SETTING A FIRE TO OUR LIFE                                                                                                TOM TORINUS

It feels good to be here. I have been away for awhile.

Late last spring I walked into Vance¹ office and told him that I was stepping away from Hope Church. I used those words, ³stepping away,² because they felt right. Not quitting in anger or disappointment, or even moving on to something new, Just stepping away because it felt like Hope Church was distracting me from my spiritual journey that supporting me in it. And that journey is what I live for. It was not a decision I came to easily or quickly. For a number of years I had been struggling with the question of why I stayed with Hope.

I told Vance that he was definitely not the reason . That would just be too easy, wouldn¹t it? I am stepping away because the pastor doesn¹t meet my needs? That kind of relationship could never have been a very deep one, and my relationship with Hope has been deep. The pastor has never been the center of it.

I also told Vance that I had no idea what I would do if I were in his position, what I would do to lead Hope forward into an ever-renewing spiritual life. I reminded him what Phil Sweet had said the Sunday morning seven years ago when he announced in this pulpit that he was retiring. He said he did not know how to lead Hope Church into the 21st Century.

That¹s what I want to wonder about with you today: How does the Hope community find its pathway forward? A pathway of authentic spiritual growth and development, a pathway of ardent fire and great adventure?

Much has happened since I left. The leadership, which has struggled for the past six years, has struggled mightily in the past few months. No one has struggled more than Vance, upon whom our worries and woes are placed most heavily. A week ago Thursday night I attended one of the meetings being hosted by the Personnel Committee. Carl, our moderator, told the group that many of our leaders are afraid Hope will not make it through another year. Let me say that again, because I had not heard it stated so directly: We might not make it through another year. That cuts through a lot of denial.

The church continues to decline in membership. New people come but even more old members leave. There are 19 fewer pledging households that last year, of which I am one. The church just borrowed $5,000 to cover bills and it is
early in the fiscal year.

Though I have not been attending or writing checks, I have thought of Hope every day. Carried you in my heart, as we like to say at Hope. And I have prayed for Hope and Vance every day. I have realized in my time away that I love this place, but also that I was simply weighed down by its organizational and financial worries and woes. I know I am not alone.

As the poet Tagore cries out in the Call to Worship, "Clouds unbroken, rain all night, all night... What is happening to us?"

To this point this has been a dismal message. Now let me tell you what brought me back to Hope three weeks ago. It was Vance. Or, rather, what the Spirit is doing in Vance. On that Sunday I heard Vance say from this pulpit that he had discovered Jesus, but with a new naiveté, a beginners mind a the Buddhists call it, a new childhood beyond adulthood. He had been welcomed into a new relationship with a God not of certainty but of unfathomable mystery, not of of dogma and rules but of unending love, not even of understanding but of standing under. He noted the irony that he had come to Hope Church to find it.

Now, these are the kind of words that have repelled us at Hope Church. And rightly so. Because they conjure up images of a cultural Christianity which send shivers down our spines. A mythic Christianity which many of us have been wounded by in our pasts, which divides in its small certainties divides people and sets them against one another, which retreats into false simplicities and refuses the bear the burden of living in a complex, diverse world. A Christianity we at Hope Church have grown past.

Yet I could feel the import of that moment for us, a vibrant promise for Hope Church which, it seems to me, stands at a threshold both dangerous and inviting.

What I see happening in Vance is not a step backward. Quite the contrary, it seems to me to be a step forward into a level of spiritual consciousness higher than we have gone before. An authentic transformation, which is the dynamic which propels the spiritual journey , a dynamic which we as the Hope community have perhaps avoided. I can see the transformation in his face, his body, his way of being. There is a softening, a letting go of bristle-i-ness, defensiveness and reactivity. A growing acceptance of himself even in his limitedness, and of who we are in our limitedness, both individually and as an organization. A vulnerability. And with this vulnerability a new strength, an inner authority, a clarity of vision. A transparency to the power of Spirit, which is not the power of dominance and control but the power of creativity.

It may seem embarrassing for me to talk so intimately about Vance¹s spiritual process. But if we are a spiritual community, I suggest this is what we must be about. Spiritual growth and transformation. It is happening
right before our eyes. We must look with the eyes of our hearts and see the Spirit at work. It is critical important that we make make a wise discernment about it.

For I hear Vance offering us a new vision, a new way forward that is grounded in what is happening in him. Death - rebirth. Metanoia is the classic word. The very heart of the Christian story, the Christian truth. The very core of what it means to be a growing, developing, evolving human person. What God is longing to accomplish in each of us.

In distancing ourselves from cultural Christianity, have we forgotten it? Have we robbed ourselves of this immense creative power that comes out a humble and total surrender into the Great Power?

I told Vance that day I met with him last spring that Hope Church's self-identity, the things we keep saying over and over again to ourselves about ourselves, were no longer enough for me. Frankly, I am weary of hearing us say tell ourselves that this a friendly place, that we are open and celebrate diversity. (A wise acquaintance once told me that if we really celebrated diversity, we would be much more diverse.) That we foster an atmosphere of intellectual seeking. That we love questions and are wary of answers. I have wondered to myself how we are different from a book club or Rotary?

We say we support each person in his or her own spiritual journey. I would challenge that statement. Just exactly how do we do that? What do we even know about the dynamics of spiritual transformation? Do we understand what it takes to become move to a higher level of consciousness and what it takes to get there?

