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Easter Season 2009
Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of Divine Presence, Who is Love. While it focuses on Christian teaching, the writer hopes persons of other faiths find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps you trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches you. Please share this ministry with others, and I hope you return soon. There is a new offering daily.
Blessings,
Rev Dr Brian K Wilcox
Ecumenical Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader,
Spiritual Counselor, Chaplain
PREPARING YOUR HEART TO MEET THE HEART OF LOVE
Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and holy, tried and true
With thanksgiving, I'll be a living
Sanctuary for You
It is you, Lord
Who came to save
The heart and soul
Of every man
It is you Lord
who knows my weakness
Who gives me strength,
With thine own hand.
Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and Holy, tried and true
With thanksgiving I'll be a living
Sanctuary for you
Lead Me on Lord
From temptation
Purify me
From within
Fill my heart with
You holy spirit
Take away all my sin
Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary
Pure and holy, tried and true
With thanksgiving, I'll be a living
Sanctuary for You
*Words and Music, Randy Scruggs and John W. Thompson
LISTENING TO THE SCRIPTURES
Have the people of Israel build me a holy sanctuary so I can live among them.
*Exodus 25.8 (NLT)
RECEIVING SACRED TEACHING
But if I know not the distinction between our working and the power of God, I know not God Himself. And if I know not God, I cannot worship Him, praise Him, give Him thanks, nor serve Him; for I shall not know how much I ought to ascribe unto myself, and how much unto God. It is necessary, therefore, to hold the most certain distinction, between the power of God and our power, the working of God and our working, if we would live in His fear [reverence, awe of God].
*Martin Luther. Bondage of Will.
* * *
I recall with fond memories of going to the little church close to my childhood home. I would go for sanctuary. I wanted to be there, kneel at the altar, and know God was there and listening. I am so thankful for those memories!
Only much later in my life did I see that I was to be such a sanctuary for others, a holy place they could meet God in and through me. A presence for the Presence to others. I was to learn that is what I longed to be, and that would be for me the essence of Christian living.
* * *
"Sanctuary" derives from Latin sanctus; "sacred, holy." This implies set part, consecrated, devoted to spiritual use; means of divine Presence, sacred Power.
The sanctuary for the people of Israel was the axis mundi. The sanctuary was center-point of creation joining heaven and earth. Through revelation and cultic rite, the people would connect with the Divine, and the Divine with it.
The words of "Sanctuary" remind us that in Christ the truths of the Old Testament are spiritualized in this Christ Age. We are to be a sanctuary. As the sanctuary represented an early, more simple phase of Hebrew religion, we are being called to return to such beginnings. As the sanctuary moved with the people, we are to move, be mobile instruments of Grace among people, where we go. A moving sanctuary. This is far from sanctuary sitting on the corner of so-and-so.
* * *
What does this mean? We are literally, not metaphorically, to give ourselves to be a meeting-point of "heaven" and "earth." We each, in Christ, are to be the center of Creation. We are each to be a means of Revelation.
Practically, this means we are to mediate the Presence of God. We are to be living, breathing, walking invitations for persons to enter our lives and discover Grace. We are to be ultimately available to be this for others.
We can not do this with closed heart. We cannot be this apart from daily consecration to be christs, in Christ. We must be open, not to ourselves finally, but to the One within us.
* * *
Christian religion as most of us have known it has - and is - miserably failing to help prepare us to be a living sanctuary of God for others. Why? The forms of religion have numbed us to spiritual realities, truths, mirrored in Scriptural images and symbols:
They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!
*II Timothy 3.5 (NLT)
These persons are as such: "[T]hey profess religion, or are in connexion with the church." And...
Opposing the real power of religion; not allowing it to exert any influence in their lives. It imposes no restraint on their passions and carnal propensities; but in all respects, except in the form of religion, they live as if they had none. This has been common in the world. The most regular and bigoted adherence to the forms of religion, furnishes no evidence in itself that there is any true piety at heart, or that true religion has any actual control over the soul. It is much easier for men to observe the forms of religion than it is to bring the heart under its controlling influence.
*Barnes New Testament Notes. Enlarged Type Edition, Ed. Robert Frew. Emphasis mine.
* * *
A living sanctuary is one who opens the heart to surrender to the Power to be activated within, so that he or she is able to be a mediator, or mediatrix, of Grace.
Then, a spiritual in-Christ community is a communion of persons practicing surrender and openness to One Power as one people, in unity of Love being a single means of Grace in Christ.
This is where much established religion has failed persons. They have offered forms - of rite, of doctrine, of buildings, of programs, of teachings, ... - but without leading persons to the deeper Waters of spiritual Life embedded in the signs of these matters - of Power.
You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food.
*Hebrews 5.12 (NLT)
Yet, the forms of religion, not wrong in themselves, are means to communicate a Power that enable to become mature in Christ, and mature in-Christ communities.
Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.
*Colossians 1.28 (ESV)
Note how many of the clergy and others get excited to build up a new "church building," investing huge money that could be used to offer Christ outside the walls of the "church building." What if that money was invested to grow and lead to Christ living sanctuaries?
* * *
In St. Paul wording - "They deny the power." The Greek is dunamis, from which comes "dynamite." If we are to have communions of Christian brothers and sisters, we must look at the possibility that religion as we know it in much of the US landscape will not do - myriads are leaving the long-established denominations. There is a power available, to be a sanctuary.
Possibly, the whole idea of church membership needs leaving off. Possibly, the creation of small enclaves of sanctuary communions is our future. In this would be a return to the early church communions, reclaiming of an innocence and simplicity lost in our loss of the power of being spiritual men and women.
Being a living sanctuary within in-Christ community is inwardly embodying the Presence of the Christ of Easter. Is this not what many in our society are longing for, rather than cold and formalized faith expressions not touching the deeper recesses of the human heart longing for the Heart of God?
Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K. Wilcox
Wednesday the First, Easter Season
April 15, 2009
QUIETLY RESPONDING
1. Name one person to whom you have been a living sanctuary within the last week. How did Christ serve that person through you?
2. Name one person who has been a living sanctuary to you in the last week. How did Christ serve you through that person?
3. In what ways do you sense you are gifted to be a living sanctuary?
4. Is the faith community you are in doing well at maturing persons to be living sanctuaries? Explain.
5. List five qualities, in your estimation, that a community of living sanctuaries would have.
* * *
*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian K. Wilcox, of SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis. Brian is an ecumenical spiritual leader, open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.
*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at barukhattah@embarqmail.com .
*Contact the above email to book Brian for Spiritual Direction, retreats, or workshops. You can order his book An Ache for Union at major book dealers.
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