The Light in Every Thing
Deeper conversation on the mysteries of Christianity with Patrick Kennedy and Jonah Evans, directors of the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America.
In this podcast we engage the great questions of life and do this through a spiritual approach to Christianity made possible through contemplative inquiry and the science of the spirit known as Anthroposophy.
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The Light in Every Thing
“Sleeper, Awake…” - Episode 48 in the series, “Letter to the Ephesians”
Our series continues with Jonah and Patrick reflecting on the people of Ephesus, who were being led into a new faith experience with Jesus Christ. The birth of a new community in Christ was a fusion of Jewish and pagan traditions, both cultural and spiritual. What were the consequences of this new light dawning in their daily lives? Paul offers us all a discernment practice—when we turn towards Christ’s light, the shadow in us is revealed. One gives life, the other is rooted in death. “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Eph 5:14 (ESV)
The Light in Every Thing is a podcast of The Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. Learn more about the Seminary and its offerings at our website. This podcast is supported by our growing Patreon community. To learn more, go to www.patreon.com/ccseminary.
Thanks to Elliott Chamberlin who composed our theme music, “Seeking Together,” and the legacy of our original show-notes and patreon producer, Camilla Lake.
Good morning.
Speaker 3:Patrick Greetings earthlings. I'm an earthling now, Good Patrick.
Speaker 2:Greetings earthlings. I'm an earthling now, Good, good.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I like earth.
Speaker 3:You got some earth in there. Yeah, good morning, Welcome everyone.
Speaker 2:To the light in everything where we discuss and try to have inspired conversation about the mysteries of Christ. Amen. And we'll begin, as we always do, with the Gospel of John in chapter 8. Again, jesus spoke to them saying I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if, for some strange reason, this is the first time you are dropping in on what we're up to in this time, in the Light and Everything, our little podcast here in Vaughan, ontario, as a part of the Seminary of the Christian Community, we are deep in the depths of a text in the New Testament, the letter to the Ephesians. That, for us, is a part of Paul's group of letters to communities, communities of human beings who are attempting and it's just so hard to put ourselves into that position, but are attempting something that has never happened before Christ community. We have to try to imagine there was nothing like this yet. This place where people from the pagan spiritual practices and world, in the mighty spiritual city of Ephesus, with its eighth wonder of the world or part of the wonders of the world, its temple to Artemis there and its temple to Isis and its temple to Asclepius and temple to the Caesar, in this pulsing harbor, in what is now current Turkey and the north, northern elbows of the Mediterranean, northeastern elbow of the Mediterranean ocean, roughly 2,000 years ago. And into that mix is coming also all of the diaspora Jews who would attend synagogues, and this guy, paul, shows up in their city and starts talking about.
Speaker 3:There's someone who has arrived, who is letting his rays shine into everybody's spiritual practices, because he is the spirit of humanity. He's the true human being. He is the divine creator word, and it's time to form new communities who gather around him. How do we do that? What do we do? How does that change who we are as people? How do I live my life in light of the fact that I worship this being? How do I relate to my brothers and sisters in life, in social circumstances or when we gather together? What are the consequences of of all of this? As we try to do this new thing? Paul's recognizing, I think that it isn't just the spiritual encounter with this being that matters. It should start to flow into all of your life and how we are with one another, how we speak, act, think and feel, how we sing and pray, how we worship, of course, how we inhabit our work, relationships, family, everything. So this is a window into the birth and wrestling and difficult moment of becoming of Christian community on the planet.
Speaker 3:It's very it's just for me riveting right that there's like a snapshot taken of a moment in those birth pangs. So I'm inspired just to remember that fact because, you know, humans have been living with these letters from this person who was trying to build these communities for so many thousands of years now. It took a couple thousand years, roughly, that it's easy to forget that this was this just beginning. And his incredible care and unbelievable concern that this new growth thrive and fulfill its own nature and not be co-opted by other spirits and fall back into these other things. So something new coming into being that needs to be permeated by the one who is its center.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's also just worth, I think, naming as well, or emphasizing maybe that's a better word of this quality. It's not like this is a set of principles that you just live by. It's not like, oh, now you want to be in a state of being that is constant. The way you're describing it, it's like a seed has come into a dark soil, beautiful, and that there's other ways. There's other beings, there's darkness, there's shadow and there's this seed of light that has a new reality, a new life. That is a being.
