1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 7.Focused on the Spirit?

1.7.1 Introduction

I am venturing into deep waters. What is the focused word the Spirit saying to the church? One person cannot answer this alone. The answer can only arise out of the community yet to concede that 'the community' can speak with the voice on this is beyond reason. I can only say that here is my discernment at this time.

There can be no dogmatism in making any analysis of what we discern the Spirit is saying. I offer my discernment: any authenticity it may have comes as the Spirit witnesses to the mind and spirit of the community. It will do its work though even if that witness does not register because it creates the quest to discern what is indeed the word of the Spirit.

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1.7.2 The primary word -- God is salvation

The primary word is the message of salvation. In a sense, this goes without saying. Yet what the Spirit is saying is a call to radically re-evaluate what we mean by this message. It no longer connects with us in any sense to speak and think of 'salvation' as being to 'another world' or as relating to something occurring only after death. It is my discernment at least that the central word of the Spirit to the whole of humanity in our day is that we are face to face with unimaginable calamity and that the path of salvation is a path created by hearing the Spirit and walking the way of the Spirit.

God wills humanity's survival and continued place in the universe. This the Spirit testifies to us. Humanity faces extinction because of its own failure to recognise and live its being as grace incarnate in physical life. This is the Spirit testifies to us. The salvation from extinction will not come from our effort but from grace. This the Spirit testifies to us.

The cornerstone of Christian faith is that Jesus, Word of God, became fully human. It is a core element of the Apostolic Testament that this act of becoming human was an act of cosmic significance, not just “an event in history”. The reality of the entire universe revolves around the movement and place of the crucifixion. It was 'humanity' that hosted the incarnate Christ: not an ant or a shark or a lion, but a human being. We do not under-estimate the crisis now facing humanity. Indeed a role of the church is to make every person  aware of the reality of our physical danger and prepare our society for the consequences of the forces bearing down upon us. Yet into the face of all these forces, the Christian community affirms that, as humans, we play a critical role in God's universe and, as humanity, we will be saved even if it seems everything we ever held dear and precious is shattered and lost to us.

The community of the Spirit is of those who believe into the face of death the insuperable power of God to save. It proclaims therefore a call to transcend any and all concern for our personal 'salvation'. That is where the conviction about trans-historical judgement and salvation does indeed come into play, as we willingly let go of all our personal objectives and desires, even of life itself, trusting in the work of salvation -- and that if we lose even our life in that great creative act of grace, yet we do not lose it eternally but have our reward.

How is it that humanity will be saved? It will not be by some trans-historical 'miracle'. It will not leave by a materialisation of a 'return of Christ'. To believe this is false hope, a betrayal of the Spirit. Salvation will spring from the community that maintains faith and hope into the face of everything that would extinguish faith and hope. It will be as community: no individual can or will stand in the face of these events. There is real and fundamental truth in the old saying, "no salvation outside the church". Nor will 'the church' be saved by hard work and great programmes, or even intense religious zeal. The community that is saved will survive only and solely because it puts its faith in the fact that, through baptism, through grace alone, it is the being in and of the Christ of God in the world and that even as it may be apparently destroyed yet will it live and know resurrection as the indestructible community of faith, the bearer of salvation for the world.

The words of the Spirit testifies with utter clarity that there is a life for humanity beyond whatever happens to global society in this century -- and that this new life will spring from the community of faith.

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1.7.3 The vision that calls us on

So the Spirit speaks to us the promise of salvation. What would a 'saved' humanity be like? We are not projecting some vision of 'being in heaven' nor the coming of a trans-historical messianic kingdom. Humanity that emerges 'saved' from the cataclysm will still be flesh and blood, ambiguous and ambivalent, subject to all the same passions, torments and temptations as we today. Human nature will still be weak, as it was to Jesus himself.

But yet we can be sure and confident that there will be a transformation and about the only thing we can be certain of is that the nature of how society will be transformed will be such that totally defies our present imagination to predict. Yet, even so, the word of the Spirit is that we do know fully what will be the inner reality of that transformation, because we already live it.

Let me envisage a world of humanity utterly shattered and broken with virtually every trace of recognisable institution gone, the planet itself very largely a wasteland and wilderness. In the midst of all this brokenness, there will be communities of people who will gather every week, gathered to hear the words of the Spirit spoken as its memory is rehearsed in scripture and liturgy, and who offer bread and wine, lift up their voice in the sursum corda -- "let us give thanks: it is right to offer thanks and praise": giving thanks even into the face of their circumstances, breaking the loaf and sharing the bread and wine.

It is from this simple rite that the entire new life of humanity will spring and it is this rite that will give it its transformed character. Everything for a new humanity is encapsulated in the Eucharistic rite.

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1.7.4 The call of the Spirit to repentance

It is a truism to assert that the 20th century saw a radical decline in the sense of sin. Many reasons have been advanced for this decline. The church itself was substantially to blame both trivialising the understanding of sin and for exploiting conviction about sin as a lever of control.

