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I grew up long before computers showed us how they could handle millions of requests all at once. So in college I began to have serious questions whenever our preacher asked everyone to bow their heads and say a silent prayer to God. And our preachers back in the 50’s and 60’s did that a lot. How could God hear all those prayers being offered up at the same time? There were several hundred at our church and many more throughout Tupelo who were in church from 11 until noon on Sunday, plus in our state and country and around the world. Lots of prayers were being offered up all at once, so how did God sort them all out.

Rev. Sam Alexander is Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA. He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., and Union Seminary in Virginia, M.Div. Sam has served congregations in Maryland and in the San Francisco Bay area and is currently Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael. He serves as an Adjunct Instructor in Homiletics at San Francisco Theological Seminary. What they call, “his provocative sermons” have inspired, disturbed, and delighted his congregations.

It’s interesting to see what Jesus thought about beliefs. Jesus, in his parable of the Good Samaritan, makes it clear that the righteous one is not the Pharisee or the lawyer, who are learned and who know about the law, correct belief, or so on. The righteous one is the one who cares for his neighbor, who reaches out to the stranger in need.

For love is long-suffering and abounds in kindness. It is not arrogant or boastful. Love does not behave rudely. Neither self-serving nor quick to take offence, love never thinks the worst.

Belief is something you hold because you presume you have some facts. You believe in them. When I was in college studying chemistry, there was a chart up on the wall that had all of the components that make up matter. You could count them and some people actually memorized them. Those components were treated as facts and if you wanted to get a good grade you better believe that they were facts.

Two perspectives are changing recently among progressive Christians that dilute the concentration on “getting to heaven,” the most common definition of “salvation.” First, fewer people still believe in hell, that is, that an all-loving God would condemn anyone to eternal suffering and separation from God. (It is curious that the belief in heaven persists even among many who don’t really believe in hell.) A more important change in thought is that God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ is all-inclusive, meant for everyone, whether or not heaven or an afterlife of any sort exists. Diminishing is the view that there will be a sorting-out process depending upon each person’s “right beliefs.”

To believe, or give assent to, a fixed set of beliefs, such as, “I believe in God the father almighty….,” or the inerrency of the Bible is to cut off the possibility of growth. If you have all the answers you are not open to new thoughts or questions. Communicating with a fundamentalist is very difficult, and we are all fundamentalist in a variety of ways. But Leonard Cohen reminds us that “there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light comes in.”

Easter calls attention to the traditional, fundamental “beliefs” associated with the Christian religion – if only for a day. The secular world pays little attention to the nuances of Christian “faith” in a post-Christian world. Easter is a liturgical season that lasts for seven weeks. In Christian tradition, the time between the resurrection of Jesus and his “ascension” into the sky (Pentecost) replaces the time between the Jewish Feast of the Passover and the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Not only do most Christians concentrate on the resurrection story – often literally. Editorial writers for supposedly sophisticated secular media seem to feel obligated to attempt to find meaning in the traditional religious legend of a dead man walking out of his tomb. But “faith” does not mean “belief.” “Faith” means “trust.” “Faith” further means “confidence.”

Dogma and doctrine should not get in the way of practicing Love, who is God. Doctrines can be interesting: they help us understand the origins and background of our religion. But repeating creeds is not the price of admission into Christianity. Instead of caring whether the story of Jesus’ resurrection was a fact or a myth, let’s look in the story for inspiration to turn from the way of death to the way of life. Let’s care about our neighbors without jobs or health insurance, face the resentment in our hearts that needs to be released, become activist citizens, and learn to bring our careers in alignment with our highest values. Let’s gather in churches, soup kitchens, work-places, living rooms, and cafés to support each other in doing things that matter, and let go of old doctrines that don’t.

As we gather to support each other in sacred community, or as we search for sacred community, shared beliefs and common ideas have great value. But is it essential that we all agree on what we believe to be true?

It is our village, our community, where we experience the most challenges, growth, support, and evolution. Whether you are a part of a thriving sacred community or would like to create one, we hope these eBulletins support you in your community journey. We encourage you to draw together, even just a few friends, find a common spiritual path, and share ritual, breaking of bread, music, discussion, and support on this journey of life and death, birth and re-birth. And we are thankful that you are a part of our larger community!

A middlepath spirituality is a spiritual path that has nothing to do with religious doctrines, religious beliefs, religious creeds, or the need to embrace any of the teaching’s contained in the world’s sacred texts as “absolute truth”.A middlepath spirituality is the authentic spirituality that emerges when we adopt a level of consciousness that embraces the intentional decision to search for, and then fully embrace, the contradictory truths found on both sides of every issue—–without having to label one side as “right” and the other as “wrong”.

The mortality rate is 100%. If we are not promising eternal life in heaven, what sensible and sensitive response to we have to the issue of mortality? How do we navigate the big transitions of life at times of birth, coming of age, marriage, illness and death when the certainty of traditional church answers now seem to be either useless or entirely false.
We have exchanged false certainty for honest uncertainty, choosing to live meaningfully in the present moment, freed of anxiety about the future.

Soren Kierkegaard has said that prayer does not change the One to Whom we pray but it changes the one who prays. If we accept that prayer is not asking a supernatural theistic god to grant us wishes, how then do we pray so that it changes us?

All religions are the product of a culture’s attempt at expressing their most closely held beliefs, values and the morals they want to pass on to the coming generation. We should no more say that one religion is better than another than we would claim that one language is superior to another or that my favorite music is “right” any everyone else’s favorite music is “wrong.” There are healthy and unhealthy religious beliefs and practices but in the 21st century we need to learn from one another and challenge one another to repent of our prejudices, oppressive practices and out dated values so that we can all become the best Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. that we can be.

Modern scholarship and religious practice have given us several different images of Jesus. Some insist that he never existed while others insist that he was God incarnate. This message attempts to take a scholarly approach to articulating a relevant, historically honest approach to the role of the Jesus tradition in the 21st century saying: the strata of the Jesus tradition that motivates progressives is the Jesus who stands as an alternative to the empire.

As progressive Christians, we mean we are Christians who strive for peace and justice among all people. As spiritual beings committed to being lights in this world, how can we support war? Is there a just war?

During this time of intense transition, axial shifts, cultural evolution, darkness, and rebirth…may we all be born again into the light, into the healing, into the spirit, and into interconnected awareness. May the light of Jesus shine within all of us. May his birth be a reminder of the power of one human to change the world. May we be the midwives of this new birth. May the birthing pains be worth the new creation that we are being called to co-create. May we ever be in gratitude for this divine experience of being human during this holy shift.