Speaker 2:But to put on this being, to relate to this being, to even walk with this being, is a process that is gradual. It starts like an inspiration and it starts to gradually want to permeate your entire life, grow up into a tree, become a real son in this dark cosmos, so to speak. So, because Christ isn't saying you know, realize this and be, he's saying know me and walk with me. There's a journey here. It's a gradual progression. Follow me, I'm going to lead you to a new kind of existence, but it's going to start like a seed.
Speaker 3:And I think it was doubly challenging to fulfill this, because it was new and not new practicing and devout people of the book, who we label Jews, the people of Israel, who deeply lived in their identity that was born through the liberation from the oppression of Egypt, through the intervention of God and the blood of the Lamb at Passover and all that was bestowed upon them in the desert, their guidance of God, the new priesthood and a new tabernacle, and came out of that into a land that was promised to them as being their home, where God's name would be, and they built a temple and it all was destroyed and they were dispersed, but they still lived in the promises of the prophets.
Speaker 3:There will be restoration of the prophets. There will be restoration For them. When they met Paul, who was an absolutely devout and memorized practically all of Scripture person, jesus was the fulfillment of all the promises. He was the light that was shining back in all of their scripture and their experiences as a people. Was the light coming from him? They said oh, here it all is. All of the promises are raying out to us. The gifting of the Holy Spirit is coming through our relationship with his being the same Holy Spirit that came down and filled the tabernacle, that filled the kings and so forth. There's continuity.
Speaker 2:Beautiful.
Speaker 3:And it seems to also have something new in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a real mystery Right, so it's hard Like how are we just doing the same thing with Jesus?
Speaker 3:So I think for that group it was also challenging to not because they knew how to do the way of the previous time before him to really try to figure out. What does it mean to now live and follow him, now that God has come and become human?
Speaker 2:And that is an interesting way that you set that up, in terms of just touching in on what are all the aspects of the newness of just touching in on what are all the aspects of the newness and you know I've been studying Romans, which is one of his other letters famous and when he tries to describe, in chapters 10 through 12, the faith, the difference between faith and the law following the law like the Hebrews did.
Speaker 2:That was a kind of structure, a kind of divinely inspired system of behavior and practice, but it didn't have in its law form a relationship to a being that was inspired. Moses was inspired by a relationship, but then the law became a kind of set of principles, if we just do X, y, z.
Speaker 3:We're in right relationship.
Speaker 2:But Paul in Romans describes the faith experience distinct from the law experience as an experience of a relationship with a being like Abraham had with Yahweh. Yeah, being inspired by a living relationship with an actual being other than you. That's guiding you. And then, if we look at Paul, that's his radical faith experience.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent, which is Saul. Saul, why are you persecuting me? It's Jesus, and he changes his heart based on a relationship with a being, and he changes his heart based on a relationship with a being, and so there's such a mystery in Paul's work in general about how to be faithful, different than how to be lawful, that I think that's an element of this newness. Yeah, that I think that's an element of this newness. Yeah, that it's a new relationship that is faithful to a being.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think you know certainly quite a few people I know also have a lot of antipathy towards the law. Quote-unquote, even that phrase like it, just brings up antipathy. Oh gosh me too, but I think, if you look at the beautiful way and I'd be so interested to hear what you say that Paul works with it in Romans and elsewhere is that he shows that its nature was light, but that one of the things light does is reveal darkness, shadow.
Speaker 2:Perfectly said.
