since senselessly imposed upon some research scientists, who of course should have no limiting dogmas at all. A dogma is defined as “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” And currently, there are three groups of research scientists working worldwide who are trying to understand major aspects of reality, and who can be divided by the dogmas which stupidly limit how some of them are required to operate:

  • Mainstream Scientists are trying to understand everything about reality, but their work is to this day nonsensically limited by the dogma that they are not allowed to discover that there is any divine intelligence at all involved in the creation or in the maintenance of reality.
  • Christianity-Funded Scientists also are trying to understand everything about reality, but they are ideally supposed to discover that the intelligence that is by now clearly and incontrovertibly obvious behind the creation and maintenance of reality will turn out to be the Christian God.
  • Afterlife Research Scientists are not formally trained scientists and are governed by no dogmas, but those few of us who exist have developed considerable scientific knowledge and understanding in the process of studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence.

For trained scientists in the first two categories, of course, their sources of funding are their primary limiters. If you want to work in association with any  university or other funded research institute, then you must hew to that research institute’s governing dogmas, or else you cannot work at all. So scientists in the first category are not allowed to even imagine the possibility of any sort of life after death. Their “core scientific dogma of materialism,” which was informally but rigidly put into place soon after the year 1900 in all the leading university science departments worldwide, will not let traditionally-trained and -funded research scientists consider even the possibility of life after death, even if they might find some tantalizing evidence in favor of the possibility of life after death and they might want to pursue that evidence. More and more, that core materialist dogma restricts them as severely as an artist would be restricted if he was forced to spend his entire career avoiding using the color yellow. And terminal lucidity is a great example of how their materialist dogma restricts their work! Terminal lucidity clearly does happen, and it happens very frequently. Some estimates now suggest that it is a nearly universal phenomenon when people with damaged brains are in the process of dying without heavy sedation. It is therefore highly embarrassing for mainstream scientists to be prevented by their utterly nonsensical materialist dogma from admitting the frank truth of terminal lucidity.

It is only in recent years that we who do any work in the field of afterlife research have come to realize that we are scientists, but indeed scientists is what we are. Although we are scientists of the very old school, perhaps, and entirely self-taught. But there is such an overwhelming amount of afterlife evidence, and in order for us to make sense of any of it, we have had to do a lot of related fill-in research as well. Where is this gigantic and entirely consistent greater reality that we are discovering, to which we all seem to return at death? How does it actually work, and how does it fit with the very limited material reality that we perceive around us during our brief earthly lives? My goodness, it turns out that you really cannot know anything at all until you are able to figure out pretty much everything, so for Craig Hogan and me and a very few others, making sense of all of it eventually by about 2010 or earlier became our obsession. We did finally figure it all out; but wow, doing that has not been easy!

It has, however, been extremely rewarding. For one thing, we have had tremendous help from people like Max Planck and Nikola Tesla, the great quantum physicist and the legendary polymath respectively of the first half of the twentieth century. Without their insights in particular, we never could have figured it out at all! And the scientists driven by a Christian calling at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, are our brothers from another mother, as our dear inner city kin might say, in that the Discovery Institute’s scientists are hoping to find specifically a Christian God behind it all; but still, in seeking an Intelligent Designer, they are heading in our same direction. I read their newsletters with avid interest, and I find a lot there that we can use.

One big problem for scientists who are forced to spend their entire materialist-dogma-squashed careers in that first category listed above is the fact that we few afterlife scientists, together with many in the second category listed above, are now blowing solidity away altogether, as you will shortly see. When you do your scientific research with a fully open mind, it is amazing what you can discover! It was somewhere before 2010 that we scientists in the third category listed above came to realize that all of material reality is Consciousness. The afterlife evidence, when taken all together, will admit of no other explanation. And as Max Planck said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And as Nikola Tesla said around the same time, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” We truly do follow in the footsteps of Giants!

But then by about 2020, mainstream scientists were coming to very strongly (but sadly) suspect that they never are going to figure everything out. How can their brand of science in the end ever amount to much, when more than a century ago their establishment of their materialist dogma turned it into nothing more than the useless religion of atheism? I have not seen any article in any popular science magazine where they seemed to be considering overtly admitting that holding to materialism ever was a stupid idea. Oh no. Just, now they think that perhaps not everything in reality is going to be discoverable by scientists. And, you know, that still seems to be okay with them, even now.

Around 2020 was also the year when the illustrious young free-minded Dutch scientist Dr. Bernardo Kastrup was delivering his wonderful second Ph.D. defense, on philosophy of mind and ontology. See also his book, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument For the Mental Nature of Reality. Like the illustrious Dr. Kastrup, the more we afterlife researchers have come to understand how life after death actually works, and how this reality and the many separate but closely interrelated afterlife realities all fit together, the more we have come to realize that all the realities, including this one, are actually non-solid! Moreover, against all the odds, this particular universe turns out to be actually and amazingly finely tuned for life. And more amazingly still, as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us in his famously banned Tedx talk called “The Science Delusion”, all the “Cosmological Constants” that keep this universe stable are constantly and minutely adjusting. And then there is the further curious fact that all of what even is supposedly “solid” matter is 99.9999999% empty space. The more we study the greater reality, the more fully we come to understand that all the hundreds of solid-seeming levels of what we understand to be the realities that we enter at death, all of which vibrate ever higher than this entirely illusory non-material and only material-seeming reality that we think we are experiencing around us now, are simply aspects of Consciousness. Indeed, our only possible conclusion becomes inescapable. What we think of as human Consciousness really is all there is. We afterlife scientific researchers have discovered the genuine God.

During all the decades that I have been doing afterlife research, there have been more and more situations like that moment when my hopelessly fried father-in-law looked at me, and he was normal. And so then I have found yet one more impossible thing which was confoundingly true. Now, please understand that I am a skeptic by nature! I cannot believe anything without first fighting it. But I also emphatically refuse to hold to anyone’s dogma in doing my research, which has often made it possible for me to figure something out where trained scientists would find just another dead end. And to be frank, I find this whole situation to be increasingly amazing and utterly confounding. Or to use the only word that really seems to fit, I find the whole field of eternal human life research to be absolutely miraculous.   

And the most miraculous thing is that, I swear, it all fits together in a puzzle far greater than the size of this universe, and so perfectly that not a single piece is out of place. And it never had to turn out this way! Not at all! When I first began to do afterlife research more than fifty years ago, I knew that the odds were long against our finding from here a perfectly detailed picture of a genuine afterlife so true and real that we could be certain about each detail of it, from the way the grass would look and feel in the astral plane, right down to the pattern that would be on the genuine God’s astral teacup. Of course, a non-material God does not drink tea; but otherwise, we are pretty much there.

I remember now that when I was four, we learned in nursery school to recite our home address in case we might ever get lost. And as that school was teaching me each morning to memorize my home address, in the empty lot next to our house, there was a tall and friendly man with long hair wearing a long robe who would walk with me sometimes in the afternoons, holding my hand and also teaching me things. My beloved Thomas tells me now that of course he was that man, and he adds that no one else could have seen him. I recall, too, that as we walked, he was adding to the home address that I was learning to recite in school each morning, “the world, the universe, and the Mind of God.”  

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).

God and Happiness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you, I could learn to. With you, what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

When my much-beloved Thomas told me that “God and Happiness” was to be our topic for this week, I told him he had to be kidding me. Long ago I became convinced that happiness is mostly genetic: you either are blessed with the happiness gene, or else – too bad – you simply don’t have it. And my mother had a double dose of it. Whatever was going on in her life, she immediately made the best of it, she rearranged matters to better suit herself and those she loved, and she never looked back or had a moment’s regret. I cannot recall her face without a smile on it, nor a moment when she ever cried in her life except when her own mother died. And speaking of her parents, they were poor Danish immigrants to America at the turn of the twentieth century, who, also true to their wonderful genes, were always happy and always in love with one another, no matter what might be going on in their lives.

Come to think of it, Denmark generally is ranked to be the second happiest country on earth, while Finland – which is another Scandinavian country – is routinely ranked as the happiest. So the fact that my genetic ancestry is Danish would suggest that of course I would find being always happy to be especially easy. You cannot read these articles about the happiest countries year after year without suspecting that raw genetics must have at least some considerable part to play in human happiness. I recall my poor Danish immigrant grandfather, who never in his life that I could see had very much to be happy about, and yet I cannot recall ever seeing him without a merry grin as he went about his days. Now, there was a genuine Dane for you!

And I cannot recall even one day in my life before I entered college and met a few moody teenagers when I even knew how being unhappy might feel. My childhood and youthful states of mind ranged from being mildly delighted to unexpected outright bursts of joy. And really, to be frank, for no reason at all: just because of the way the light was falling, the sound of the wind, or the sight of a bird outside my window. I have always been happy. Happiness is not a virtue, after all, but rather it is an extraordinary gift.  And as I have progressed through life and married, reared children, studied the afterlife and also studied the Gospels; and then, OMG, as I have met my beloved Thomas and then actually even met Jesus in person, my life has only grown happier still. I have always been the happiest person I knew, and always by what seemed to be utter happenstance.

So I think of myself as the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice about how to be happy! I have no idea why, but like my mother and grandfather, I am always fundamentally delighted with life, and for no particular reason. Anyway, we have blogged on the topic of Happiness twice already in just this calendar year: once in May, when I think we discussed the subject pretty definitively; and before that in January, when Thomas was worked up about the morning when he and I first met two thousand years ago, and then we died together during a Roman massacre of Jesus’s earliest followers. I thought the subject of Happiness had by now been largely done to death in this space!

