Invitational Eternal Love

This quote came across my feed recently, and it got me to thinking.

“Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

I have read quite a lot of Diana Butler bass over the years. Her book Christianity After Religion was an eye-opening read for me. It spoke to me and invited me into this thing called religion. In my growing up years we did not attend church and to be quite honest religion left a bad taste in my mouth when I was in my late teens an early 20s. It wasn’t until I began attending church, my wife’s childhood church after we moved back to town from New York City, that I began to feel a sense of belonging within a religious community.

I was called into pastoral ministry through preaching and worship preparation in this caring church. What began as a couple of sermons turned into a need, not a want or an inkling, but a deep need to learn. As I think back I’m so thankful to that Pastor who saw or heard something in me, invited me to wrestle with whatever it was I was feeling, and opened the pulpit to me so that I could explore. So, I began reading and since that time almost 20 years ago I typically have one or two books I’m working my way through.

 Whatever was going on in my spirit during that time, the pulpit was the invitation to the spiritual growth that I was experiencing without even knowing it. At that time, I did not know what it was, but as I think about the above quote about Christianity began with an invitation, my ministry began with an invitation from a caring pastor.

I fear that Diana has landed on something that is still prevalent in our life and in the church today. She wrote that book in 2012 and it still speaks to me and remains on my bookshelf as a wonderful reference.

You see I wonder if we are missing the invitation that is Jesus.

What if we did understand Jesus as invitation? What if Jesus is inviting us into a life of eternal love? What would happen to us, the church, and the world if we read our sacred Christian text with that word at the forefront of our learning? Invitation.

 To help us understand this, there’s a wonderful teaching text found in the gospel story of Matthew.

“All things have been committed to me by God. No one knows the Son except God, and no one knows God except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

This can be read as an exclusionary text. If we simply stop at this point and say to ourselves, Jesus is exclusionary instead of invitational. Some of us simply stop at this point and forget the next line.

“Come to me all you are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Can we hear the invitation?

 Another one that helps us is possibly one of the most famous lines in the gospel. John 3:16.

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.

Another very powerful book that has been a great influence on me is written by Neil Douglas Klotz called Prayers of the Cosmos. This is another one of those books that opened up for me a new understanding of our gospel that expanded the story of the Christ in Jesus.

 A tradition of both native Middle Eastern and Hebraic mysticism says that each statement of sacred teaching must be examined from at least three points of view: the intellectual, the metaphorical, and the universal (or mystical). From this viewpoint, we consider the face value of the words in question – what so-called modern people normally call the “literal” meaning. According to native Middle Eastern mysticism, however, each Aramaic word presents several possible literal translations. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth” could easily be translated “blessed are the gentle” or “blessed are those who have softened the rigidity within.” The word “earth” in Aramaic also carries the meanings of “earthiness,” “the natural abundance of nature,” and “everything that appears in particular forms.”

Taking all of this together what we might be listening to, and quite possibly throughout the entire gospel story, or the life of Jesus, is an invitation to live in eternal love.

We enter into, within, and are a part of that cosmic, mystical, expansive, eternal love, not only in Jesus, but in all of life. What Jesus is teaching us is that we can’t enter that eternal love through our pocketbook or the material world. We cannot journey into that eternal love through anything that we can buy or do in the material world.

What Jesus may be helping us understand is that we can’t enter that eternal love through power. As was the case, then, and as is the case now. The most powerful among us are the humble servants much more than the rich and powerful. Even deeper than that is oh boy, be weary of those who wield and ask for more power. Be very weary.

When we listen with our expansive understanding with an ear towards invitation, we can hear Jesus saying and the gospel writers if we really pay attention, “I am the invitation to eternal love.”

I am the invitation to this eternal love (the universal Christ), Jesus says. The beautiful part is that if we accept this invitation, then we become the invitation ourselves to share this eternal love with a hurting world.

We may read it into the gospel story, but Jesus never said I am the only invitation. We, in our interpretation down through the ages, put that too heavy a yoke, only, upon Jesus. Yes, he was setting himself up and against a materialistic, hierarchical destructive world view of religion and power. (Roman rulers and the Jewish religious elite)

In that sense, he was setting himself aside. “No one comes to the Father (God) except through me,” in the Matthew text, in an expansive understanding of the literal words may be understood as, the powerful “fathers” of the ruling class are not the path towards this eternal love I am inviting you too. So all of you who are weary are invited to get to know me and this Love that I walk and live in within my spirit. Join me.

This brings me back to the original question… what if the church could view itself as the wide open, accepting, open and affirming, expansive invitation to live in eternal love? What a world the church could help create. What a world indeed we could live in.

Quite simply if we want to understand what eternal means: all the way back to when there was no time, and all the way forward beyond our lifetime into the spiritual eternal to come.

We are living in eternal love. If only we can see it. If only we can live it.

Our humanity, our inner divine spark, is the gift of original blessing.

We were loved into being with the breath of life.

We have all been invited to be the invitation.

Listen one and all

Jesus invites us

Live into this one eternal love