Speaker 3:Right, I mean you could say that is, the mission of the law was to move aside the clouds that block the sunlight so we can see the shadows we cast. Yeah, that's it. It doesn't solve the shadow issue at all. No, but by knowing the law, you realize I can't do the law. Yeah, so it's thanks to the law, which I really would translate it as moral light, moral wisdom. Moral wisdom enters our life and then we can examine our life in the light of moral wisdom, because what's in that law is nothing to be antipathetical about. The vast majority is about being respectful and honorable and loving and welcoming to the stranger, to the widow, to the orphan, to your neighbor, to your wife, to your husband, to your people, to God. It's like how to have good relationships and not take advantage of people and not put yourself first. The whole love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself, is from the law. People, literally like most Christians, don't even know that. That is where that's from, not from Jesus. Jesus is quoting the law.
Speaker 2:Good point the law of love is what's in the law Right, and very often that is our relationship to religion, which is a set of rules that are wise, somehow, in its best sense, come from God, our divine light. But if anyone has ever taken rules very seriously and tried to follow them, like you just said, they'll realize what Paul's talking about, that they actually serve to, yes, provide a kind of orientation, but awaken how I'm not actually able to fulfill those ideals.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's such a powerful pedagogical presence, if you use that language, in the sense that, for a being to grow, I'll just stay the same if I'm never aware of the effects of what I do, the effects of my choices. But if something comes into my life that can show me the effects I'm having and I can own those and seek. Now, well, what do I do? How do I change and transform, how do I grow to be different? Now a process of becoming can happen.
Speaker 2:A more mature process of becoming.
Speaker 2:A more mature right, yeah, and then you realize, oh, there are certain things and I think this is going to be very helpful as we go into the rest of this letter, because there's a relationship to then to my own weaknesses that becomes helpful. But it also becomes an issue not just of being able to achieve for myself the ideals I set before myself achieve for myself the ideals I set before myself but a more mature orientation, of continuing to set my mind on something that is full of wisdom but ultimately won't be succeeded or won't be fulfilled by me personally. That's the faith element that my relationship with this being will bestow upon me clothing, armor, substance that will fulfill the ideals I set before myself. I don't know if all that made sense.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a key, because otherwise we fall into the trap that religion is just about achieving ideals for ourselves, following rules, and if I'm better than you at being disciplined, then I achieve and I feel like I'm better than you and I have more pride, and then that's not good.
Speaker 3:We're back in the same problems. That's right, spiritual achievement pride, Right.
Speaker 2:So there has to be a way to overcome that kind of pride, which Paul will really go through in detail in Romans. But here you can, you can find it as well.
Speaker 3:It's, yeah, it's just so moving too. And the whole like, if you, if you look, so the, so the, the word, the law is that it comes from the nomos in Greek. That's why we translate it that way. But that was simply the Greek word in the Hebrew tradition for the five books of Moses. It was the equivalent to the Hebrew word Torah To refer to actually all that is in those five books. And you get to Deuteronomy, the last book, and like the word heart is suddenly filling this book, or the word love and this whole with all your heart and all your soul, love god with all your heart.
Speaker 3:it's actually, it's a good valentine's day yeah today's valentine's day Day in our part of the world. Give your heart to the divine. And then this second thing that we've talked about before, which is from actually the priestly book Leviticus, in the middle of the Torah see in your neighbor yourself, love your neighbor as yourself. This is like the. It will remain to the end of earth evolution, in my estimation. Oh for sure, the medicine for the human self, love God, be turned towards the divine moral wisdom and relationship, the being and relationship, the being.
Speaker 2:yeah.
Speaker 3:And love this being with every part of who you are. Be God oriented and other-oriented.
Speaker 2:Amen, that's the medicine.
Speaker 3:And with the forces of love. Yeah, and then you will feel peace.
Speaker 2:Right, and that fundamental medicine is expressed also in how we are to relate to Jesus Christ, god through him, and he is an other.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the practice really is grounded in that. There's a great image in the book of Revelation where the fulfilled humans are playing harps with five strings, and this is often interpreted by the church fathers as the five books of Moses. Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3:The Torah Right they sing the song of Moses in the book of Revelation yes, but the point is that the law is there, but it's not the thing.