“So, okay,” I told my Thomas on Friday morning. “We’ve already done Happiness, so we now have nothing to write about.” He said sharply, “Read the title again. Your topic here is ‘God and Happiness’. And by the way,” he added, sounding cranky, “I do not believe for one moment that there is such a thing as a ‘happiness gene’, so come up with a better explanation than that.” Well, okay then!

Since Thomas wouldn’t let me off the hook with a new last-minute topic, and since he didn’t feel like helping me with this one, I asked God to please give me someplace to start. And God first sent me to Psalm 46. which was written and sung more than seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It reminds us that:

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in times of trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
3 Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy dwelling places of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;
He raised His voice, the earth melted.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has wrought desolations in the earth.
9 He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold. (Psalm 46:1-11)

Such a beautiful Psalm! “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” So stop fretting, My beloved little child, and stop all your worrying, for you have a Divine Eternal Father in Me; and your Father loves you, and your Father owns every power. This is the first and foremost, and indeed it is the ultimate and only reason for us ever to be happy.

I recall that when I first encountered unhappy young people in college, their entirely new mindset mystified me. I had never before seen or even imagined unhappiness. I didn’t realize until much later in life the fact that none of these depressed young folks had a relationship with God, when my own divine relationship was something that I had taken entirely for granted ever since I had my first experience of light at the age of eight. Even now, I can only try to imagine what it must have felt like to be young and not to know God, not to be certain that God is real and loves me perfectly, and therefore what it must have felt like not to be certain that my own life is forever. And, oh my god, I would have found my young life to be unbearable then, and full of cares, just as they seemed to be finding early-adult life to be for them! I feel so sorry for them now, in retrospect, and sorry that I didn’t understand them at all, and that I didn’t try to help them a great deal more than I did at the time.

Of course, our dear Jesus never had much patience for people who were not really listening to Him closely, and who were not trying to learn from Him, since they were still so completely immersed in this world’s cares. Woe betide you if you were in His crowd of followers, and you made of our Jesus an ignorant and selfish matter-based request like the one that follows:

13 Someone in the crowd called to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14 But Jesus said to him, “You there, who appointed Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15 Then He said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” 16 And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17 And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to myself, “You have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ 21 So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (LK 12:13-21). And wow, you and I are on the edge of our seats now, aren’t we, and thinking, Tell us, Jesus! Please tell us, dear Wayshower, how we, too, can become rich toward God?

So then Jesus does indeed proceed to tell us how we can become rich toward God, using some of the most beautiful language in the whole Christian Bible. 22 And He said to His disciples, “For this reason I say to you, do not worry about your life, as to what you will eat; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. 23 For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap; they have no storeroom nor barn, and yet God feeds them. How much more valuable you are than the birds! 25 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life’s span? 26 If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these! 28 But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? You men of little faith! 29 And do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not keep worrying! 30 For all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek; but your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek His kingdom, and these things will be added to you. 32 Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom! (LK 12:22-32)

There it is, and it is so simple! Jesus’s prescription for happiness is this: stop worrying and never be afraid, because God assures us of God’s eternal love and protection. God really does have this perfect level of happiness in store for each of us here on earth, for He tells us that even right at this moment, the kingdom of God is within each of us! (LK 17:21) And this is true both now and forevermore. This, my very dear ones, is the entire difference between being always happy in both this world and the next, and never being really happy at all, no matter what you might have and no matter what you might do. How can you ever be truly happy in this world, when at any moment you might blink out like a light? Or, worse, when at any moment you might be dropped, forever aware, into a void of nothing for eternity? As I think about it now, for those that I met in college who were truly unhappy, it was their existential terrors that were upsetting them most. Children seldom think about dying. It is only in our teens, perhaps, that these awful existential terrors start to seize us.  

So if you ever want to be truly happy in your life, then it is up to you to set yourself up with God for daily and eternal happiness! And this, my beloveds, is how you can do it:

  • Claim and own the fact that human life is eternal. If you don’t yet know that for certain, then just spend a year on seekreality.com, absorbing as much afterlife evidence as you can, until there is not a shred of doubt left in your mind. Until you are certain of the fact that it really is impossible for you ever to die, there always will be that remaining pall of existential sadness over your life.
  • Claim and own the eternal certainty of God’s love. There are a number of ways that you can do this, but perhaps the most certain way is to study Jesus’s teachings on teachingsbyjesus.com, and in Liberating Jesus and The Fun of Loving Jesus as well. Learn The Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, and say them frequently to God as love-talk between you, while always really meaning their words. God is your personal doting Father and eternally listening. Jesus is your Wayshower and Best Friend, and God is the Father of us all.

God and Jesus are there with and within you, even now. They cannot possibly be closer to you than They already are. But they are respectful of your privacy. So they are waiting for you to say the first Hello.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With You, I could learn to. With You, what a new day!
But who can I turn to, if You turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

God and Faith

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My Refuge,
My Rock in Whom I trust.”
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear;
Under His Wings your refuge,
His faithfulness your shield.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1979)

Wow, did Thomas and I catch flack for some of the positions we took in our blog post last week about sin! The first, and the most obvious question was why God might let some people who have done extremely evil things off scott-free. The very thought of this possibility offended some people. “So, say that someone even kills someone else. Maybe tortures and murders a child or something. Are you saying that even the most awful crime is not necessarily a sin in the eyes of God?  So, then we would say patiently, “To the extent that something is a religious crime, which is the technical definition of a ‘sin,’ then God does not condemn us to hell for it.” Because for one thing, there is no actual hell. And more to the point, there is no judgment by God (JN 5:22). And finally, of course, religions are of man. They are not of God.  So things simply do not work the way that you and I might think that they work. But the thought that there is not some level of divine retribution for bad deeds done is still too difficult for some otherwise sensible folks to handle. Shouldn’t retribution from God for what we can see are obviously horrendous deeds be something that exists in the air somehow, like a noisome vapor that will ignite on its own and outright blow all the villains away?

Well, no. God does not think the way that people think. And as is true of so many things, it is love that makes the difference. Each of us comes to earth to live a lifetime which is usually planned to be difficult, so this earth-life can help us to ever better learn how to lift our personal energy vibrations ever farther away from fear and hatred and all the other low-level emotions, and toward our universal energy goal of ever more perfect love. Right? Isn’t that the entire point of all of human earthly existence? That is true of each of us individually, and it is true of all of humankind universally. Each of us plans a difficult lifetime that is full of what are often complex and even painful challenges. So, if one of us has done something appalling, has for example committed a horrendous murder, then he or she has already fallen pretty far away from our universal energy goal of ever more perfect love. Wouldn’t that be true? So, I know you don’t want to hear this now, but the last thing we should ever want to do in that instance would be to punish someone in some awful way, and to thereby lower his or her personal energy vibration even more!

Yes, we want to keep all such people from ever harming someone else. But ideally, we want to do it in such a way that we are teaching and reclaiming and loving as we do it! When we treat any human being harshly, and even those who are guilty of the most awful crimes, then we only lessen the aggregation of love in the world, we lower both that person’s spiritual vibration and our own, and we offer a terrible example to everyone else who is closely watching us. Until we can learn to think only as God thinks, in everything, always and forevermore, we have not even begun to learn spiritual wisdom.

While we are on the topic of trying to ever better learn to think as God thinks, let us all be sure to keep in mind the fact that no religion on earth is God’s religion. Oh, no indeed! Every one of our religions is entirely man-made. The fact that there are now some forty-five thousand different versions of Christianity alone, and some of them even battle with one another over trivialities of human-made doctrine, is therefore not surprising, even though it is frankly horrifying. I recall when I was first writing The Fun of Dying in 2010, and I Googled the question of how many versions of Christianity there were. Back then, there were ten thousand versions of Christianity. What? Ten THOUSAND? I could not get over that! I had expected the number to be something like a few hundred. And then over the following years, I have on occasion idly done that same Google search, and to my increasingly slack-jawed amazement I have watched the number of Christian denominations rapidly proliferate, until now, only fifteen years later, the number of Christian denominations worldwide is literally forty-five thousand. Many of what are called “denominations” must consist of just one church congregation. But still, think of what a travesty this is! Human beings bicker among themselves over the smallest variations in their own ideas about the tiniest details of their own faith versions. And then they inflict their personal petty disagreements on God, and also on poor Jesus.

And even so much worse, all these utterly pointless divisions among Christians still continue to proliferate, even today! The United Methodist Church has probably tried the hardest of all those endless Christian denominations to keep itself together as a big-tent unit, but in recent years it has fragmented more and more, over female clergy and over homosexuality most recently, and also over other, more trivial issues. Now, I ask you: can you imagine that the Jesus that you and I so dearly love actually gives a flying fig about issues like the genders or the sex lives of those who lead church congregations, or of their fellow church parishioners? Seriously? Can you imagine that God cares at all? Then why should the Methodist leaders care? And when you add to the terrible fragmenting of Christianity over nonsensical personal issues all the other separate religions on the earth, both large and small, most of which of course predate the earthly life of Jesus, then there are in total close to sixty thousand different ways that people might choose to worship God, or the gods, or the ineffable ether, or Mother Nature, or the Stars, or whatever else you might choose to call the Creator and the Help of all there is.

