Read Our Written Sermons
grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
Fast from Your “Self”
I can’t help but think it would be amazing if my dog did all the things that I told her to: “Ghost, sit and rest. Ghost, turn around. Ghost, do a backflip! Ghost, take yourself safely on a walk for the next 15 minutes.” Although, it sounds like it might be a bummer for her! But this is exactly what Christ and many wise sages indicate that they do in regard to God. Jesus said, “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing.” Christ knew that all things that happened are a manifestation of the universal will or what some call “God’s Providence,” but it also means that Christ had awakened to this truth so fully that his mind was perfectly in sync with the Spirit flowing through his mind and around him. Unlike many of us, Jesus was no longer beholden to his fickle yearnings and attachments, nor deep-seated fear or misgivings, although he might have experienced these in passing. Christ says as much himself, “for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me,” inviting us to the same lightness of Spirit by giving in to the flow of Life. And perhaps our relationship with God is even closer and already more aligned than we know, making us less God’s “pets” and more God’s “children.”
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.
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told
The sages are largely consistent with the assertion that we are love itself and so is God. Indeed, they describe how a separation between the love that we are and the love that God is doesn’t exist, although we may often feel or believe this way. Our tendency to get invested in our sense of having a limited form, a limited story, a limited way of thinking and observing of “outside things” keeps us from seeing this truth. The thing that sees these seeming limitations is not itself limited, and how do we know it is not a shared “field of consciousness”? We are one in God – this is also the truth we hear from Jesus Christ. And yet, even knowing this, when we hear the famous Christian Biblical quote of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” we interpret it from a place of division, believing that the “only Son” that we are to believe in is elsewhere and not already within us, as the love at our core.
Find Rebirth in What You Already Are
Many of the awakened sages speak of coming into a naturalness of life as they uncover the Divinity at their core. They say that their behaviour starts being dictated by their greater self, the Universe, God, and no longer by the earthly reactions to pressure and conditioning that their old self, their ego, used to exhibit. This coming into the naturalness of life is often expressed as coming into the love that we truly are, coming to know that our very consciousness or awareness makes us all one as the very “light” of God (as Christ called us). Many sages speak of this and some even go as far as to call it “being born again.”
Resist Inner Resistance?
Often, we pile resistance on top of our pain, which just multiplies the issue. Many tough things happen that are beyond our power to change, but we can’t seem to help to rail against them anyway (again and again). In fact, it’s not just pain and tough circumstances, we resist just about everything down to every single second. Yes, we tend to have a habit of fighting against the present moment, yearning for a future that will fulfill our sense of lack. Coming to know that Divinity itself dwells in the now, beneath our fears and our over-thinking minds, helps us to see that we’ve been missing life itself by getting so caught up in the wilderness of our thinking.
We Are One with the Word of God
God is with us and empowering us all the time, whatever we call God. God is, in fact, beyond description. Words only point to Divinity, just as words only point to anything else in reality – they are not the reality that they describe. Now, a “word” is a reality unto itself, but the word “tree” is not a tree, only the tree itself is the truth of that tree – words only point to this truth. In this vein, the truth of something is only the reality of it. Which makes it interesting that the scriptures say, “the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This reading then goes on to indicate that not only is “the Word” one with God, but all life and all humanity is one with that Word as well - let’s explore this a bit further.
See the Unity Within and Find Joy
There’s something about the holidays that speaks “joy.” Whatever we celebrate and for whatever reason, when it’s with family and friends (with treats and music) we can’t help but find some level of joy – at least, most of the time! In fact, it’s when we find a sense of oneness, setting aside our personal issues, as well as our political differences, historical arguments, and reactive judgments, that we often find the most joy during the holidays. For good reason! In a way, when we do this, we are setting aside our deep sense of personality (our ego) for our family and friends, or, in other words, we find the greatest joy and love when we “lay down our lives for our friends.”