Speaker 2:It's being played, it's got a music. It's got a music, it's got a beauty. And what are they also doing? They're following the lamb wherever he goes. That's so beautiful. So you have that relationship of the actual content of faith is the relationship with this being Jesus Christ, who is the fulfillment, through his grace, of being here. But the law is not obsolete. It's being played like music.
Speaker 3:It's just what you said. The last piece of the medicine is to have the goal. That's another way of saying what the law is. This is the goal of being a human Be good. If I just sum it up be good.
Speaker 3:Be, loving, Be true, be good, be loving and be in right relationship with the highest and the lowest and what is around you and all those people. And then your heart gets inspired by that yeah, I want to do that. And then you go and you try to do it and you start to discover that you can't.
Speaker 3:Some parts you feel like maybe you're kind of pulling off, but you start to get to the edges of what you can't. Some parts you feel like maybe you're kind of pulling off, but you start to get to the edges of what you can do Right. And so the law also reveals to you that you can't fulfill the law, the moral wisdom, you can't fully embody it, and so you run into a kind of powerlessness and helplessness. Through wholly engaging with all your being trying to respond to it. And that's good, that's also part of the medicine isn't it 100%, because then you need this relationship.
Speaker 3:You're not going to be able to pull it off on your own. Exactly, that's a great thing.
Speaker 2:It's a great thing and that's the step that so often we stumble and break on. Yeah, because you hear all the time from friends well, I would be religious too, but I just see so much hypocrisy. That's it, but the hypocrisy is also the point. That's it, but the hypocrisy is also the point. The hypocrisy is revealed necessarily through trying to do the law. Yeah, and then I love it. In Luke's gospel, christ describes the medicine if one has eyes and ears to hear and see. After he lays into the Pharisees and the Sadducees in his great woes he says the one who learns to say blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. So it points to this relationship, this one coming towards me, that he's the good and he can bestow his being on us and we can become good through that grace, and then pride can't have a foothold.
Speaker 3:Because this is the danger. The danger is that if I could pull it off and be a fantastic, good person and it's just so awful you can't even say it then there would be one last sin waiting for me, which is arrogance and pride, and vanity and all that stuff that has to do with I'm the spiritually realized good person.
Speaker 3:And by running into the edge, the person on the path towards God gets to experience being in need, being not whole, and experiencing a gift from a beloved, and then you have a love relationship. That is being in an experience of grace that someone is lifting you, blessing you, filling you and then you go out and are good and you don't have that pride you blessing you, filling you and then you go out and are good and you don't have that pride because you have the feeling that's not me alone. When it's good it's him and me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's him and me but it's he's the thing that pours into me when any kind of good's happening and therefore I feel blessed like you feel blessed. That's the other side. When a moment happens, you were just sharing some with me. You're like I was there and there was more there, and it seems to be. He has shaped me into a vessel for a certain kind of gift he wants to give, but it's his gift. As soon as I think I own it.
Speaker 2:It's corrupted, it's so incredible, that's amazing, but I'm not a medium.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm not a medium, I'm not absent.
Speaker 2:No, and I'm not resigned. I have to be super active, even more than regularly active. Yes, right, no, and I'm not resigned. I have to be super active, even more than regularly active. Yes, right, yeah. You got to be so actively aware of subtle temptations and realities. So this is not a recipe for just God does everything and I'm nothing and I'm a worm Nope, that's an error. But to be receiving the fulfillment and to be a chalice that then pours out for others, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So there we see the subtlety, then, and the differences. The light appears in our life through the moral wisdom form that just illumines the moral world, and now I can see what I've done was wrong. Oh, this is the thing I want to strive for. Oh, I develop the sensitivity for that moral realm, but the capacity to be moral and good, as Jesus says. Why do you call me good? God alone is good. Now I need to be filled with God. That then becomes the only hope for goodness to happen.