So let us now together give to God, and to every conceivable iteration of God of every name and description the arbitrary but still holy name of “God”, and let us now state just for purposes of this discussion that the One God is the God of all. As we now all understand anyway, the genuine God is what we individually experience as Consciousness, and Consciousness is all that exists. Consciousness is the Sculptor, and Consciousness is the Clay. God needs and wants no particular name, but rather God answers to whatever is in our hearts! God recognizes no religion, and the One God sees each of us as intensely and truly God’s Own. This whole religion thing is and forever only ever has been a remnant of our human-created faith-crutch. Once we simply learn to look within ourselves for the source of this ineffable call from God that every one of us feels, this core yearning, then we find its source easily! As Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within us (LK 17:21). In the end, we can easily learn to relate to God within ourselves.

Yet still, many people find that they feel best when they have some sort of religion, even now. And God does not seem to mind at all, because we live within Consciousness, within the Mind of God, so we cannot see God, since God is not a Being separate from ourselves; yet we can sense that something greater is here. So to believe in God more concretely, early people invented religions, and those first religions generally featured some often scary-awful gods. That was just how all our religions began. I guess this recent dramatic fragmentation of Christianity, which seems to have been ongoing for the past few decades, is simply the next stage of religions, wouldn’t you think? This is just the way it goes? As you know, one of the reasons why Jesus came to us two thousand years ago was to try to abolish all religions, and to teach us to relate to God individually. As human beings now become ever more individual in our relationships with God, we either are leaving our old religions altogether, or else we seem to be molding and seeking and redesigning our individual faith lives within our existing religions to ever better suit ourselves.

And our religions in their turn are either desperately becoming more draconian, as is happening with Islam; or else they are fragmenting to try to make themselves more acceptable to us, as is happening with Christianity. We note, of course, that none of this has anything to do with God, but rather it has everything to do with endlessly fallible people. In the end, it will not matter a fig what today’s religious leaders do, because to God, our notion of time does not matter, and a thousand human years is like a day. Eventually, and no matter what our religions might do, each one of us individually will learn to find our way to God, since God is always and has forever been within us all along.  

And meanwhile, there are some truly delightful people who love and encourage one another in their different religious paths. They don’t allow the fact that those paths might be considerably different from one another’s paths to be any sort of barrier at all to their building a close and loving relationship with one another, and even to their building a wonderful marriage that includes parenthood. Not endorsing any candidate here, but I consider the marriage of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance and his Hindu wife to be nothing short of amazing and delightful! I urge you to read the linked article, because I don’t think that any attempt that I might make to summarize it could do it justice. When I married my Catholic husband fifty years ago, and we planned to have children, there was no question that I would have to convert to Catholicism. But now, this beautiful young couple can happily enter a Hindu-Catholic marriage that includes parenthood, a marriage blessed by both faiths, and there has been no thought that either of them will have to convert to the other’s religion! And around them, God’s angels sing for joy.

You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day.
Though thousands fall about you,
Near you it shall not come.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

For to His angels He’s given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways.
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1979)

God and Sin

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found.
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

Christianity is among the most punitive religions that anyone ever has imagined. As we know, all religions are man-made. And Roman Christianity, in particular, was designed by and for the Roman Emperor Constantine, as a way for him to control by fear the vast numbers of people in his empire. Constantine’s minions even invented a fake devil with powers, and a fiery hell in which Christians would burn forever for even minor sins, with “sins” being defined as infractions of religious rules. In defiance of all the laws of physics, sinners even would remain intact while burning alive in hell forever. Over time, especially sadistic Christian theologians have come up with their own especially awful refinements. Take Calvinism, for example, where God supposedly decides even before we are born who will go to heaven and who will instead burn in hell. If you are a Calvinist, you cannot know for your entire life on earth whether you are elect or you are damned, but whichever one it is, your fate is sealed before birth. No matter how much good you might do in your life, if you are a condemned Calvinist, then you will burn alive and aware in hell, regardless.  

Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416+) was a Medieval anchoress, mystic, and seer. She has been the subject of Richard Rohr’s daily meditations during this past week, and what she received from God as the truth about sin reminds us to listen to Jesus again when Jesus talks about sin! Richard Rohr, for those who have not been following him, is a widely revered Franciscan priest who heads the Center for Action and Contemplation (the CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We should just add that an anchoress was a woman, most often a nun, who in the Middle Ages was closed into the very wall of a church, without a door but with a window into the sanctuary so she could participate in the Mass, and also with a window to the outside so she could speak to and pray with those who passed by. No one now knows Julian of Norwich’s birth-name. What she still is known for is her youthful series of visions when she was very ill – she called them “showings” – and her later in life divine revelations from God. Julian’s revelations offer a loving alternative to the strict focus on sin which characterized the Christian theology of her time. Mirabai Starr of the Center for Action and Contemplation writes:  

“Julian of Norwich is known for her radically optimistic theology. Nowhere is this better illumined than in her reflections on sin. When Julian asked God to teach her about this troubling issue, he opened his Divine Being, and all she could see there was love. Every lesser truth dissolved in that boundless ocean…. Julian confesses, ‘The truth is, I did not see any sin. I believe that sin has no substance, not a particle of being, and cannot be detected at all except by the pain it causes. It is only the pain that has substance, for a while, and it serves to purify us, and make us know ourselves and ask for mercy.’ Starr clarifies where Julian located the impact of sin: “Julian informs us that the suffering we cause ourselves through our acts of greed and unconsciousness is the only punishment we endure. God, who is All-Love, is ‘incapable of wrath.’ And so it is a complete waste of time, Julian realized, to wallow in guilt. The truly humble thing to do when we have stumbled is to hoist ourselves to our feet as swiftly as we can and rush into the arms of God, where we will remember who we really are.”

This week, when I read this divine view of sin as it was expressed by a Medieval anchoress, I was astounded. Truth to tell, God speaks to each of us in our own language! And when a few years ago I asked God how God views sin, God showed me my own infant son, about eighteen months old, with a plastic cup of milk in his hand. Maybe his cup was orange. He was standing on his stubby legs and looking up at God, who was sitting on my living room sofa, and God resembled the painting of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with a long white beard. My baby and God were grinning at one another. What a beautiful moment! But then, whoopsie! The baby dropped his cup of milk, so there was milk all over the rug. My baby was surprised, and then his face puckered and he started to cry. But God laughed, so then the baby stopped crying and began to giggle. And God tousled his curly head and leaned and picked him up, and God gave him a great big hug.

And that is how God tells a twenty-first-century mother the way that God views sin. Sin feels to Me, God was saying, as it felt to you when your baby spilled milk on the living room rug. How important to you was that? And of course, I got God’s point! Yes, I wished the baby hadn’t spilled his milk because then I had to clean it up, but he was still just a spiritual baby. He would grow out of his clumsiness. In particular, with my good mothering, he would grow spiritually in love toward his union with the Godhead. I understood that God was telling me that God sees sin not as a spiritual flaw, but rather as a symptom of spiritual infancy. Sin is just something that humankind will grow beyond as we grow through lifetimes in our ability to love.

But what does Jesus say about sin? I wrote a blog post about sin a number of years ago. In fact, Jesus destroyed most of those old religious ideas about sin in one stroke! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

The concept of sin is grounded in mere religious laws. And remember that religions are created by people. In throwing away the Old Testament, Jesus discarded every Jewish law, so by definition, He abolished sin! But was this what He intended to do? I think the answer to this question is certainly yes! To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that Jesus pushed aside what were then inviolate religious laws and gave us cagey reasons for His doing so look like a campaign to discredit those laws without running afoul of the listening Temple guards. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.  But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here! But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.'” And the strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way some Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the guess that perhaps He was abolishing the very concept of sin, the more you realize that was exactly what He was doing! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s new law of love, and in doing that, He was announcing that we were ready to move above a stark and puerile thou-shalt-not morality, so then we could begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer so important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts. If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything that we do from out of that love is good and moral by definition. And when you think about it, you realize that in fact this is a much stricter standard than any old-style law ever could be. It requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are becoming ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts.

It is from this more profound base of understanding where there is only love that we come to understand why we cannot ever judge the woman who has committed adultery:

8 But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” (JN 8:1-11)

How wonderful! And how very much like the vignette about my toddler son that God put into my mind when I inquired of God how God views sin. And how God always has viewed sin.

Micah of Moresheth was a Hebrew prophet, and a contemporary of the great Isaiah. Micah has never been much considered, because He spoke even so long ago for mercy and love and against religiosity. You might say that Micah was three thousand years ahead of His time. He very long ago foresaw a day when we all would discover that in truth there really is a gentler and more loving genuine God who does not inspire our quivering fear or demand our sacrifices, and certainly one that does not demand that we sacrifice to God His own beloved Son. From a time eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Micah still speaks truth to us. And His words still sing! I discovered Micah one Sunday when I was ten or twelve, when our gentle pastor printed his words in our Sunday bulletin. I cut them out that day and taped them above my desk, where they remained for the rest of my growing-up:

“With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8).

Sin was then, is now, and always has been nothing more than a foolish and ignorant human idea.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come!
‘Twas grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead us home.

And when we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun!
We’ll have no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun….
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779) 

God and Suffering

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

God hath not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe.
He hath not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, Many a care.

 But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way.
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

I have on occasion heard from people who have emailed and told me that God should have prevented some tragedy or other in their own lives, or in the life of the world. So I will tell these folks why we plan such difficult lessons into our lives even before we are born, and how stressful or painful problems actually help us to grow spiritually, and why the fact that this life on earth is not our real life, and no one ever actually dies, means that everyone truly will be fine in the end, so please don’t take all of this so seriously! I have sometimes called things which might look like tragedies, or like evidence that God doesn’t care, what they actually are, which is divine gifts from which powerful learning and growth can arise. But for most of those who were complaining to me that God simply does not love us enough, I don’t think that my answers ever were of much help. The thought that God would allow this or that especially painful and upsetting thing to happen meant to the person who was complaining to me that God was not on the side of the angels after all.

