Read Our Written Sermons
grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
Our Shared Black History
What we truly are is not describable as a thing or a limited entity – this is the truth that many of our awakened sages have shared, from Christ to Krishna. And yet, our identification with certain descriptions of ourselves and our personal histories seems unavoidable: I am a mixed (Black, perhaps Indigenous, and White) American male, currently residing in Ontario, Canada. But although we can speak this way, the heart of our teachers’ messages seems to point us back to our shared core of love and light. We are light because it is our open consciousness that perceives the world, dreams, and life, and we are love because our very nature accepts all as one with itself. However, we’ve lost these truths of ourselves by taking an entrenched stand with one in-group or another, finding that we feel separated from those outside of them and especially those who judge and reject them.
Day 7 of Creation: Surrender to Love, Justice, and Abundance
The spiritual meaning of the seventh day of creation, called the Sabbath (“rest”), is uplifted throughout scripture: biblical and others. We’re told that a true sense of inner peace comes from surrendering to the greater love within that if we work to disentangle ourselves from our obsessive attachments and distracted, lustful thinking, we find that we can surrender to an underlying clarity and peace of consciousness, which gently taps into the reality of love in our depths and around us. This Divine or Universal Love, at the root of all our minds, ultimately makes all things one and can’t help but naturally uplift and empower justice, equality, and abundance.
Day 7 of Creation: No Oneness, No Peace or Justice
Our world is staring down the barrel of a few life-as-we-know-it-ending calamities, from climate change to the rise of fascism in the hearts of many “far-right” politicians and supporters in the U.S. Demagoguery and divisive thinking are the roots of almost-unimaginable cruelty, fear, and pain in this world and indeed, in each of our hearts. And so, personally and socially we must work to uplift their opposites: a compassionate justice from a true acceptance of our interconnected oneness if we are ever to find the Sabbath and the peace that Divinity invites us toward; no matter our religion or lack thereof.
Let’s Stop Suffocating our Fathers and Embrace Life as Father Sky Does
An enlightening and peaceful Fathers’ Day to you, particularly as we as a society continue to slowly open our eyes to the burdens we’ve placed on the necks of all too many fathers and families for the last 400+ years. Although seemingly inconvenient, acknowledging both the light and the darkness associated with a celebratory day like today is called for if we hope to continue to grow into health in our various cultures, transforming our lives towards receiving the heavenliness that Divinity offers all peoples in all traditions in every moment.
Divinity Flips the Tables of Oppression
The most prolific world scriptures make it clear that above all we are tasked with rejecting bigotry and the spirit of domination in our hearts and actions if we are to ever experience heaven within or without. Indeed, this is often the core message of the Bible, although we tend to twist the text into something of our own making. The current protests and civil rights activism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police officers can be viewed as an embodiment of the Spirit of God moving through the people, in the same vein that Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple; flipping tables and wielding a whip.