Speaker 2:It's radical. Yeah, I'll radical yeah.
Speaker 3:I'll say it again the only hope for the good is to be filled with God, and that is confirmed even in our movement for religious renewal in our sacrament of consultation.
Speaker 2:Amen, yeah, yeah. That being filled with God's grace through my own receptive participation in freedom, reaching towards God, possibility through which my soul can feel peace, that I can start to even love God's reality, that I can start to even feel like I'm becoming a full human being, filled with love for other human beings and for God, it's going to have to pour in, it's going to have to pour in.
Speaker 3:It's going to have to pour in I don't have it.
Speaker 2:That's the picture that we work with. That is the redemption and reconciliation of the human self. Amen. It's all about the fact that the self is not yet whole, it's not yet fulfilled, it's not yet what it's called to be.
Speaker 3:So that, even meeting, if I meet a self, if I meet a human where it seems like some good is pouring through, I'll be meeting someone who's in relationship, they're in a practiced wedding, a love bond with their beloved. I'll feel that I'll feel, oh, you and your beloved, that's what's making this work, you and your beloved.
Speaker 3:So all of that was our little meditation this morning on how there is this continuity from the light that was shining into the spirit, life and communal life of the Hebrew people through Christ before he incarnated, but then in him becoming the human Yeshua Jesus.
Speaker 3:This person and name now is added to the story and that relational work is with love, goodness, truth and wisdom. Become human, fulfilled in someone, actually fulfilled, actually fulfilled. God poured into him and lived a human life for three years, yeah, and then? What is that now? What are the reverberations of that fact into how we do community life then and how we live our lives now? So do I just simply do that better of what we were doing before, what you know? So there's that side. But it was also true in all the other spiritualities, and this is very hard for many traditional Christians, certainly for many of our Jewish brothers and sisters, to think that the creator, god of the universe, the light of the world, the word, the logos, was present and working in the Egyptian mysteries, in Babylonian mysteries. That's a really hard one, right?
Speaker 2:It's like the bad guy most of the time.
Speaker 3:But read the book of Daniel. Sorry, we can go on and on, but it's also scriptural. That was working in the person of Jethro, who is a priest of the Midianites in the desert, who becomes a teacher for Moses and Moses goes to him and gets advice on how to build community in scripture. And that priest of the Midianites talks about Yahweh he knows him. Or Abraham, who meets Melchizedek, who is the priest king of Salem, the city of peace that would become Jerusalem, who comes down and blesses Abraham and is a mystery priest who uses bread and wine chapter 14 of Genesis and then disappears.
Speaker 3:Like also the creator, god is not the sole possession of the Hebrew people, of course not that. It's like. The radiant sun belongs to all of the earth. Rays of his being was shining also into the Hindu tradition, and so forth. And on and on, yeah. And Gilgamesh has a raise of that light in the Sumerian epic, and on and on, yeah. The pagan mysteries and the pagan myths and all of the peoples of the world were receiving some of his light in their unique way.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's also very important to make this a universal thing.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Well, there we are.
Speaker 3:That's a part of the new, isn't?
Speaker 2:it Exactly. It's a part of the new. And what also is a part of the new is it's not as if all you know? There's a tendency in our time to say well, all the mystery traditions are revealing the same thing. So Buddha and Osiris and you know, you name it all the gods are revealing the same truth. So you pick whatever ray of light you want and it's all the same. There's a slight difference in the trajectory of what we're talking about that they were revealed but they weren't yet fully realized. They were prophetic, yes, premonitions, premonitions, spiritual premonitions that all of God and all of history is trying to prepare for this fully realized new creation, new human, and they all play a part in that great drama of preparation. All the mystery centers play a part in the great preparation for that fulfillment of the full mystery, and so that's also a radically different picture than every tradition is showing. The same thing, yes, no it's not all the same.
Speaker 2:It's not all the same, but it does often have these similar archetypal, prophetic imaginations and stories that are leading toward something and helping to reveal something. I think that's a crucial paradigm difference.