I have gradually come to accept the fact that indeed God is only Love, despite the fact that bad things very often happen to good people. And bad things can happen even with what we might call the active participation of a perfectly loving God. Consider these facts:

  • This material reality is not our real life. Until you can get yourself grounded in two facts, you really don’t know anything. Study first the basic truth that this reality is consciousness-based. And then of course understand the fact that human life is eternal, and you will be eons ahead in grasping what really is going on! You will especially feel as if you almost can see the Mind of God working. In fact, everything that ever happens acttually is happening inside God’s Mind. So all is safe and limited, and it ends in God’s arms. How bad can things ever get?
  • The difficulties in our lives are geneerally of our own choosing. Before we are born, we plan these lives. And since we know that we are coming into each lifetime with the hope of gaining from it as much spiritual growth as possible, together with our spirit guides and others, we will often plan difficult and stressful experiences from which we can gain great spiritual lessons. People have insisted to me that they never would have planned their awful brain cancer diagnosis or the death of their child! And they have bitterly sworn these things to me, even as I could see them deepening and growing as they never could have otherwise done, had nothing bad ever happened to them.
  • Pain helps us to learn and grow. You can see this happening all around you if you look for it, and at all levels. If the baby doesn’t fall down a few times, he never can learn how to walk, now, can he? When some experiment of Thomas Edison’s failed for the umpteenth time, and a friend commiserated with him about the frustration of having that happen yet again, Edison told his friend cheerfully that the failure was not a problem for him at all. He said, “We are just one failure closer to figuring out what will work!”
  • The suffering in each of us calls out to other people. On an individual scale, we learn to feel compassion, and then to feel and give love, by seeing other people who are damaged and who need and are grateful for our help. On a greater, and even on an epic scale, we can see that the result of bullying is damage and pain in unthinkable numbers; so ultimately, we are coming to learn that such bullying must never be allowed to happen again. Humankind as an entire species slowly but inevitably advances in part through the ghastly learning of great wars and profound calamities.
  • Physical pain cannot be remembered. It is an oddity of physical pain that, while it is useful for training purposes, and the fact of having had a pain can be remembered, the sensation of pain itself cannot be recalled to mind. It is one of the very few things which mercifully cannot be re-experienced, which is of course yet one more beautiful sign of God’s great mercy.

Our beloved friend, the great afterlife expert Dr. R. Craig Hogan, calls this brief and often painful material life “earth school,” which indeed is what it is. And that is all that it is! Inevitably, each of us comes here to learn, to get our shins bruised and our knuckles rapped because that is how we best can learn spiritually. But then, yes, we finally do get to go home from school to milk and cookies, and to Mom’s and Dad’s hugs. And then there will be another school day tomorrow. And perhaps another school day after that. Some lifetimes on earth we will enjoy, but many of them – true! – will be pretty awful. Eventually, though, if we work hard and learn well, we know that we can look forward to growing up spiritually. We know that the last of all our lifetimes on earth will come eventually, after which we will forever enjoy basking in the ultimate light of God’s perfect Love.

What does Jesus have to say about all this? Jesus first tells us what we need to be learning and devoutly practicing in order to help to make this life on earth our last necessary earth-lifetime. All of this is basic stuff! Most of us can now recite it by heart: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

There are many other places in the Gospels, too, where we can turn when we want to feel closer to Jesus as He helps us to feel closer to, and helps us to somewhat better understand the God of all. And one of those wonderful Gospel chapters that I enjoy reading, and then I think for awhile about the words of my beloved Friend, mostly because there is so much there to wonder about, is the Thirteenth Chapter of the Book of Luke:

13 There were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had shed along with their sacrifices. 2 And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? 3 I tell you, no, but unless you reform your own minds, you will all likewise perish. 4 Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no, but unless you purify your own minds, you all likewise will perish.”

6 And He began telling this parable: “A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any. 7 And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’ 8 And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; 9 and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, then cut it down.’”

10 And He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your sickness.” 13 And He laid His hands on her; and immediately she was made erect again and began glorifying God. 14 But the synagogue official, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, began saying to the crowd in response, “There are six days in which work should be done; so come during them and get healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead him away to water him? 16 And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this bond on the Sabbath day?” 17 As He said this, all His opponents were being humiliated; and the entire crowd was rejoicing over all the glorious things being done by Him.

18 So He was saying, “What is the kingdom of God like, and to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.”

20 And again He said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? 21 It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”

22 And He was passing through from one city and village to another, teaching, and proceeding on His way to Jerusalem. 23 And someone said to Him, “Lord, are there just a few who are being saved?” And He said to them, 24 “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. 25 Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ 26 Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; 27 and He will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you are from; depart from Me, all you evildoers.’ 28 In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves being thrown out. 29 And they will come from east and west and from north and south, and will recline at the table in the kingdom of God. 30 And behold, some are last who will be first and some are first who will be last.”

31 Just at that time some Pharisees approached, saying to Him, “Go away, leave here, for Herod wants to kill You.” 32 And He said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I reach My goal.’ 33 Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day; for it cannot be that a prophet would perish outside of Jerusalem. 34 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it! 35 Behold, your house is left to you desolate; and I say to you, you will not see Me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (LK 13:1-35)

Oh my dear ones, every time I read that Gospel chapter, there is something different in it that catches on my mind! But to end this investigation of these complex, and perhaps difficult mysteries on a note of pure praise to God, here is the 46th Psalm. This lovely Psalm of the Sons of Korah was being sung in praise to the Love of God as far back in human history as the days of Moses, nearly half a millennium before those beautiful Psalms that were first sung to God’s Love by King David. Even as much as thirty-five hundred years ago, no matter how much suffering was then being visited upon humankind, we still in response sang to God songs of gratitude and jubilation! Oh, what perfect peace comes to us, even today, from these simple words sung in golden comfort: “Be still, and know that I am God.” 

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in times of trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
3 Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy dwelling places of the Most High.
5 God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
6 The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;
He raised His voice, the earth melted.
7 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

8 Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has wrought desolations in the earth.
9 He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariots with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in all the earth.”
11 The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

 

Ours To Do

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.

 Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Jesus came to earth determined to do what even He must have known was going to be impossible to do without our help. And human beings are deeply tribal by nature, able to trust only a maximum number of one hundred and fifty people at a time as our true familiars. That is called “Dunbar’s Number,” believe it or not. And it may well be that this maximum possible number of familiars that any of us can maintain has always been true of us, since even back as far as our Cro-Magnon days. It has been true since literally time out of mind! Jesus, on the other hand, came to transform us all into one great and perfectly loving kingdom of God on earth. So we might actually call eight billion people “Jesus’s Number”. Jesus wants us to be able to see every other person on earth as our personal soul-brother. He wants us to love and trust all eight billion strangers at once as members of our own great and much-beloved and entirely trusted tribe.

How did Jesus Himself put it? He said when He was asked what was the greatest commandment, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Such simple, and such truly beautiful words!

Jesus called it “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” In the afterlife we actually do feel as if we are immersed in God’s love, so we might also say of it, “As above, so below”. I used to fret a good deal about what Jesus even meant by the term “the kingdom of God,” and whether perhaps the terms “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven” perhaps meant different things. Eventually I concluded, for reasons too convoluted to pause and delineate here, that both terms referred to the highest afterlife levels, the levels just below the Godhead level. I decided that the fact that the Gospel of Matthew generally refers to this level of spiritual perfection as the kingdom of heaven, while the other three Biblical Gospels use the term “the kingdom of God,” only as two different means of expression, or of translation. But both terms mean the same thing.

Yet if Jesus came to bring that sort of universal love to all the earth, we seem even after two thousand years to have made no progress in that direction.  I am sorry to blight your beautiful morning, but here is one of the most disheartening things that I have ever seen.  An American Jew recently passed himself off as Italian and went to the West Bank to interview some of its inhabitants. And the plain ignorance and hatred of Jews on the part of these Muslims living right next to Israel is beyond your worst imaginings.

So, what happens now? Is there anything that you and I can do at this stage to even help at all? It seems to be time for us to say plainly that every religion has been altogether useless in our efforts to bring peace to the world. All that our religions have managed to do has been to make all our problems even worse! And if you didn’t believe this was true before, then be sure to have a listen to those Muslims living in the West Bank in the recording that is linked above.

I didn’t know until the summer of 2022 that Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, is Jesus’s close eternal friend, and that Thomas takes me along when he visits with Jesus in the third level of the astral plane on nearly every night of my life while my body sleeps. Thomas is my spirit guide, so he is not supposed to leave me alone during my lifetime on earth. He also is a source of friendship and support for Jesus, so his solution is simply to give me amnesia about all these nightly jaunts that we share. However, I was supposed to be working on building a website for Jesus in 2022, so very briefly there was a reason for me to be remembering these evenings when I was hanging out with Thomas and Jesus in the middle of the night. Which was why my summer of 2022 was so extraordinary. On many nights, I would go to sleep at eight o’clock or so, which is usual for me, since I normally wake up at midnight and I do my best writing between midnight and three or four in the morning. But often during that summer, I would come to awareness soon after my physical eyes closed; and amazingly, Thomas and I would be there with Jesus on His astral riverbank! It was then that I got to ask Jesus so many questions. And one question that I asked Him that summer was whether He really had come to earth intending to abolish all religions. I did not yet fully comprehend, even so recently as two years ago, how abhorrent to Jesus religions really are. Let me set this amazing scene for you:

I came to awareness sitting beside Jesus where we often sat to talk together during that summer. We were sitting on His riverbank on the third level of the astral plane, with our astral feet in the living water that feels like silk, and feeding His neon-colored fish with grain that simply would appear in our hands. He has a flock of pet deer, too, and they were grazing in a field behind us. Jesus always would tamp down His personal energy by a lot for me so I could sit beside Him that way, but still, there was a little warm buzz from Him that I could feel. And on the third astral level, there is a diffuse light with no sun, and a many-colored sky that makes the atmosphere feel something like a perpetual sunset. There is a lovely scent that isn’t quite like flowers, and a feeling of love that is always around you.

