The Reality of the Spiritual World
by Rev. Brooks Smith

I believe in the spiritual world. Life is more than the world of space and time and matter. Spiritual entities interface and interact with what we think of as our natural life. Some call those entities angels; some whisper about messengers of God or experiences of the Holy Spirit. Some talk of visions. Now do I believe that everyone is telling the truth about what they experience? Absolutely not. Charlatans and shysters come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Often people use the cloak of religious experience or religious language to hide their efforts to deceive and oppress others. And even when other people have genuine experiences of the spiritual realm that are very meaningful to them, those experiences may not speak to me at all. That's okay. Every flower lifts its face to the sun in its own way.

We know when we feel like we are in the presence of angels or of spiritual realities. We know the difference between being in the spirit, in the connected flow of Life, in the presence of God on the one hand and everyday life. In those moments of everydayness, the world seems to be flat, without a spiritual dimension. We don't have a sense of God, of Spirit or of ourselves as spirit.

Wordsworth writes of our spiritual awareness "fading into the light of common day." Our culture, the world as it is created by human minds and hands wants to eliminate our sense of being spiritual beings. The glare of our culture's neon lights attempts to create a landscape barren of spirit. Our culture's drive is to tell is that we are only material creatures, not children of the Spirit. The materialism of our culture is essentially hostile to Spirit.

I believe that the universe was created some 15 billion years ago as a material and spiritual reality. From the beginning, spirit and matter danced together. Human beings embody a concentration of spirit so our dance with the Creator is of particular power and importance. We do not dance alone. Spirit and matter dance together in all the creatures and in rocks and trees and flowers. All creation dances. All creatures of God sing the song of life. The universe groans everyday-with the birth pangs of new creations and with the agonies of dying.

Life is struggle. Creation happens out of the watery chaos-and chaos is not destroyed, but rather it is just held back temporarily. God says to Job-See the leviathan, look unto the chaos dragon, my creation, my child, always present. Chaos is at the heart of the universe. Chaos happens, not as divine punishment, but simply as part of the reality of the world. Nicholas Berdyaev spoke of the Ungrund, the uncreated as the reality of the universe, before God created. Chaos happens. Cells begin to grow out of control-lightning strikes-El Nino brings drought-atmospheric conditions create hurricanes.

Through science, thank God, we can often understand the dynamics of these processes. We can understand how things are happening. But when chaos strikes us, when it takes our children, or when in empathy we see it take another mother's child, or when we contemplate the reality of the pain and suffering of life, we cry out. Why, tell me, tell us, why o God, you created a world with so much pain. Why is there such evil, such suffering in so much of the world and in my world?

Once, I had a dream. In the dream, I went down into the old cold cellar that was under the farmhouse where my great grandparents lived in Missouri. I carried a hoe and in the corner of the cellar, I saw a rattlesnake. Out of my fear, I began attacking the snake, which had been asleep. Suddenly I notice a large cobra off to my left that was rising up to strike. And then from the corner of my eye, I saw a gila monster menacing me from my right. The large cobra strikes. The cobra strikes at me, but somehow it ends up striking through me and then becoming evanescent and settling gently onto me. I am incorporated into the cobra. The cobra has really struck and neutralized the gila monster!

I believe that the pain and suffering that we experience in life has four sources, corresponding to four entities in the dream. Human beings, of course, cause suffering with our violence against nature and against each other. Perhaps we cause suffering especially when we only live in the light of common day, thinking that our tools, our power of mind and body, gives us control over nature.

Nature, the first snake, does cause suffering as well. Nature can also be a glorious blessing, even as we human beings can burst forth with love and joy and beauty. Since I did a report in 4th grade on gila monsters, they have fascinated me as fearsome, ugly, very dangerous creatures. I see the gila monster as a symbol of radical evil, the demonic. Karl Barth called it `das Nichtige', the nothingness, but it is a malevolent nothingness. And the large cobra-well, that is God.

The prophet Hosea says that God sometimes cuts in order to heal, God wounds us in order to bind up the wounds. The cobra strikes fear into me and I am even somehow wounded as the cobra attacks the gila monster, preventing the gila monster from destroying me.

And now Jesus. I believe that God sent Jesus to dwell among us full of grace and truth. The parable of the Tenants in the Vineyard tells us that the owner of the vineyard has left responsibility in the hands of the tenants. They are to work the vineyard and pay the rent. They refuse to pay the rent and beat or kill the messengers from the owner. The owner decides, perhaps in anguish, to send the beloved son in the hope that the tenants will come to their sense, pay the rent and continue to work the vineyard. The tenants kill the son, convincing themselves that if they kill the heir, it will all be theirs. In their selfishness, in their greed, in their refusal to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with the Owner, they kill the ultimate messenger.

God did not plan to have Jesus die on the cross. God's hope was that the tenants would repent, turn around, come to their true selves, and pay the rent. God's risk was that violence would be imposed on the Beloved Son. The Scripture says that a sword will pierce your heart Mary. The Centurion's sword pierces the heart of Jesus after his death. But it is also true that the suffering of Jesus is the suffering of God. In the spiritual realm,the suffering of Jesus brings all our sufferings and all the sufferings of creation into his heart and through him into the heart of God.

Jesus was opposed to the sacrificial system of the temple. His assault on the moneychangers in the temple crystallized the Sanhedrin's opposition to him and leads to his death. He dies because those who have taken over the vineyard refused to pay the rent-they wanted the temple to be a den of thieves rather than a place of prayer.

Jesus death, then, is the triumph for a time of the human forces of evil. What will the owner of the vineyard do? What will God do? Will the thieving tenants get away with murder? Will we? Will the Temple's sacrificial system go on making money for the priests while robbing the people of a true house of prayer, of connection to the living God? Has it? Are the murderous tenants in complete control? Does God have an answer?

`Early in morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and ...