Speaker 3:It's huge, yeah, it's really huge. But you can see, I mean, even then, if you go back to the calling of Abraham, that for some reason Abraham's on our mind this morning. I can tell, as Paul sees in him, in Romans, actually, the seed of Christ's community. He sees in Abraham. Yeah, the seed of faithfulness, because his goodness, which is called righteousness in the New Testament, his goodness, is a result of his faith in God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, his faith, not in rules, but in a relationship with the being.
Speaker 3:I trust you and a relationship with the being.
Speaker 2:I trust you A living relationship, hearing God, knowing God's word and following.
Speaker 3:And that same Abraham then was told I'm pulling you out of all the nations. He was a part of the Sumerian, mesopotamian traditions, these places of the ziggurats, these places of the Gilgamesh epic and the Enuma Elish, the story of creation from the Sumerian tradition. And he was pulled out of that culture by Yahweh in order to begin to form a new lineage. Yahweh, in order to begin to form a new lineage. And then, in the promises that were given, he says I'm pulling you out so that in you and through you, all the peoples will be blessed, all the peoples. So the forming of the Hebrew people was so that all peoples could experience blessing. So it's not exclusion away from, but separation for union, nice For blessing.
Speaker 2:Nice distinction.
Speaker 3:And a priestly identity yeah.
Speaker 1:Blessing yeah, and a priestly identity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, blessing, yeah, that's priestly work. It's that God can work through you to bless everyone.
Speaker 2:You're describing ordination. You're describing the ordination sacrament Separateness for blessing, all that's it, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's like one of the core expressions of what priesthood is. You're separated out, not for any special privileges for yourself. If you ever think this is about you, you will have gone astray. You're losing participation in every other normal thing so that through you I can bless my people, all people, and this all people thing is so key, then that seems to be then in the coming of Christ into Jesus. Then what starts to happen in that early Christian community is you've got all peoples gathering together and worshiping jesus christ and it's confusing. Yeah wait, I thought they were separated because like a new gathering and reuniting of the peoples.
Speaker 3:But the pagans are also turning towards him because they're experiencing hey, you know that the forces of life and joy and nourishment and kind of like the spirit at work in our midst, with warmed hearts and a sense of love and community that we had in the Dionysian mysteries. We're feeling it here. Or the Apollonian revelations of the sun god that would speak through the prophets. That's coming into our midst when we gather. Or all of the myths of the god who dies and rises again.
Speaker 3:Those were mostly in the pagan mysteries, not clearly shown in the Hebrew scripture actually clearly shown in the Hebrew scripture. Actually that was part of the prophetic rays that was shining in all the other traditions and I think that's where he goes here with this. This is a way of phrasing it which comes out of the pagan stream in verse 13. So he's talking in chapter 5 a little bit about this how much it matters your moral life and how you're walking and being and speaking and we talked about that last time in this powerful way of bringing our immorality into the light. Yeah, and then that can actually change its nature. But then he says Awake O sleeper and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you.
Speaker 3:Christ will shine upon you, I would submit that that is a summary of all of the pagan mysteries. In their mystery tradition, what they sought to do with their candidates was to lead them into death, to lay aside their old self and to rise out of the tomb of their body, and to meet the spiritual son. That was a person that you could meet in the spiritual world. It's just like a concentrate of those mysteries.
Speaker 2:It's a complete, yeah, the complete essence.
Speaker 3:Awake O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and the anointed one, the Mashiach, the priest king of the sun, will shine upon you. He is radiant. He's the one you meet when you cross the threshold Right.
Speaker 2:So I think it also sheds new light on verse 11, which says take no part in unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. And in this sense we can expose them to the light of Christ as opposed to because exposing has this connotation. I don't like this transition yet Right, like I'm going to expose you and I'm going to show but it's also a way to think of it is to allow myself to be seen in the light of Christ and then even my darkness, even the dead parts of me that I know are dead and that I know are dark, can become light, can become enlightened, useful revelations that can help me along the way if I allow the light of Christ to shine in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and this other part for me is to see, then, what his light lets me see is. All those things are death yeah they have no life in them.