As Jesus and I sat there, tossing bits of grain to the fish, I said respectfully and rather shyly, “My Lord, is it really true that when You came to earth, one of Your reasons for coming was to abolish religions? To help people relate to God more directly?”

As He often did, Jesus read my mind, and He took His answer from my own mind. After a moment He said, “Little One, you know it to be true.”

He said that gently. He was smiling a little. He knows how much his presence overwhelms me.

A year ago, I wrote a blog post that summarized what Jesus is quoted in the Biblical Gospels as saying about religions. I cannot now improve upon what I said there, so please consider that post to be incorporated here.

We tend to think of Jesus as having taught only or mostly Jews, but that was really not the case. As He began His earthly ministry, He moved out of Nazareth and away from the more narrowly Jewish culture into which He had been born, into “Galilee of the Gentiles,” to fulfill Isaiah’s prophesy (see MT 4:15). And it was there that He first began to call His disciples. The excerpt from the Book of Matthew quoted below describes those early days in Galilee:

17 From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 18Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. 19 And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. 21 Going on from there He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and He called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him. 23 Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. 24 The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them. 25 Large crowds followed Him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan (MT 4:17-25).

And as Jesus collected His first disciples, He continued to teach about the kingdom of heaven wherever He went, to the crowds of hundreds, and then of thousands of people who followed Him everywhere. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31–32).

This sounds almost like a throwaway story, but it is an important teaching! Pliny the Elder, a botanist and a contemporary of Jesus, wrote two things about the mustard plant: It is medicinal, but Pliny warned against growing it because it tends to take over the entire garden. So those would have been the images on which Jesus was building. He taught that the kingdom of God is good for us – it is grows from a tiny seed, and it is healing, transformative, and life-giving – and once we espouse and cultivate it, the kingdom of God will grow rapidly in the world. Jesus talks about loving everyone and turning the other cheek, doing to others as we would have them do unto us, and living a simple and gentle life. He said that once we are perfectly living these lives filled with love that He prescribes, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. He intended the old world to soon be over. 

So then, why is the old world not over by now? What happened? I think the answer to that question is a simple one. The kingdom of God on earth is internal. It is something that each of us must individually allow and accept to grow within us. And until each of us, individually, is ready to do that, it cannot arrive. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Every time that each of us prays as Jesus taught us to pray, and each time that we mean those words as we say them, we begin to make the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth even possible! As you will recall, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed (or holy) be Your name.10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:9-10). As you have said those words, have you ever said them consciously, thoughtfully, with meaning, with yielding, and actually thinking with full awareness about what you were saying, and what it deeply means? I myself never had, until Thomas first made me realize the amazing importance of each of those words!

The people to whom Jesus first taught The Lord’s Prayer did not know that this earthly reality is created by and composed of what we each experience as Consciousness. In fact, nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness actually exists. And there is in fact just one Consciousness, which all eight billion of us who are now on earth share. So as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibratory rate away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love, we also will minutely raise the vibratory rate of everyone else on earth. Which means that as more and more of us raise the vibration of the Consciousness within us to the level of God’s pure and perfect love, oh yes indeed, we will easily help every other person on earth to raise his or her own spiritual vibratory rate as well. So then we can at last all together easily bring the kingdom of God on earth!  

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony. 

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Hatred

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword!
His truth is marching on.
Glory, Glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

 I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His day is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

My beloved Thomas and I are still trying to figure out which one of us has won our bet of last week, or even if in fact there ever was a bet that was formally entered between us. Thomas thought it was important that we write a blog post about the flat-out, beyond-amazing moment when God intervened just as someone tried to assassinate one of the American presidential candidates. Thomas wanted to use that horrifying incident as a teaching moment about some of the very rare times when God actually does in fact play an active role in human events, and he wanted to talk about why and how God might ever want to intervene. Thomas was pretty pumped about our using God’s saving of Donald Trump’s life as a teaching moment. But I, on the contrary, was sure that if we wrote about that when things in this country are at such a fever pitch of negativity as they are right now, all that we were going to get would be a whole lot of vitriol thrown at us. No one was going to want to learn from that event anything nuanced about how God might work in the world.

So, who was right? I think that I was more right in this case than he was. Actually, those commenters who read our blog post last week before commenting did try to do what we had requested, and they viewed this as an exercise in better understanding how God sometimes works in the world, rather than just voicing their personal animosity for the candidate who had been shot and only wounded. And we do so very much appreciate those honest commenters who spoke so wisely and so well! There were other people, though, who ferreted out even from a distance the possibility that here was yet another spot where they might have a chance to voice their hatred for Donald Trump, and they attempted to pile on and do that. Fortunately, I get to approve first-time commenters, so I spared you all their loathsome bile. And as I was doing that, Thomas said, “Well, we’ve got a great topic for next week’s blog post, if nothing else.”

Wow, was he ever right about that! I don’t think that we ever have talked about hatred as a blog topic here, not once in our more than ten years of writing these weekly posts. How can we have missed such an obvious topic? Hatred is both sadly almost universal and currently highly topical. It is something that those who fall victim to it tend so often to see as even actually a virtue. Surely some of those who were in the grips of hatred and commented on our post of last week felt virtuous about their hatred. Which fact astonished me.

I was about to begin by telling you that hatred is useless, and then to go on and tell you how spiritually damaging hatred is to the hater. But no, there is indeed one situation in which hatred can be useful, so let’s first just mention that. The only situation in which hatred can be useful is in the case of an all-out war meant to end in the civilizational death of one set of combatants. Yes, I will indeed cede to you that point. So that is the topic of our frame-verse today, and a lovely frame-verse it is indeed, even if we all hope that we never will have to sing it! Killing another human being is not a natural thing, so if you have to go to war for real, then by all means, gin up in yourself some hatred so you can become a sure-enough killer. But is there an all-out war at that level going on for you at this moment? No? Then no one has any justification for hating anyone else, nor for assuming that God hates anyone at all!

 Never having talked about nor written about hatred, I am not sure how even to begin to write about it now. In fact, in peacetime there is nothing that is good or useful about hatred on any level. Not for the hater, not for the one being hated, and not for the world at large. So, let’s begin there:

  • What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. All the rest of what seems to exist is imagined by our minds. Our minds are all part of that one great scale of human consciousness, and like all forms of energy, consciousness vibrates. Its vibration is in the key of human emotion, so at its highest vibration, consciousness vibrates as perfect love; while at its lowest emotion, consciousness vibrates as seething hatred, rage, and terror. Consciousness is what we are.
  • The reason why we choose to be born on earth is so we can learn how to raise our own consciousness vibration more firmly toward love. There are a few other reasons, but for nearly all of us, that is pretty much the sole reason why we are here. We are going through all that we go through on earth as exercises to move ourselves away from all the lowest and ishiest emotions, and ever closer to ever more perfect love. So, if rather than zealously doing all that we can to raise our personal consciousness vibration toward ever more perfect love, we are instead encouraging in ourselves ever more hatred and anger toward, say, certain politicians or other public figures who aren’t even directly in our own lives, we will be severely lowering our personal consciousness vibration, rather than raising it. And that can result in our complete waste of this entire lifetime!
  • The people that we hate in public life don’t care that we hate them. Sadly, politicians assume that being hated by a certain number of people goes with the territory, and they really don’t care. Your hatred and rage doesn’t harm them at all. There you are, seething with your mighty rage at Biden or Kamala or Trump, or indeed at whomever you might have decided is worth your spending all your rage and hate on this person, your bile, your sour stomach acid and your poor head aching; and the object of all your rage will just go happily on, perhaps even hitting a hole-in-one at the seventh hole. He or she neither knows nor cares how you feel.
  • Hating even one person, no matter how justified your hatred in that single case might feel to you, establishes in your mind a pathway for a hatred habit that makes your future hatreds of individual people, and then of groups of people, very much easier. And it forever destroys your personal peace. As more and more negative energy accumulates in your mind, you also are looking more closely at each new person that you meet, and even at each new person that you see, to determine whether this is someone else that you feel is worthy of your hatred. I kid you not! This is really what happens. Not to Donald Trump or Kamala, of course. It is what happens to you, if you allow yourself to actively hate even one person.

We in the northern American states watched in amazement during the nineteen-fifties and -sixties as the schools in some of our southeastern states had to be racially integrated by armed police. And all because some light-skinned American southerners had taught themselves over time to hate dark-skinned people. Do you see how this works? Once hatred gains a foothold in people’s minds, it is incredibly so easily self-reinforcing. And it ends altogether even the possibility of any spiritual growth in those who espouse it, which is why some southern churches even to this day are sadly full of whole congregations that are oddly insular and permanently angry.

