“Mindset” Vance L. Toivonen
READING Romans 8:6-11
To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law-- indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
READING Adolph Guggenbühl-Craig, Power in Helping Professions
The average healthy individual repeatedly falls victim to his own self-destructive and aggressive tendencies, destroying what he has built, sabotaging relationships which are important to him, tormenting his own family and friends – or shifting his destructiveness to his environment...The most difficult thing for everyone…is to become conscious of the workings of the archetypal shadow, of one’s own destructive and self-destructive tendencies, and to experience them in oneself rather than only in projections…much conscious good will must constellate a roughly equal amount of unconscious evil intent and destructivity.
SERMON
What’s on your mind right now? What are you thinking about? Surely you cannot expect me to believe that all of you are giving me your 100% undivided attention right now. Perhaps you skipped breakfast and your stomach is rumbling just a bit. You are thinking about the coffee hour to follow the service and filling that hollow spot. Maybe you are anxious about something, an exchange of words between yourself and a loved one, a work week that ended on a sour note, an illness that plagues you or a loved one, a financial situation that is causing stress, or the congregational meeting that will follow the service. At any given moment there are a myriad of distractions that keep us from being mindful of the precise moment that we are in. Remember those simple admonitions by Eckhart Tolle from a few weeks ago? Let’s review them. “Be still. Look. Listen. Be Present.” (3x)
One of the many new experiences I have had while being at Hope has been the exploration of meditation. Up until a few years ago I had never known the process of quieting my mind, focusing entirely on silence, emptying myself of all the stuff competing for my attention. And I can also tell you, from personal experience, that it is not easy. In fact, it is was one of the most challenging things I have ever done.
Paul writes quite a bit in his New Testament letters about this battle between flesh and spirit. I think this struggle is the struggle that dominates our efforts at meditation. I’m not sure who coined the term, but the mind that wants to run us through a million different aspects of our lives has been referred to as the monkey mind. Meditation and prayer are about quieting that monkey mind.
There may very well be a correlation between the monkey mind and the archetypal shadow Adolph Guggenbühl-Craig refers to in that second reading. It is, I suppose, the unruly child in all of us throwing temper tantrums when he or she does not get his or her own way; it is that little horned devil on our shoulders whispering into our ears, feeding our insatiable egos with all manner of psychological and emotional junk food; it is the wanting and the desire and the addiction craving for attention, longing for satisfaction. All of this Paul refers to simply as “the flesh.”
In contrast Paul also refers to “the Spirit,” which is, in this case, the Spirit of Christ. In other places Paul speaks of the mind of Christ, inviting us to put on the mind of Christ. For Paul it is about mindset. It is about where we have our focus, and it is about our consciousness of the tension between the two, between flesh and spirit. Learning to distinguish between them is spiritual practice stuff, mindfulness stuff, and it is just plain hard work.
As we are sitting here now we can practice this mindfulness by asking ourselves what our minds are set on right now, right here in this moment. We have come here to worship – to worship what, or who? Is our focus in this hour to be on God? Is our attention to be directed toward the cares and needs of others? What are we gathering here to practice if not a kind of centering, an intentional redirection of our thoughts and energies?
Paul teaches that this putting on of Christ’s mind is synonymous with thinking, living, and acting as Jesus of Nazareth would have thought, lived, and acted. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author says there is no distinction here between Buddhism and Christianity. There is a Buddha-mind for the Buddhist, and a Christ-mind for the Christian. In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ he writes,
The living Christ is the Christ of Love who is always generating love, moment after moment. When the church manifests understanding, tolerance, and loving-kindness, Jesus is there. Christians have to help Jesus Christ be manifested by their way of life, showing those around them that love, understanding and tolerance are possible…In Buddhism we also say the living Buddha, the one who teaches us love and compassion, must be manifested by the way we live.
Thich Nhat Hanh goes on to remind the reader that practices that foster mindfulness, awareness, and consciousness lead us toward the use of our bodies as conduits of Spirit. We must learn to see ourselves as not being limited to the flesh, or captive to the monkey mind. We are very much spiritual beings, beings of light and hope and love and peacefulness. Through practice we can learn to quiet the monkey mind, to suppress the flesh, and to foster the energy of what Christians traditionally refer to as The Holy Spirit.
I think there is a great deal of confusion in the Christian Church as a whole about the importance of belief. In my experience as a seminarian and then as an ordained Lutheran minister, I was very focused on doctrine and belief. It almost seemed as if what you thought about Jesus was more important than whether or not you lived like Jesus. My colleagues in the Lutheran Church still tussle over doctrines and beliefs, draw clearly defined lines between which beliefs are acceptable and which are not, and do not hesitate to refer to those colleagues who color outside the lines as heretics. Yes, I have been called a heretic.
Progressive Christianity shifts the focus from doctrines and beliefs to the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus did not teach doctrine. In fact, Jesus did not ask anyone to believe in him. If he asked any kind of faith of us, it was to be faith in God, and in God alone. Jesus taught in stories and parables. Jesus lived an itinerant life that kept him from being beholden to attachment. His actual life and his spiritual life converged in such an extraordinary way that we still mark the exceptional quality of his life today. This is why some Progressive Christians are wondering whether they should even call themselves Christians, or just simply followers of Jesus.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes,
I think it is important to look deeply into every act and every teaching of Jesus during His lifetime, and to use this as a model for our own practice. Jesus lived exactly as he taught, so studying the life of Jesus is crucial to understanding His teaching. For me, the life of Jesus is His most basic teaching, more important than even faith in the resurrection or faith in eternity. (Living Buddha, Living Christ).
Those words are the words of a Buddhist monk. If a Buddhist monk is stressing the importance of setting our minds on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, then those of us who find ourselves in the Church ought to consider strongly the value of such exploration for ourselves. None of us should be satisfied to simply listen to others talk about Jesus. We need to study for ourselves his life and teachings, set our minds on the mind of Christ, the mind of Jesus of Nazareth. This will result in a much more effective anecdote to the rigid fundamentalism and biblical literalism that haunts our society, and it will help us stay focused on what really matters – namely, lives that are lived in concert with the life that Jesus lived.
I know it is sort of cheap to plug something at this point, but I cannot avoid the fact that there is an opportunity on the horizon for you to begin, or enhance this exploration process. On Tuesday, March 25th at 7:00 PM you can begin a 12 week journey into the life and teachings of Jesus by attending the Saving Jesus course. For me it has been much more than a refresher course for what I had learned in the past. Saving Jesus introduced me to a newer, and for me a more dynamic, real Jesus than I have ever known before. It is an entrée into the process of accessing Jesus in a tangible way in the here and now. It is a tool for fostering the Christ-mind within ourselves.
In lieu of attending that course, I would suggest reading the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John. Familiarize yourself with the stories, and the sayings. Note the tensions between what rings true and what rings false. Some of the stuff attributed to Jesus in the gospels is just that, stuff attributed to Jesus. I think there is a way to whittle down the gospels to a manageable database of what Jesus really did say and do, and a means by which we can do exactly what Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, to look deeply into every act and every teaching of Jesus during His lifetime. But this will take some research and study, and familiarization with Jesus material. I believe it to be worth the effort. It’ll help us all adjust our mindsets, giving more attention to the spirit than the flesh.
There are other ways to skin this cat. All I ask of us is that we actively engage in fostering this Christ-mind, or Buddha-mind, if you prefer, someway, somehow. To the extent that we are faithful in raising our spiritual consciousness, to that same extent we will aid in raising the consciousness of the world…one brain cell at a time.