Sermon Library
“Kenosis and Tantra”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
February 08, 2009
Service Theme: Epiphany V-2009
Epiphany V-2009 February 8, 2009
Kenosis and Tantra
By Gregg R. Anderson
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up
“Will the real Jesus please stand up?” Do you remember that game show? In was on TV from 1956 to 68. (It is “To Tell the Truth.”) Do you remember the host and some of the panelists? (Bud Collyer was the host. Panelists were Kitty Carlisle, Orson Bean, Polly Bergen, Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Bill Cullen, and Don Ameche.) Discovering the real truth about the life of Jesus has been the interesting challenge ever since Jesus lived. Even Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona.” (Matthew 16:15-17) This may be the answer, but followers of Jesus have been trying to understand what this answer really means. Today, perhaps due to technology and global communication, the search for the real Jesus is as intense as it ever has been and maybe even more. There are advantages to research today that were never available before. We may very well have the ability to come closer to discovering the real Jesus unlike any other time before. We want the truth. Will the real Jesus please stand up?
This is what is going on today through thousands of contemporary scholars; scholars such as Matthew Fox, John Dominic Crossan, N.T. Wright, Bart Ehrman, Karen Armstrong, Diana Eck, John Spong, Marcus Borg, Elaine Pagels and Cynthia Bourgeault; just to name a few. The purpose is not to create a new Jesus, some sort of new age Jesus, but to discover the real historical Jesus. Sometimes this means to search through, around and underneath past creeds and doctrines that were written when the world was flat and limited. I believe Cynthia’s book The Wisdom Jesus makes an excellent contribution to the purpose of asking for the real Jesus to stand up.
Cynthia is teaching us some new words which are actually very old words, but understood in new ways, in ways which they were initially meant to be understood. Instantiation was the word last Sunday and the Sunday before it was Metanoia. Today it is Kenosis. Metanoia is the original Greek word which means to open and expand one’s mind. Meta means large or enlarge and nous or noia is mind. Jesus is asking people to approach life with a different mind-set, a more encompassing mind.
Metanoia
What happened to metanoia in the past was that it got interpreted as repentance in the third and fourth century by Jerome due to a corresponding definition and doctrine of baptism. It was not a translation, but subjective theologizing. Even Martin Luther and John Calvin knew of this mistake and tried to correct it, but the word and emphasis of “repentance” has been instilled for over a millennium. Luther wrote that metanoia clearly signifies a changing of the mind and heart and not just contrition.
Cynthia lifts the phrase “Putting on the mind of Christ.” This is from the Letter to the Phillipians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” “The words call us up short as to what we are actually supposed to be doing on this path of metanoia: not just admiring Jesus, but acquiring his consciousness.” (p. 29)
So, metanoia is, in fact, not about repentance, but about an expansion of our mind into the very mind of Christ, into the revolutionary change of consciousness and into Christ consciousness. It is not just about repenting and asking God to forgive us through the sacrifice and belief in Jesus, but for us to begin to put on the mind of Christ and therefore to approach life much differently here and now. It is not just a turn around for our eternal salvation, but a turn around of our lives today and how we relate and love one another here and now.
Repaint and Thin No More
It seems that there was a little old church out in the countryside: painted white and with a high steeple. One Sunday, the pastor noticed that his church needed painting. He checked out the Sunday ads and found a paint sale. The next day, he went into town and bought a gallon of white paint. He went back out to the church and began the job. He finished with the first side. It was looking great. But he noticed he had already used a half gallon. He didn’t want to run back in town and being the creative person that he was, he found a gallon of thinner in the shed out back, and began to thin his paint. It worked out great. He finished the remaining three sides with the last half gallon of paint. That night, it rained: it rained hard. The next morning when he stepped outside the parsonage to admire his work, he saw that the first side was looking great, but the paint on the other three sides had washed away. The pastor looked up in the sky in anguish and cried out, “What shall I do?” A voice came back from the heavens saying, “Repaint, and thin no more!”
