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By N. Gordon Cosby People are a part of our universe. So the question, “Is the universe friendly?” involves the question, “Are people friendly?” Many of us would like to consider these questions separately, saying, “Well, I can believe that God is friendly, but let’s separate God from the people.” But people happen to be a very important dimension through which the universe comes to us. Are the people friendly? This is where the question gets extremely sticky. We know a little something about what happens when people are denied love. Children are abused, and later they become abusers. Rapists have often been raped. Hitler was beaten every day by his father, and he in turn beat millions of people. And with the help of millions of ‘decent’ and educated people he exterminated six million Jews. These evidences of rampant evil in the world are not just in the past—not just ‘out there.’ They are right here—right in our city. Can you imagine how wounded one must be who spends his life deepening the addiction of a fellow human being to drugs? There are people in our city, in our neighborhoods, who are scheming constantly to strengthen their drug-marketing procedures in order to stay ahead of those who are trying to protect people from drugs and to help those already addicted to return to health. A very sophisticated marketing procedure developed by some very sharp minds is working hard so that people will become hooked. A few days ago I met with a person who is working with this very issue. He said that the age group from seven to ten is now starting to use drugs. He is developing a kit with which parents can test their children to do away with the denial syndrome and the ignorance of parents as to whether their children are on drugs. Are people friendly? Just as we make a faith-decision concerning God and, by faith, say, “God is love; I will rest my weight on that love,” we make a faith-decision regarding wounded, demonic people. The demonic comes into human life through wounded people. We know that everyone is wounded in some degree, and that all of us are limited in our capacity to love. We make a faith-decision. The deepest essence of each of us is love. At bottom, we are made in God’s image. God is love. I, you, everyone—is love. I will trust that inner revelation. I will treat people, all people, with love. Sensing God in their deeps, with my developed mystic consciousness, I will sense the numinous in them and will totally reverence them. Ultimately, we reverence everything or we reverence nothing. By nature, by essence, we co-inhere with others. God is in them. If God’s love and my love cannot touch the depths in the other, then I choose to take and absorb whatever may be directed toward me out of the evil of the other. That is far better than isolating myself, cutting myself off from God in people. The isolation technique is sure death. If I stay open, any hurt I sustain serves to drive me more deeply into God, who is love. We sometimes seem to think that we are wiser than Jesus—that we know the world better than he knew it. But Jesus, more than any other, knew the nature of the demonic in people. With that knowledge and understanding he strode in love…into the presence of the demonic embodied in the religious-military-industrial complex of his day, and for this he died. Today, 2,000 years later—in Washington, DC, in what is supposed to be the power center of the world, the power of dominance and the power of control—today we drink the blood that he shed for us. Jesus, the world’s greatest realist, believed the universe was friendly. So, even with what I know about the power of darkness and the demonic as it expresses itself through people, I am going to connect as Jesus did and let people—all people, my kind and not ‘my kind’—be the instruments of God’s love and presence flowing into me. And I’m going to flow into them. To connect is to relax. It is to rest. It is to trust. It is to let down. It is to be cared for. It is to be nourished. For the most part, we are terribly isolated from people and we remain in a defensive stance toward those with whom we come in contact. To be alienated from people is to be alienated from God. Gordon Cosby is the founding pastor of The Church of the Saviour and a member today of the Friends of Jesus Church. This excerpt of a 1990 sermon is from the book called By Grace Transformed, available here.
Original content at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Inwardoutward/~3/159800506/.
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Scott Bartchy is a radical. He believes in a subversive system that embraces those on the fringes of our society and seeks to establish a new way of life that goes against the status quo.