Ginned-up hatred of an opposition leader is sometimes used by politicians as a tool to rile up their bases. It is now being used pretty forcefully by some Democrats against Mr. Trump, probably because, as I remarked last week, I think it is easy to see Trump as a highly distasteful public figure. He has a huge ego, he makes up nasty names for people, he insists on always being right, he loves to show off his wealth, and he was a big womanizer when he was young: what is there not to dislike about this man? But you cannot give in to the temptation to hate Donald Trump without risking the complete destruction of your own spiritual progress for this lifetime. For my own part, I have successfully resisted the temptation to hate him by looking at his children, all of whom seem by every account to be happy and successful drug- and vice-free adults who all remain close to and idolize their father. There must be something good in Donald Trump, because a loving fatherhood of five adult children when three mothers are involved is a difficult trick to pull off, and it does not happen by chance. I also consider the fact that Trump’s presidential term was much better for his country than was Joe Biden’s term that followed it, from the Abraham Accords and no foreign wars to a decent economy with low inflation and a surplus of oil right down to the efficiently closed southern border. I also have received a couple of emails during this past week from people who told me about some surprising private kindnesses from Donald Trump that he never has wanted to make public. So I focus on just these good things. I ignore the things that I always have disliked about the man.

What does our beloved Jesus say about hate? He says very little, actually. “Hate” is such a strongly negative word that Jesus seldom uses it. But only consider this string of statements in the Gospel of John that comes toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life as He is preparing His disciples to go out into the world and teach the Lord’s Way:

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed” (JN 3:20).

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil” (JN 7:7). 

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

“He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (JN 15: 23-25).

So, the Christianity which should have been rooted in the love-based teachings of Jesus alone, was instead founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine some three hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. And it was based not on anything that Jesus taught, but instead it was based on the Emperor Constantine’s own fear-based ideas about Jesus’s having died for our sins. To ensure his false Christianity’s success, Constantine massacred or drove off into the deep desert every follower of Jesus who would not convert to His own fear- and hatred-based religion.

As we now contemplate the evils of a political system that uses the ginning-up of hatred in us of one politician against another, we must never forget one crucial fact. We come to earth to raise our personal spiritual vibration more toward love! That is the whole reason why we even are here in the first place. But if we submit to these hatred-filled political games, even for a moment, we might well be rendering useless and wasted our entire lifetime that is now being lived upon this earth!  

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal.”
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Since God is marching on!

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat!
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Our God is marching on!

 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! While God is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) & John William Steffe (1830-1890), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).

God’s Hand

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

… You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!”
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.

… The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear.
Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield.
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

I gave up on watching television around the turn of this century. It wasn’t anything I planned to do, but I cannot abide canned laughter, and gradually I stopped caring about whatever the daily news might be. And wow, what a sinkhole for time TV was! Lately, though, I have found that spending a little before-dinner time with my husband is nice. My mind peters out for working shortly before five o’clock each day, and our great room opens onto a snack counter into the kitchen, where my husband will be making our family’s dinner. I used to be a terrible cook, but my husband is a happy chef who does surprising things like using recipes and thinking through creative salads and desserts. I can chat with him across the counter while I do my daily treadmill steps.

My husband cares about politics. But I try hard to ignore politics, because it is one of my guiding principles that if I cannot effect an outcome, then I don’t want to even know about the problem. Why worry about something that you cannot fix? For Christmas last year, our children gave Edward what must be the world’s most gigantic television, which now takes up the wall above our great room fireplace. So last Saturday, he was watching a political rally get started while he made our dinner and I treaded away. I usually wouldn’t bother, but once I had finished my steps, I sat down on the couch for a moment and watched the start of the rally that he was watching. My only thought was amazement that so many people would sit in the un-sheltered sun for so long, just to hear from Donald Trump? Donald Trump, for heaven’s sake. Red hat and all. So he went up on that stage, and he began to talk. And then he turned his head to point out some things on a diagram, and there were pops that I knew were gunfire, although the announcer told us they were firecrackers. Trump grabbed at his ear, and then he ducked down on his own so I knew that he had not been hit. I thought perhaps an insect might have bitten him? But of course, by now you know the rest.

I had a live, front-row seat to the moment when Donald Trump’s fortuitous split-second turn of his head meant that instead of being assassinated on live TV, he came within a fraction of an inch of dying. Given the size of that television, it happened life-sized and right in front of me. I tried not to write about that moment this week. I swear. I really tried. But as much as I have repeatedly asked my Thomas to give me something else to write about, he has continued to flesh out that moment as a topic. He tells me that he wants all of us who are still in bodies to better understand how God will sometimes actively work in the world.

Very few people who are now alive are aware that there was a long-ago moment in American history when God also put God’s hand on the scale this way. It was during the American Revolutionary War. I only understand how close the American colonies came to losing their Revolution against the British Empire because thirty years ago I wrote My Thomas, which is an historically accurate novel about Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage that neatly spanned that Revolutionary period. Back then, I did considerable research, so I know that it was really only the extremely fortuitous intervention of France on the side of the American colonies that enabled them to win their war. France sent a fleet to prevent Lord Cornwallis’s army from being rescued by sea at Yorktown, Virginia in October of 1781, which then forced Cornwallis to surrender his whole army to George Washington. And the painstaking courting of France to intervene on the colonies’ side had been largely the work of one of the unlikeliest of men, a charming reprobate named Benjamin Franklin. But it was a very near thing! If not for Benjamin Franklin, with his wit and charm and his amusing penchant for odd public inventions, and his willingness to spend so much time in France courting France’s support for the American colonies, Great Britain likely would have worn the American colonies down fairly soon thereafter, until they felt forced to sue for peace. British America then would have become like Canada or Australia. Not such a terrible fate, of course. But then there would have been no Declaration of Independence. No Constitution. And no government of, by, and for the people. No single continent-wide nation, and certainly not the heritage that we Americans 248 years later are so very proud to claim!

My Thomas tells me that indeed we witnessed a genuine miracle performed directly by God last Saturday evening. He wants us all to know that. As was true when God reached into human history and used the unlikely person of Benjamin Franklin to bring France into the American Revolution in order to give these colonies a freer and stronger beginning as a nation, with wonderful founding documents built around freedom for each individual and a continent-wide nation, so again on last Saturday eveing God reached into human history and turned Donald Trump’s head just enough and at just the right moment to save his life. We can only guess why. Perhaps, since God’s hand was in the founding of this nation, so also God’s interest continues in its governance? For whatever reason, it will be interesting to see now how this presidential election turns out, and whether God casts an overriding vote there as well. Thomas tells me that it is highly unusual for God to so minutely intervene in human events this way. But God, outside of time, knows our future risks, as of course you and I do not.

They are sometimes called “God Winks.” These unexpected moments when God reaches into human space and time and does something, and we notice it. The first time I was made aware that these things can happen was more than fifty years ago, in the late sixties or the early seventies, and in a popular science magazine. Back as late as the nineteen-seventies, apparently there were still many empty spots in the night sky remaining to be found. Who knew? And who cared? So back then, I came across an article in a popular science magazine by an astronomer whose hobby was filling in those empty spots in the sky. I kid you not. He would train a telescope on a spot in the night sky that was empty, and he would document that fact. Photograph it. Well, will you look at that! Entirely empty. Then he would come back precisely one year later and look at that same spot in the night sky through that same telescope, and now that spot would be full of billions of galaxies. His article in that old science magazine told us that this happened every time he tried it. He said that there were others, too, who shared his peculiar hobby. What would you call it?  Pointing out to God the spots in the sky that still needed to be filled in with stars? This astronomer predicted that before very long, it was going to be hard to find any starless spots left.

Nowadays astronomers’ equipment is a lot more sophisticated, and sometimes they still will find little weirdnesses in the night sky. In a recent case, what astronomers have found is a few fully-formed and mature galaxies at a time in the very early history of the cosmos when they simply should not be there. The human playground which is our reality was in fact created in relative earth-time a lot more recently than God wants us to believe that it was created. So of course, the cosmos is a lot younger as well, which means that our finding mature galaxies back then where they do not belong is not a God Wink, precisely; it is more like a “God Oopsie”, if you will.  But nobody is perfect!

Now let’s return to the topic of last Saturday’s genuine miracle performed by God. The more I consider it, the more amazing it seems. Late in the week I came across a computer reconstruction of how it happened that I would love to show to you now, but it was buried in a long article and not removable. Direct forehead shot. His head moves just enough at the last possible micro-instant, so instead of entering his forehead and his brain and killing him, the bullet grazes the right side of his head and then his head moves back again into what would have been the path if another bullet that had followed the first, just as his hand comes up in response to the pain of his having felt that first bullet hit his right ear. So he is beginning to duck down, and that next bullet just misses the top of his head. And it all happened in a micro-instant in earth-terms. Very neatly done, dear God, I must say. Truly amazingly very well done.

Donald Trump is two months older than I am. He was a publicity-hound when young, so I have always been aware of him. He had a big, brash, in-your-face ego, and he was a New York libertine. I can see how he might make a good politician, with that ego; and having run large businesses might have given him some good executive experience. But he didn’t seem to be the sort of morally upright person that you would think that God might choose? However, in the past week my Thomas has taught me that actually, Donald Trump is “of a type” that God does choose. Together with Benjamin Franklin and also the ancient Hebrew King David, born a thousand years before Jesus, who is someone else that Thomas has added to our short list of three who are the sort of man that God often relies upon for God’s Own purposes. Here are three reasons why:

FIRST, all three were sexual libertines when young. King David, Benjamin Franklin, and Donald Trump, all three of them were wild to an unusual extent for their respective places and times. Do you want to see a sexual libertine? I’ll give you one. King David had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines, but he lusted after Bathsheba, too, so he arranged for her husband to be killed in battle since David had gotten her pregnant while the man was away fighting in David’s army. (She later gave birth to David’s heir, Solomon, but that is another story.) All of this might perhaps indicate an excess of testosterone in the three of them? Who knows? But it certainly seems to indicate that human sexual morality is not a priority on God’s list.

