Rally Sunday September 13, 2009 “New Beginnings” Reverend Michael D. Powell Mark 8:27-36

Can you imagine Jesus being mad at you, calling you bad names? My heart goes out to Peter, poor guy. The only thing in my own experience that even begins to remotely compare with Peter’s experience is the time I got hit with a stick while I was praying. To be honest, it wasn’t in a United Methodist church, so I guess I ought to explain.

When I was in seminary I read a lot of books, but somehow studying the Old Testament, New Testament, Church History and Systematic Theology was not nourishing my heart. I wanted a deeper prayer experience. I’d read some Zen Buddhism and knew a little about meditation, so I decided to join the West End Zen Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was pretty convenient for me because they did an hour of zazen meditation at 6 a.m. I was driving a yellow cab at the time and I’d pick up my cab, go meditate for an hour, then hit the streets.

I went on a seven day retreat, called a sesshin, which basically consists of hours and hours and hours and hours of meditation every day, sitting cross legged facing a wall. In addition, we would chant devotional sutras in Japanese. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I was really trying hard to do everything right, but it was pretty exhausting, and very overwhelming. Zen Buddhists have one other feature that I’ve considered incorporating into our United Methodist worship services – they have a guy with a stick who walks around behind the meditators and, if it looks like they’re falling asleep or not keeping their back straight enough, gives them a whack on the shoulder with the stick. It definitely gets your attention. Then, you’re supposed to bow to him! So, about the 4^th or 5^th day, after spending countless hours sincerely and with all my heart facing the wall, meditating and chanting sutras, this guy hits me. I bowed to him, and then I began sobbing. Couldn’t he see how hard I was trying? Actually, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was a turning point, a new beginning. What I realized, more deeply than I had ever realized before, was just how Christian I was. I loved Jesus and somehow, once I got that straight, the hours began to fly by. I kept meditating and chanting. I honored Buddha, but my devotional practice became a love song to Jesus, and I was blissed.

Sometimes everything we think we know is wrong! And, it goes without saying that having this pointed out to us is a painful experience. But, it could be the best thing that ever happens to us and maybe, just maybe, something like that happened for Peter out on the road to Caesarea Philippi when Jesus rebuked him, hitting him with that “Get behind me, Satan” remark. We need a new beginning, but sometimes our shock over the whole Satan thing causes us to lose the spiritual point that Jesus was making when he says: “Get behind me Satan, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then he goes on to explain that setting our minds on divine things is going to involve a major shift in the way we normally think, that we have to deny ourselves in order to follow, lose our life in order to save it. What he’s talking about is a new beginning, a major shift in perspective, in point of view, in the way we normally think. He’s talking about a process of personal transformation and, even though it may hurt at first to lose the old perspective and the old identity, it’s the best thing that could ever happen to us. This new beginning is nothing less than what Jesus refers to as being “born again,” and it’s the whole purpose and goal of our Christian faith.

In Marcus Borg’s book, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, he notes that Paul’s shorthand phrase for this new life is being “in Christ.” He uses the phrase 165 times in his letters and the virtually synonymous phrase “in the Spirit,” about 20 times. (Borg, p. 119) In Second Corinthians 5:17, Paul describes it this way: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.”

For a new beginning to proceed, we obviously need to have an ending. The old has to pass away. When Paul describes this process he says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:19) So what gets crucified? What has to end in order for the new beginning to occur? What has to die is the worldview that has been described as The Three A’s of appearance, achievement and affluence. We are taught from adolescence to question if we are attractive enough, if we’re cool. “In adulthood the issue of attractiveness continues, now accompanied by issues of achievement and affluence and also issues of intimacy, sensitivity and caring. Am I enough? Am I good enough? Throughout this process we fall farther into the world of separation and alienation, comparison and judgment – of self and others. We live our lives in relation to what Thomas Keating calls ‘the false self,’ the self created and conferred by culture. Or, to use language from Frederick Buechner, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out.” (Borg. P. 116)

The characteristics of this false self, as it’s described in the bible, is a sense of separation and self-preoccupation, of being prideful on the one hand, and worry-filled, miserable and angry on the other hand. Sounds pretty unattractive, doesn’t it? Jesus is inviting us to die to this old, false self, and to be born into an identity centered in the Spirit, in God. It’s a new beginning, a process of internal redefinition of the self whereby a real person is born within us.

We can’t just snap our fingers and make this new beginning happen, of course. But we can, in a sense, midwife the process. This is the whole purpose of spirituality: to help birth the new self and nourish new life. We do that by becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God. Each of us is already in relationship with God, but spirituality is about becoming aware of a relationship that already exists by paying attention to that relationship, by spending time attending to it through being in spiritual community, through prayer and worship; in other words, by practicing our faith. That’s why we’re here this morning. That’s what church is all about.

And, I want to close with this. This new beginning of being in conscious relationship with God is enormously attractive. Paul describes new life in Christ as being marked by freedom, joy, peace and love. These are the fruits, or the gifts of the spirit. They are the fruit not of human striving, but of a new identity and a new way of being – they are the product of centering one’s life in God, in Spirit. Paul’s most famous description of this new life is found in 1 Corinthians 13, often called his “hymn to love,” which concludes with a ringing affirmation: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” Love is the primary quality, the definitive gift of this new beginning of living “in Christ.” May this day be for each of us a day of new beginnings, through Christ, in whose name we gather and pray. Amen.