Speaker 3:So in that moment I've, if I can, if I go towards his light. Literally what happens is part of me rises up out of my body, meaning the parts that are have only death in them, because I can see in his light. They're revealed as death and he's showing me the part in me that is a part of his life. I've arisen out of it. Something is actually not equal to those things it's not entangled in those yeah.
Speaker 3:so he's drawing some part of me also out to see him and see the death. So there I can experience, as we talked about last time, this self that isn't in that body of death, self that isn't in that body of death, that is a bride to the bridegroom but that now needs to pick up that body anew, come back into it and live in my life in the light of that experience, Walk with what I have done newly. So this dynamic, it's just so exact and it's such a living practice over and over and over again Awake O sleeper. And it's very possible.
Speaker 3:And people wonder where this phrasing comes from. It can be found nowhere else, certainly nowhere in Scripture, regular Hebrew Scripture, nowhere else in the New Testament. But they find phrasings like this in many of the spiritual initiation practices of the pagan world. It is very possible that the Ephesian community practiced this as part of their baptismal rite into Christ's community, Because they experienced that sun spirit being that used to rule in our pagan mysteries had became human. He's now embodied on the earth. So now into this room are coming all these pagans. They're like yeah, the fulfillment of our mysteries is here too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it just shows also the methodology of Paul, which is to unite with who he's working with, unite with the archetypes and the imaginations of the peoples that he's working with, of the peoples that he's working with, and find the Christ who is? Always universal in those pictures and emphasize that.
Speaker 3:It's so beautiful, it's so moving to me. As we take this in today, I can just feel oh yeah, my relationship with him tells me what he's about is going to have to be wide enough and big enough for truly all of the rays of the sun, which means all peoples and all spiritualities to find their Christ ray and bring in their true and good thing. That's going into the future and, just like me, also laying aside those things that have no more future, that we need to lay now, no longer do, and that, I think, is the challenge he's facing here. We all are, you know, but some things you guys are bringing with you through your life, practices and experiences, we're going to leave them at the shore before we get on the boat.
Speaker 2:Right, they have death in them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we spent some time today talking about how ways of living with the law have no future. It's not, the law has no future. Ways of living with the law have no future. We have to leave those aside. If it's not faith built, then our righteousness will not be good. But it doesn't mean the law is suddenly made irrelevant. Everybody goes into that in the New Testament. No, no, no, no, no. Don't get it twisted. But we have to live in it and work with it in a totally new kind of way but what about the pagans?
Speaker 3:What about their world and way?
Speaker 1:Because our spiritual experiences happen in many ways a little bit outside the body.
Speaker 3:They're encounters in the soul that touch a spirit, reality, and then we come back out of them, back kind of into our life and body. Now I've got to go to the store. Now I've got to go relate to them. Now I've got to go to the store. Now I've got to go relate to right. Now I've got to live my life and not everything around me has gone through what I've gone through. They're not where I'm at, and so these dear pagan Christians will go home and their husband and their children tomorrow are going to be going to the pagan rites where they slaughter pigs to some gods and then eat those pigs that are full of the god, power of that god, and they're like can I do that still? Everybody's getting absolutely drunk out of their mind so they can disappear and die into the universe and feel the pleasure of ecstatic mindlessness and then be put back together again as they wake up the next day and feel like they're connecting with God. Can I still do those things? Still do those things?
Speaker 2:I feel, like.
Speaker 3:That's what will be really nice to look at next time, because we are hours up. How is Paul trying to work with these two groups who are coming together and pointing them towards a new life in Christ, them towards a new life in Christ?
Speaker 1:living in the light of this Christ who shines on us. Beautiful, I look forward to it. Yeah, thank you Jonah, thank you Patrick. © BF-WATCH TV 2021. © transcript Emily Beynon.