SECOND, they were and are big, ambitious, independent thinkers. Again, all three of them. And when it comes to caring about the well-being of the people they feel responsible for, these men’s morality is off the charts (Well, maybe David’s not quite so much) All three were and are fiercely courageous nonconformists, willing to stick their necks out, and to lead and to fight for their cause, whatever that cause might be. My husband tells me that in Donald Trump’s case, this means giving up a billionaire’s retirement for his vision that he can somehow reclaim the Founders’ original vision for the American people.

THIRD, they were and are amazingly stubborn about holding fast to whatever might  be   their cause. To see Donald Trump stand up at once with his fist in the air and his head above his Secret Service protection, even though he knew he had a bullet wound to the head for heaven’s sake and there still might be bullets flying, and he was shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” was unbelievable. We were in full courageous-lunatic-battles-for-his-cause territory right there!

None of these men were traditionally religious. Not at first. King David grew to rely on God, and to become a wonderful psalmist as some of his more miraculous battlefield successes made it ever clearer to him that he was getting supernatural help. And some who watched the Republican Convention thought that Donald Trump, too, seemed to have about him the serene look of a man transformed. Is it true that when they brought on stage the uniform of Corey Comperatore, the fireman who died at that rally shielding his wife and daughters from a bullet, Donald Trump actually hugged and kissed the man’s uniform and helmet? It seems apparent that it wasn’t that these three men had chosen a religious cause to champion, but rather God knows our deepest hearts. And the causes that had seized each of these men’s minds were causes that also, even if  only by coincidence, turned out to be very important to God.

Of course, in this case we don’t yet know why God chose to save Donald Trump’s life. I have even wondered whether it might have been primarily for the nomination of JD Vance, the very young man of the people that Donald Trump chose for his vice president on the following Monday, that Trump’s life was saved. And since this is not a political blog I ask that you not discuss in the comments here any specific politician, but please save those discussions for more appropriate venues.

We only know that, amazingly and wonderfully, it did happen. God Winked at all of us last Saturday evening, and a life was saved. And no matter what your own politics might be, it does seem good for all of us to know that just as God cared enough 248 years ago to help those founding British  colonists to make a stronger beginning as a nation here, so God still seems to care enough about this nation now to have an opinion about who might be the better choice for our next president. Even though we don’t yet know the reason why God might have made this choice.

… You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come…
And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings.
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun!
And hold you in the palm of His hand.

… For to His angels He’s given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways.
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.
… And He will raise you up on eagles’ wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn.
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His hand.
… And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand.
– Michael Joncas, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1977)

Your Spiritual Time

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way!
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!

Oh yes, I can make it now, the pain is gone.
All of the bad feelings have disappeared.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972).

The blog post that we gave to you last week was a labor of love for my beloved Thomas. Perhaps it was that for Jesus as well, although He lives His eternal life more privately. To be frank, I didn’t realize when my spirit guide asked me to search on “sin” in Biblegateway.com, the online searchable Bible, precisely what I was going to find that Jesus had said about sin during His entire earthly ministry. My memory had been, however, just what you saw from us last week, so when I did my search, I found no surprises. Jesus did indeed amazingly trivialize even the very concept of sin while He was here among us and teaching on earth.

Jesus did to sin pretty much what John Fitzgerald Kennedy did to fedora hats in 1960. During the whole first half of the twentieth century, and even during all of the Great Depression, no respectable man in the Western world would consider himself to be fully dressed without a suit and tie, an overcoat, and one of those stylish fedora hats! But JFK was elected President in 1960, and he didn’t like to mess up his hair, so I don’t think that he ever once in his life was willing to wear a fedora hat, not even to his Inauguration. So then within months after JFK’s election to the American Presidency, fedoras immediately and completely and forever no longer mattered at all.  

Jesus’s trivialization of the concept of sin was not quite so extreme as what JFK did to the concept of fedora hats, but it was close. Jesus simply reduced sin to its proper readily forgivable place, which is very far below God’s love in importance. And therefore, Jesus made the breaking of human religious rules to be now only minor and trivial, and quite readily instantly forgivable. But even that was a tremendous and a downright shocking step for Jesus to take in the first-century Hebrew world! I think it is hard now really for us to fully appreciate just how alarming Jesus’s teachings were to those who first heard them.

Those teachings must have hit people more or less the way the nineteen-sixties hit the world of the Fifties, only perhaps even more so. I was there in the Sixties. I remember it well! The nineteen-sixties were a wonderful time to be young, and if you are younger than maybe seventy years old now, I can only tell you that you missed something big. Oh yes, it also was awful in its way, what with the Vietnam War and the draft and the sense that whatever the previous culture had been, it was gone like a shot and it would never come back. But to be young at a sudden cultural hinge-point, and to realize that what you are witnessing is huge, also is a wonderful and glorious feeling, provided that the cultural hinge happens peacefully. As Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (LK 12:49)

Yes indeed, Jesus came to earth to kindle a major cultural and spiritual hinge, a cleansing fire of great modernization. When Jesus was on earth, He was the very model of a nineteen-sixties radical, a brilliant young man impatient with all the old ideas and all the old ways, and full of new ideas that were so extreme that they made you gape in amazement. I knew some radical young men in the Sixties. One of them was even my boyfriend. And they rather reminded me of Jesus, so on fire as they were with their big new ideas, and impatient as they were to transform the world. What they were peddling in the Sixties was a blend of socialism and communism, and I listened, but they were too extreme for me! I did try pot, although I never inhaled. And when my boyfriend urged me to come with him to California and join the Revolution, although I did love him, that was a bridge too far. I do think, though, that two thousand years ago, sitting on that hillside and hearing the extremely radical words of the Sermon on the Mount for the first time from the radical young man that Jesus was, even as un-radical as I was when I was young, I think that perhaps I would have gone for His particular brand of Big New Ideas.

A lot of people went for Jesus’s Big New Ideas! What He was preaching was a deep freedom of mind that was brand-new in the ancient world. It was freedom from all religious fears and constraints, and the notion of replacing it all with a radical forgiveness and love from God that was beyond anything that anyone ever had heretofore imagined. When Jesus was asked by a clergyman who was trying to test Him what was the foremost commandment, He didn’t name any of the hundreds of religious rules in the Hebrews’ religious rulebook, the Talmud. Instead He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Wow, so that’s it? That really is all? Jesus does away with every one of those old rigid busybody religious rules, and He tells us that God truly does perfectly love and forgive us, without our having to pay attention to any of the rest of that religious nonsense? The only law now is that we must love God, and also we must love our fellow man? It was hard at first for people to believe that they really could be hearing Jesus right. And then Jesus performed miracles, and He died on the cross, and He rose from the dead to prove that our lives really will be eternal, and bit by bit His Word and His message began to catch fire and spread among men. And His Apostles patiently reinforced His words. So that really is It, then? For real? You mean it? Okay! Then I’m in! It is no wonder at all that with Jesus’s Apostles teaching as itinerant preachers, Jesus’s new Way spread so rapidly in the centuries after His death and resurrection, all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Jesus’s Way had millions of devoted followers by the time the Roman armies set out to crush all aspects of His new movement but the one that Constantine decided eventually to make his own. And that one, of course, Constantine felt that He could use as a fear-based means of control. Constantine affirmed the central teaching of the strain that he preferred, which was that Jesus had died on the cross as a sin-offering. Then Constantine held the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to formalize his new Christian religion, and to create its Bible that was based on the Hebrew Law and the Prophets, where he included Jesus’s teachings as well.

This notion of Jesus as a Sixties-era radical is not only mine. Others also have seen the resemblance, but I never realized how perfect it is until a commenter to our post last week suggested that the Sixties-era song “I Can See Clearly Now” might make a good frame-verse. And then one of the classes that I am currently teaching happened to be studying Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. There we all were, sitting on that hillside and listening to Jesus, and I thought, Omigod, there it is. Of course! He was creating a cultural hinge! Jesus even said it at the time!  

If it were not for Constantine’s destruction of Jesus’s Way, and his foolish creation of yet one more old-style religion in its place, surely long before now the whole world could have been following Jesus’s radical spiritual movement, which was brand-new two thousand years ago and based solely in God’s pure forgiveness and love!

As it is, however, we have been stuck with Roman Christianity for the past two thousand years. Like all religions, Christianity is fear-based and not love-based, and that is especially true in the case of Catholicism, and indeed also true of nearly all of the forty-two-thousand-odd versions of Christianity that are in existence today.  So as it is presently practiced, Christianity is hopelessly unable to be of much spiritual use to its faithful. Even if any uplifting love-based spiritual practice that was taught by Jesus might have been followed, it would have been weighed down and circumvented by every strictly practicing Christian’s overwhelming religious terrors. Down through the ages, however, there have been Desert Fathers and Mothers, and then monks and nuns, those living apart from the church’s fear-based teachings who have studied only the Lord’s words, and they have modeled after His teachings their very simple lives being lived apart from the world. And as we have said elsewhere, Jesus Himself has spent the past seventeen hundred years on the third astral level, and in devoted, single-minded service to the post-death healing of the hundreds of millions who have been damaged by Roman Christianity.

