God, The Greater Consciousness

SERMON RECORDING​

FULL SERVICE RECORDING 

The Greater Consciousness – John 17:20-26; Ephesians 4:1-13

Recently Wendy and I have been catching up on the BBC documentaries in which groups of celebrities go on pilgrimage through Wales, Ireland/Scotland, and through the Swiss Alps. 

For those who haven’t seen these, one gets a privileged insight into the spiritual journey’s of different people, from different faiths, and some of no faith who either consider themselves agnostic or atheist. 

One of the questions that pilgrims often battle with is the question of “Is there a God or isn’t there a God?”. What interests me though is that for most people this question is framed around a conception of God as a separate Personality located outside of themselves somewhere else in the universe, imagining God to be like an invisible super-sized human being.  God is over there and I am over here and God is much bigger than me.  Most often this understanding of God is spoken of as the ‘Man Above’ of ‘the Big Man in the Sky who looks over us’. 

While in some places in Scripture, there are highly personified and anthropomorphised images of God that give this impression, there are also many other far more sophisticated notions of God?  What if this notion of God as a supersized Man in the Sky is an oversimplification of who or what God really is? 

I was having a conversation with someone recently who was expressing their deep struggles with the notion of God. Again the notion of God that this person was struggling with was perhaps a simplified Sunday School notion of God: God as a separate person located somewhere else in the universe who controlled all the events on the earth from a distance, sometimes seeming to show up, but most of the time seemingly silent and missing in action.  This person said the they weren’t sure if they could believe in such a God?  But then went on to say that if God was spoken of in different terms, perhaps as the Greater Consciousness in which we all participate and which in fact dwells within each and every person, then that was a conception of God that could make more sense to them.  But the person was worried that this wasn’t what he had been taught growing up as a ‘Christian’ understanding of God and so had always been nervous to raise the question with previous ministers. 

But this view of God as the Greater Consciousness, Higher Wisdom or Greater Intelligence is actually one that I believe resonates very deeply with some important parts of the Biblical Tradition.  It is in fact a view of the Divine that makes more sense to me. 

It is a view that very much connects with our passage today:  In it Jesus speaks in very mysterious ways about himself and about God.  He speaks of God being in him, and he being in God as well as the possibility that we too can share in this experience of God and Jesus being in us and us being in God and in Christ? “...As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…” John 17:21

This is language that is hard to make sense of in terms of our simplistic nations of God as being a  separate living outside of us somewhere else.  How can two or even three separate objects or beings be inside each other at the same time?  How can Christ be in God and God in Christ at the same time…not to mention us being in them and they being in us? 

But if God is the Greater Consciousness, the High Wisdom or Greater Intelligence, then this language begins to make more sense - describing Christ as being in the Greater Consciousness and simultaneously the Greater Consciousness being in Christ. 

And what if we are all expressions of this Greater Consciousness? What if all beings participate in the Greater Consciousness and the Greater Consciousness lives in the depths of all beings?

The language of John’s Gospel from beginning to end supports this conception of God or the Divine.  

The opening of John’s Gospel introduces the Divine Logos—often translated as the Word—that was with God in the beginning and was God. In ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in the thought of the Stoics and later thinkers like Philo of Alexandria, the Logos was understood as the rational principle or divine reason that permeates and orders the cosmos—a kind of intelligent blueprint through which all things come into being.  The Logos is thus the inherent Intelligence and animating Wisdom of Life itself with all of life unfolding from its Source in diverse forms and expressions according to this Intelligent Blue-print of life. In the philosophical traditions influenced by Plato and Pythagoras, mathematics was seen as a key to understanding the underlying harmony and structure of the universe. For them, to study mathematics was, in a sense, to study the Logos, this divine order woven into creation. Thus, students of the Divine were often also students of mathematics, seeking to glimpse the patterns and proportions that reflect the order of the cosmos. 

John draws on this idea but transforms it. The Logos is not only a cosmic principle but becomes especially visible in the flesh, in the person of Jesus.  This language should probably be taken poetically rather than purely literally, suggesting in other words, that Jesus shows us what a human being looks like when we lived in unhindered harmony with the Eternal Logos. When lived according to the deep inherent Sacred Law of Life, the Intelligent Blue-print of Life, then humanity begins to look like Jesus, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). 

John’s Gospel also uses another Jewish religious idea to express this, the ‘I Am’, the name of God revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush.  John’s Gospel contains seven ‘I Am’ sayings of Jesus, I am the Bread of Life, I am the Gate for the Sheep, I Am the Way the Truth and the Life.  What is perhaps more important that the sayings themselves is the idea that the Divine ‘I Am’ is now seen to be located and revealed in Jesus as well.  The Divine I AM – the Nameless and Formless Source of All Existence -  is disclosed in the life of Jesus. 