Notice the Heart of the Present Moment is Peace-Filled Love
We each have different ideas about love. I think about loved ones, like my wife, when I think about love. I think about friends and my family. In these thoughts there’s a sense of unity with these other beings which I think is indistinguishable from love itself. This is perhaps why we can treat those we love not always so lovingly, because we treat ourselves not quite so lovingly. Why is that? Some sages tell us that the same reason we don’t treat every living being as a loved one is the same reason we often beat ourselves up, marinating in fear and suffering of some kind or another: we believe and fear that we are separate, isolated beings, defined by our passing minds and bodies, at risk of losing our very light of love when we die. The life of Christ (as with others) serves to remind us that we are not separate from God or each other, that we are one in the body of Divinity and only experience the sense of separation to the extent we believe in it, forgetting the heart of love that we all share and are.
Hope to Uncover Your Infinite Light
When I think of hope I think of my big white dog, Ghost. Always hopeful that we’re about to go outside. Hopeful for food, a good rub, and sometimes for play. She’s always hoping for greater joy, what some sages call peace in action, which she gets from the things that she loves with the beings she loves. She’s not concerned (at all) about differences in opinion, or a multitude of other concerns that plague us “more advanced” humans. And yet, it seems pretty clear that hope is there. Hope is natural because as living creatures we are all seeking happiness and joy within and embodied around us in some way. And whatever we call God, be it Christ, Allah, or Krishna, God’s further advent into our lives often starts with hope for just that.
Experience Life in Remembrance of the I Am
The story of the first communion with Jesus and his disciples celebrating their Jewish Passover is essentially the story of the Lord telling us to remember him when we eat. Eating is something we do daily, but we can also define communion more narrowly, saying that communion only happens in community or at a church, with only bread and wine, etc., but I think broadening our idea of communion can be worthwhile in our exploration of what it means to commune in remembrance of God and our loved ones. You see, Christ’s message wasn’t one of exclusion but of inclusion, and although I believe he was establishing a lovely ritual for his followers to enter into together, at the same time I believe he was doing what he always did: pointing all of us back to a mode of living that no longer forgets its roots and its inherent Divine life. Indeed, to remember Christ is to remember what he was all about, otherwise the ritual of communion may easily become exclusionary and hollow.
Love is Our Awareness of Unity
When we are close enough to someone that we feel a deep bond, we often call that love. When we feel a type of growing unity or a falling of barriers between ourselves and another, we often call that “falling in love.” We more fully appreciate someone’s beauty, and we find that we want to do more and more for them. The sages tell us that this love that we are feeling is in fact our fundamental nature, but it is sensed when we start to release our sense of division. Often, we do this (or this is done) for a select few in our lives, and when we find we can’t trust someone or they walk away from us that sense of division springs back and our sense of unity, of love, is diminished. However, our greatest spiritual teachers, like Christ, Rumi, and Krishna, invite us to release our general sense of division and our false idea of ourselves, uncovering our always fully present and natural love for others “as ourselves” in the process.
See with the Light of Joy
The thing that helps us the most in any given moment may surprise us. How are we to know what may help? And what does that even mean? Ultimately, we’re all fundamentally looking for happiness. Whatever our goals, whatever our desires, at the root level these things are what we believe will help us to find some kind of happiness, or whatever’s closest to it in our experience. Unfortunately, our idea of happiness tends to be connected to passing pleasures, and we tend to allow moments of discomfort destroy our sense of happiness. Our sages, however, tell us that happiness is our very being – we’ve just come to identify so much with the passing phenomena in our lives we miss it. Sometimes, to wake us to this truth prophets and sages, from Jesus to Krishna, have to shake us a bit, and many across the millennia have used methods that at first and at certain moments don’t seem too happiness-inducing.
Thanksgiving Can Transform Your World
We as individuals would have nothing if it weren’t for many others. Without animals, insects, other people, the universe, God(dess), we would not be here. The reality of this is presented in every moment, whether through the road we drive on or the salad (pollinated by insects) that we’re eating! Of course, even our very body is an endless expression of this. We have much to be thankful for. And yet, these things are often the easiest to overlook even when they are the most profound things about life. We take for granted what we are used to, often seeking to force a bit more compliance out of something that has served us, strongly wishing that things would be a tad bit more perfect (to us). Thankfully, this year for Canadian Thanksgiving we seek to upend this tendency for unthankfulness a bit! So, let us give thanks.