I want more - much more. I am tired of the barren forest of questions with no answers. At the Thursday night meeting I attended one person said we must not proclaim anything as a community, because that scares people away. I want to be able to proclaim not a small God of certainty and dogmas, but the radical transformation that has been initiated in Vance. The dangerous adventure of total, mysterious love.

I do not want to try to get through life gracefully, or even to try to fix the world out of my own worry and anxiety for the world. I want to become the answer for the world, to grow to be the peace and love and freedom that we all long for, for ourselves and the world, and which the greatest teachers tell us, is reality itself, beyond our illusions. This is the goal of the journey of humanness, the teachers of all traditions tell us. A unitive consciousness in which there is no distinction between myself and divinity. No division between myself and others.

I told the small group meeting that I suspected Hope Church is an old wine skin. You know the saying of Jesus: you can¹t put new wine in old wineskins, for they will burst as the new wine stretches itself and matures.

All of the liberal, progressive Christian denominations have been declining in membership for 20 or 30 years. We like to think Hope Church is unique, separate from the reality of organized religion. I challenge that too. We are dying because young people are not being attracted here and we are no longer enough for some of our friends. What about your own children? Are they in a liberal church? Mine aren¹t, and I haven¹t advised them to go.

I¹ll make what for me is a shocking statement: the most spiritual people I know do not belong to a church. And some members tell me they must get their spiritual nurturance elsewhere. Furthermore, none, not one of the many
liberal spiritual teachers I have read and encountered over the past 20 years has talked about church participation as an essential element of an authentic spiritual journey.

Hope can be grateful that it has grown past the spiritual level of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. But the maps of spiritual development say that we have much further to go. toward this development of unitive consciousness, which is nested in an experience of oneness, which sees past enemy-making, conflict and war, which is the hope of the world.

Look at the first reading today. Jesus warns that the traditional church structure of church must come apart. Not one stone left standing upon another. This is his prophesy for institutional religion . Perhaps we are trying too hard to hold old structures together, yearning too much for the past, which is never enough. Perhaps we have trapped ourselves by need to support a big, expensive building and pay a professional staff. These can be wonderful tools for the journey, but they are not the journey itself and must not waylay us. The church of our future, the church that attracts spiritual seekers young and old might look very different from what we are now. Our worship and our ways of being together might be remarkably different. Are we ready to let go into that kind off change?

Where are liberal, progressive persons who want genuine transformation going? What is the true path today? I don¹t know.

But I have made the discovery of this path the center of my life for the past 20 years, and I have some inklings. Journeyers are going to psychotherapy and self-help seminars, because deep self-knowledge, especially knowledge of our dark shadows, is essential to growth beyond the place where Hope now abides. Seekers are learning mediation, do yoga, tai chi, centering prayer. Because a meditative discipline and practice are essential to spiritual maturity. They are boldly confronting challenging the busy-ness and and stressed-out over-doing of the culture and their own lives, learning to detach from materialism because simplicity, solitude and contemplation are the places where spiritual consciousness grows best.

Perhaps what most separates those who travel to the higher levels of spiritual consciousness, what sets them apart from the world at large is their level of commitment, discipline and practice. As Jesus and all great teachers have invited us to do, we must give our whole hearts, minds and bodies to the undertaking. It is an affair of deepest love. Because it is an arduous path even painful. Because it involves ego death and surrender into a mystery greater than ourselves.

Once you set out the climb past the level of the culture at large, you are on the road less traveled, and it becomes narrow, steep, rocky, arduous.

Furthermore, the path leads into the depth of the great spiritual traditions, not away from them. It is possible to mature spiritually without religion. But authentic Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism draw us into the deep current of wisdom which is alchemical.

The author of the second reading today, Jim Marion, says religion¹s only purpose is to accelerate our evolution as human beings into higher states of consciousness, states which can take us as a species beyond conflict and war. If religion is not doing that, it is doing nothing.

Will such a path immediately bring old members and new members flocking to the door? Will it pay the bills? That seems to be where Hope Church's attention is riveted right now. (I showed up one week and the next week was sent another pledge card.) And perhaps that is where our attention must be now. But it seems to me these cannot be the first concerns of a spiritual community. Perhaps we have avoided first concerns too long.

I have an image of Hope Church which I would like to share with you. We are encamped together at the base of Mount Everest. We came here originally to climb the mountain. But over the years we have become very comfortable in our base camp. We sit and look up at the summit. We study the pathways up the mountain. The Buddhists took this path, the Hindus scaled this other face. The Christians climbed yet a third route. We read the memoirs of great climbers. We have grown to like each other very much and enjoy our being together.

But we have not yet gotten on the mountain, and we are starting to forget that we came here to climb it.

One of my favorite teachers, an American Buddhists named Jack Kornfield said it not necessary to judge other people's spiritual paths. It is only necessary to find your own path and follow it, follow it to the end. For Hope the path probably must be Christianity, not the Christianity we have rejected, but Jesus' original, radical path into a deep relationship with the Great Mystery that is.

We must move out of our comfortable base camp and onto the mountain. There are maps and great teachers to follow. The second reading says that the church¹s leaders have kept themselves us ensconced in the base camp of spirituality because they themselves have become comfortable there. I see Vance now beginning the ascent and inviting us to follow.

Perhaps the only way to find the path is to set fire to our own lives and to our life together at Hope Church.