But John’s Gospel does not suggest that this Divine status of Jesus is exclusive to Jesus only. When the religious authorities in John’s Gospel begin to complain that Jesus is blaspheming by claiming to the Son of God, he refers them to their own scriptures. Quoting from the psalms he asks them… “Does not your own scriptures tell you you are gods (or divine)” (John 10:34). Psalm 82:6 puts it like this “ ‘You are gods; you are all children of the Most High”. In other words it could be said “...your primordial or essential nature is Divine… you are expressions of the Divine.” But the religious leaders in Jesus day, like most of humanity, live in ignorance of this truth about themselves and about Jesus. 

Another clue in John’s Gospel is that in describing God to the woman at the well, Jesus explicitly tells her that God is not an object, not even the supreme object, that can be located in a specific place in the universe or in the world.  “God is Spirit” Jesus says in John 4:24. ‘Spirit’ in Hebrew means breathe, it is what gives life to physical bodies. What I believe that Jesus is suggesting is that God is the life-giving breathe of the whole cosmos, the whole created order. This is not far off from saying that God is the Greater Consciousness. It suggests that God is the Greater Life that lives and breathes and moves through all creation and all creatures.  As the Scottish Presbyterian hymn writer Walter Chalmers Smith puts it, “To all life thou givest—to both great and small; In all life thou livest, the true life of all;”.  God is the Greater Life, the Greater Consciousness that lives over, in and through all creation, ‘Over all, in all and through all’ as the writer Ephesians puts it (4:6).  And so it turns out that creation is not separate from God after all. All of creation is in God and God is in all of creation, for as Paul puts in in Acts, in Him we live and move and exist (or have our being) Acts 17:28.  According to these verses, creation and nature are woven through with the Divine Presence, both as the Intelligent Blueprint of Life (the Logos), and as the Spirit or Breathe of Life that lives in and through all.  And so to live in openness and harmony to the Greater Consciousness or Greater Life of God, should also bring us into greater harmony with nature and the created order itself not further away from nature as our modern life is doing. 

When we understand God as the Greater Consciousness that lives in and through all, then the possibility of psychic phenomenon, mental telepathy is not so far fetched.  If there is One Divine Consciousness living and breathing through all of us then it is not so far fetched that we might be able to communicate in ways that our ancestors were aware of but which science is unable to account at this point.   150 years ago science had no idea of radio waves.  It would have seemed like magic to some of our ancestors.  I wonder if in future other ways of communicating between people might be considered natural ways that more ancient people were aware of? 
If the Gospels are to be trusted, then it appears that Jesus possessed these abilities. 

But I feel like I am straying from the passage now… as we get back to the passage in John 17 and we consider this language of Christ in God, God in Christ, Christ in us and us in Christ, what it also points to is that God or the Divine is deeply relational. God is the stuff that connects us together deeply as persons. God or the Divine is not just an impersonal cosmic law, the rational blue-print of creation, God is also the mystery of love. For this is what the language of Jesus implies when he says in verse 22 & 23 “...may they be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”  

When two people love each other deeply, they live inside of each other. They may have separate bodies, but at the level of heart and spirit there is a deep connection.  The language of our passage is deeply intimate. This is the language of Love.  God as the Greater Consciousness ‘of all’ and ‘in all’ is none other than the mystery of love. 

Though outwardly and physically we may seem like separate beings, when we begin to awaken to the deeper spiritual reality in which all of us share, that Divine Consciousness within all, we begin to perceive an underlying inner Oneness. It is this perception of a shared one-ness that gives rise to love.  I in God, God in me, You in God and God in you, you in me and I in you… That is the greater mystery that I believe this passage is pointing us to. 

A few weeks ago I shared a quote on Facebook that expresses this beautifully.  Is is from the Hindu teacher and mystic Shankarananda – “Holy Communion is to feel at one with the One in all beings and all creation.” It is an interesting quote because that is pretty much how the writer of Ephesians describes the Ascension of Christ -  (Ascension Day was on Thursday) –  when it says: “He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.” Eph 4:10). The writer suggests that the ascended Christ lives in a state of Holy Communion at one with the One in all beings and all creation… and if we are attentive enough through prayer and meditation we might discover this Presence of Christ, the Christ Consciousness (The Mind and Heart of Christ) dwelling within us also.  And that is what prayer is… it is the opening of our hearts and minds to the Greater Consciousness which we refer to by the word God that has been disclosed to us in Jesus. 

Just some more food for thought on the journey…