The most decisive factor in the decline in the sense of sin, however, was the collapse of the theistic model of God for which the church had no alterative  model to put in its place. Without a viable model, the population at large simply could not relate to God and so, inevitably, lost any sense of sin. The issue of a viable model is the subject of Book 2 in this series. It is my discernment that the breaking of the theistic model was the grace-act of the Spirit, for the model could no longer contain the life of the Spirit in the world. It is the grace-action of the Spirit that is raising new models. As new models come to life for us, bringing a renewed consciousness of God, so the Spirit creates an awareness in us of how profound is our failing, personal, communal and global. As the Spirit testifies to the place of humanity in the grace-universe,  we become terribly aware of the extent to which our entire globe of people, not just in the present age but since the very rise of civilisation, has betrayed the purpose of humanity in creation. If we are grasped by the Spirit we cannot but be aware of the sin gripping us in the whole way our world is living in its divisions and discords, in its abuse of the environment and consumption of resources, in its lovelessness. Then we drill all the way down to ourselves as individuals, standing against the call of the Spirit. We cannot stand in judgement on the world because we are part of that world, caught up in all the issues we see of humanity living in denial of its calling.

I have spoken of the calamity approaching global humanity as the avalanche of forces bears down on us. Is still not an inevitability,  however . The message of the Spirit even today echoes the cry of Jeremiah to his contemporaries -- "Repent. Change your ways and this evil can be averted". When we look back on Jerusalem's destruction we can see the power and accuracy of Jeremiah's call to repentance. The disaster that overtook Jerusalem and its people was a totally avoidable one. It did not have to happen. If the people have changed their ways and become wise it could have avoided the catastrophe.

So with our own world. If global society is destroyed it will be essentially an act of self-destruction. Certainly, even changing our ways will not avoid the processes of climate change though we may ameliorate these. Nothing is going to shield us from the crisis of the end of the era of cheap oil. We cannot avoid the inheritances of the past in a host of ways. However, none of these things, even coming together, need destroy global society -- if we are prepared and able to radically "repent" and change our ways.

So the word of the Spirit to our day is urging, calling, exhorting us to repentance and change of life -- a root and branch change of our entire social and economic life across the whole of human society -- beginning with you and me.

We have, all of us, made an almighty mess of being human, whether we look at our world, our country, our church, ourselves. Even just looking at the state of the world we can say this, but when we see this from the perspective of what we are called to be we are humbled to the ground.

When the Spirit calls us to repentance, though, that is not a call to put in a vast effort to change, even though we know that change must be vast and any such effort huge. Before we can even start in changing our ways, the word of the Spirit is one of forgiveness. Even if we embrace the entire mess that global humanity has made of being human, even so, the forgiveness of God is extended to embrace the whole of humanity. We are offered, the whole community is offered, forgiveness for the mess we have made.

As an Anglican, I am imbued with an English vision of the nature of the church which, if not the whole truth, is profoundly authentic. In this vision, the parish church, even if only attended by a few people from the community, is the representative  before God of the whole community within its boundaries, whether members of the church or not. When we say the general confession we do so bearing the whole weight of our communities before God and receive forgiveness of behalf of the whole community. Our Christian experience is that change is impossible without repentance; but repentance has no effect unless it is open to receiving and embracing the gift of forgiveness. From forgiveness springs real, deep and lasting change.

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1.7.5 The call to life in the Spirit

If there is one thing abundantly clear for the future of humanity, it is that there has to be a transformation of religious life. In the first place, it is an imperative of human survival  that we find, globally, a common spiritual centre, for from spirituality springs enduring community and culture, and humanity’s long-term survival depends upon finding a common global culture and its associated common community.

However, religion as it has served humanity to this point of time will not achieve this goal. On the contrary, it is clear today that wherever religion is the dominant factor in the society's life, whether it be in the United States, Iran or any other is Islamic country, India or Polynesia, that society is profoundly unhealthy. Religion is a destructive not a constructive force in contemporary humanity in so far as it achieves any degree of social control.

It will be clear from earlier sections of this chapter that I do not hear a call of the Spirit to a 'new' religion but yet again the faith community that will emerge in humanity’s future will be one radically transformed as compared with religious life as we know it today in any form, Christian or non-Christian. At this point in time, I can only and barely see dimly the shape and nature of where the Spirit is calling community. I doubt whether I will see the transformation in my lifetime, yet it is my hope that as this matrix project progresses something of the character of that transformation will make itself known. What is sure and certain is that we cannot plan and programme the transformation, set objectives or targets or create ideals. From beginning to end, this will be an action of the Spirit.

The touchstone of this entire process of transformation by the Spirit is and will always be the memory of the cross. It is the core life of the faithful community to weekly and hourly root the memory in the cross of Jesus. Everything in the Spirit works itself out in connection with the event of the cross and the instant we lose this focus from our memory, our entire religious life goes off-beam. Whatever the transformation of religion in the future, this will never change and I state that with a certainty that is absolute. Where religion shifts focus from the cross, it comes under the judgement of God and will not last and will not prove creative  for human salvation.

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