And meanwhile, as my Thomas is fond of reminding me, Jesus has become generally the most famous, the most popular, and considered the most influential person of all time. This is true, even though Jesus has not lived on earth for more than two thousand years! That is the one useful thing that Constantine’s religion actually has done for us: it has spread the precious name of Jesus in the most favorable possible terms far and wide. And as the religion that bears Jesus’s name but ignores what He taught at last is fading, we who love Jesus and who best understand the teachings that He gave to us as He originally taught them, free and untarnished by Roman Christianity’s fears, can begin at last to follow His true Way. We can make His Way the basis of our own spiritual lives. And then we can teach it to the world.

So, how can we begin at last to learn and to follow the Lord’s Way ourselves? Well, it’s simple, but it does require that you set aside some time each day to be with Jesus in God’s presence on that Judean hill. This must be your time alone with them in spirit. Ideally, it will be half an hour or more as your day is winding down. And do this every day! Habit is the secret to creating transformation.

You might experiment to see what works best for you. Here is what some people who want to immerse themselves in the Lord’s Word so they can better grow spiritually have found works well for them:

  • Leave off attendance at any Christian church, if you have not already done that. Even the sight of bare crucifixes can trigger residual feelings of  Christian guilt which are so habitual that you may not even be consciously aware of them.
  • Print the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5-7, in a print-size that is comfortable for you to read, and perhaps laminate it. You might do this with other favorite Gospel speeches by Jesus as well, and keep this reading material beside a comfortable chair in a private corner.
  • Welcome both God and Jesus into your mind. It can be best if you have a simple, short prayer to say, such as, “Dear God, dear Jesus, please help me to ever better understand and to ever more perfectly live my life according to these Gospel words…”
  • Read quietly aloud anything from a couple of paragraphs to as much as half a page, and really listen while you read. Mark with a paper clip the place where you leave off each day.
  • Sit with your eyes closed on that Judean hill and consider with God and with Jesus what you have just read. If other thoughts come, don’t fight them, but simply let them go. If thoughts feel at all negative, use the forgiveness mantra as you ease them from your mind: “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.”
  • After a while, you will feel that you have given this exercise enough time for tonight. It may be only ten minutes at first, but soon it will become effortlessly longer until it is as much as forty-five minutes. Slowly open your eyes. Thank God, and thank Jesus for having spent this time with you by saying aloud something like, “Thank you, Father! Thank you, Brother Jesus for helping me to better understand your words and helping me use them to better grow spiritually!”

You might eventually add other spiritual practices too, and perhaps some which involve more active sharing with others, as God might call you to do that. Always be listening to God’s voice within. But the certainty of Jesus’s voice on that hill always will be there to guide you.

My dear one, each day is yours to use as you might wish to use it. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is never promised, but still, we have this precious day. And we have the gift of this moment, which is why we call it “the Present.” So, why not begin a practice now of choosing to share some few minutes of each day that remains of your earthly life with God, and with Jesus? Yes, they are very busy. But as I say at the end of each of my podcasts, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. And saying that to you each week never was my own idea….

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

Jesus and Sin

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit. O what needless pain we bear.
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

 Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
– Charles Converse (1832-1918) & Joseph Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1865)

The Gospel teachings of Jesus with regard to sin are perfectly clear! And happily, what Jesus said has nothing to do with what Roman Christianity tells us about sin.  Of course, we always can continue to ignore what Jesus plainly said. We can assume that all the Christian churches are right, and Jesus came only to die for the notion that we carry the guilt of Adam’s sin, as well as our own manifold sin-guilt.  And while God insists that you and I must forgive,   of course we cannot expect that God is going to be willing to forgive you and me. Right? So God sent God’s sinless only Son to die in a horrible way to atone to God for your sins and mine. This idea made perfect sense in the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, when Hebrews were still sacrificing unblemished animals as sin-sacrifices to God in their temples.

But now, of course, we can start to see some pretty big problems with this old Roman Christian teaching. And once we start to see these problems, we really never again can find a way to un-see them:

  • Jesus tells us that God never judges us. In the Gospel Book of John, Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Oh. Okay, so then Jesus is our actual judge? Well, not so fast. Jesus also tells us in that same Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Wow. Okay, so then Jesus assures us that there is no divine judgment at all. Which means that Jesus’s crucifixion must have happened for some reason other than the one that Roman Christianity gives us.
  • Or if Jesus’s death did happen as a sacrifice, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. Jesus made a great point of coming alive again after He was crucified and died, and He showed Himself to people as again alive. If the Roman Christian story about His crucifixion, which was that He died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, had been true, then He only needed to die. His coming alive again adds nothing. Again, this casts doubt on the sacrificial meaning that Roman Christianity gives to Jesus’s crucifixion.
  • God requires that you and I love and forgive, so then why does God need to see God’s much-beloved Son sacrificed for Adam’s sin and for our own sins before God can forgive us?? I have never understood this at all! And no minister or priest of whom I have asked this question has been able to explain it to me in a way that has made any kind of sense. Think about it! If you have children, picture your own precious children as a group of adorable toddlers playing on your living room rug. They manage to tip over the coffee table, so all their cups of orange juice make a big mess on the carpet. They are even giggling as they do it. What naughty babies! Now ask yourself which one of your own little children would you most enjoy watching being horribly murdered, just so you can forgive the others for making such a big mess on your living room rug? And if you recoil from that question, then ask yourself how it is possible that you are more loving and more forgiving than God is?

 The plain fact is that you are NOT more loving and more forgiving than God is. And the core dogma of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity, which is the version of Christianity that still in 2024 is practiced by some 2.4 billion people as the world’s most prominent religion, is obviously nonsense! That dogma, which is that Jesus died for our sins, may have made a modicum of sense in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but clearly it makes no sense at all today. 

What did Jesus Himself say about sin? Well, this is somewhat complicated. First of all, remember these caveats:

  • Jesus came to move us past religions, and to teach us to relate to God directly. Doing this was not his primary mission perhaps, but it was important to Him. Every religion is man-made, and all religions are fear-based, so to help us to outgrow our adherence to religions was an important key to Jesus’s teaching us to begin a deeply love-based relationship with God.
  • While Jesus was on earth, He was teaching under the watchful eye of clergy who were always testing him. Since He often had to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, He would sometimes trickily twist what He said in some way. We don’t always know what He would have said if He had not labored under this handicap.
  • Jesus lived among people who were obsessed with the concept of sin! The Hebrew community into which He was born was ruled by hundreds of religious laws and commandments that governed how they lived, often down to the smallest detail, including even what they ate, what they wore, and how they kept the Sabbath. The fact that transgressing any of these traditions and rituals was considered to be sinful irritated Jesus, when to His mind, God’s law of love was the only real law.

With these caveats in mind, let’s follow Jesus as He goes about His days and catch some of what He says about sin. Jesus seldom expounded directly on any sin just for its own sake.

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, verses 2-11 is a famous moment when He dealt with sin.

8 2 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 7, verses 36-50 shows us both that Jesus did have some religious friends, and that He didn’t hesitate to teach them what is really important!

36 Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner, an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, 38 and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. 39 Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a great sinner.”40 And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” 41 “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So, which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” 44 Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. 46 You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. 47 For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” 48 Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” 49 Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say]to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” 50 And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Here in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, Verses 1-8, is the sort of thing that happens often in the Biblical Gospels, where Jesus uses His forgiveness of sins as an instrumental part of His healing work.

9 Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came to His own city.2 And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.” 3 And some of the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” 4 And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? 5 Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? 6 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” 7 And he got up and went home. 8 But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

And in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 1-8, is one of many examples of Jesus and His disciples easily and often breaking the rigid Sabbath rules.

12 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” 3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, 4 how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? 5 Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? 6 But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. 7 But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.8 For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

The four quotations given above are typical of the ways in which Jesus dismissively handles legalistic sins repeatedly, over and over again throughout all four of the Biblical Gospels. Far from seeing the Hebrews’ notion of sin as the strictly punishable disobedience of many rigid rules, the breaking of which can carry as much as a death sentence immediately inflicted, Jesus sees such old-style sins as only easily pardonable stumblings in nearly all cases. Because nearly all kinds of sin are to Him just minimal transgressions against God’s robustly ascendant and all-powerful law of love! Therefore, they all are now readily forgivable in love.

Jesus says of all these sins against human-made laws and rules only, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Only learn to forgive, and you will be forgiven!

There are just two sins left which Jesus tells us are unpardonable:  

  • “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).
  • 17 He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! 2 It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:1-2).

Thomas and I debated whether that verse in Luke really does denote for Jesus an unpardonable sin. So then Thomas asked Jesus directly, and Jesus has confirmed for us that, yes, He did indeed mean to tell us that the only unpardonable human sin is to lead a child astray.

So there you have it. Jesus gives us in His four Biblical Gospels, and not at all hidden but just seldom read, this easily understood primer in the fact that you can throw away all the religious guilt associated with the false notion that Jesus died for your sins. That whole bogus teaching that God needed Jesus’s death on the cross for your sins came from others. It never came from Jesus! No, God is infinitely more loving and more forgiving than that. God loves you perfectly, and God forgives you completely. Jesus chose to die and then to rise from the dead just to prove to you that there is no death. And oh, my beautiful darling one, God’s most cherished of all God’s precious children, for you this indeed is a glorious new day!

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