Penance is not even a Greek term, but a Latin term by Jerome paenitentia. It means to turn around. The turning around is not just about “repainting and thinning no more,” but a turning around of our mind, consciousness and perspective. When I was very young and going to Sunday School along with the help of my relatively conservative mother, God and religion was presented as a bunch of “Thou shalt nots.” If we committed a sin we were pretty much doomed. Fear of God was pretty much a fear of God. My mother said we can’t swear, play cards, go to movies or dance. This is what it meant to be a Christian. My dad said, however, that it was okay to dance, but just don’t stop dancing knowing what dancing in High School could lead to.
Kenosis
Today I know that such “thins” or sins have little to do with putting on the mind of Christ. One of the essential practices of putting on the mind of Christ is Kenosis. This is another important ancient and new term. Kenosis is from the Greek verb kenosein which means to empty oneself. It was Paul who first applied this term to Jesus. Cynthia states, “in a moment of intuitive brilliance Paul grasped the essential element in Jesus’ methodology, and described it in his immortal words of Philippians, ‘Though his state was that of God, yet he did not deem equality with God something that he should cling to. Rather, he emptied himself and assuming the state of a slave he was born in human likeness.’ As Paul so profoundly realizes, self-emptying is the touchstone, the core reality underlying every moment of Jesus’ human journey. Self-emptying is what brings him into human form, and self-emptying is what leads him out. The full realization of his divine selfhood comes not through the concentration of being, but through a voluntary divestment of it.”
Cynthia then quotes the Gospel of Thomas in chapter or Logion 21. When asked to describe his students, Jesus responds: “They are like small children living in a field not their own. When the landlords return and demand, ‘Give us back our field!’ the children return it by simply stripping themselves and standing naked before them.” “Stripping oneself and standing naked:” this is the essence of the kenotic path. And it is, in fact, precisely the strategy that Jesus employs during the famous temptation narratives of the canonical gospels. In each case Satan asks him to take by feeding himself by turning stones into bread; displaying his divine powers; advancing himself by allowing Satan to establish him as ruler of the world. Jesus responds by simply letting go of the bait being dangled, being content to rest in his emptiness” which, in turn, becomes his fullness and abundance.
Cynthia says, “It is also the methodology Jesus will reaffirm during his ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane and which will carry him through the crucifixion and his following forty days. Kenosis is not the same as renunciation. Renunciation implies a subtle pushing away whereas kenosis is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on. For all intents and purposes it is synonymous with non-clinging or non-attachment. But, unlike a more Buddhist version of this spiritual notion, kenosis has a certain warm spaciousness to it; to the degree one does not assert one’s own agenda, something else has the space to be. The ‘letting go’ of kenosis is actually closer to ‘letting be’ than it is to any of its ‘non’-equivalents like non-clinging and non-attachment; its flow is positive and fundamentally creative.”
Brief Summary
In the beginning of her chapter on Kenosis, Cynthia clarifies, “So far we have been looking at Jesus as typical of the wisdom tradition from which he comes. An enlightened master recognized by his followers as the Ihidaya, or the Single One, he teaches the art of metanoia, or “going into the larger mind.” Underlying all his teaching is a clarion call to a radical shift in consciousness: away from the alienation and polarization of the egoic operating system and into the unified field of divine abundance that can be perceived only through the heart.” (p. 62)
This belief, this concept of kenosis or essential letting go and realizing that it really is a primary teaching of Jesus is a metanoic and paradigmatic perception of the life of Jesus and there the life of those of us who might call ourselves Christian. With Cynthia’s profound insights I have become more and more convinced that metanoia and kenosis are, indeed, two of the paramount purposes of Jesus life and teachings. So many of us are conditioned and committed to clinging to our things and our thoughts. We think this is what we are supposed to do. Yet, the gap between our own dogma and our day to day reality increases and so, too our expectations, anxiety and frustration. We all have our thoughts about how our lives should be or even deserve to be, but reality seems to keep reminding us that our so called deserving expectations do not come to fruition and even failure.
To let go of such expectations and entitlements can, and inevitably do, reduce our common consternations. Our genuine “let it be” gestures and attitudes can literally change our lives if we genuinely “let it be” and “let it go.” I think if we can think about this teaching and practice on a daily basis in our day to day lives, we can become far less anxious and even different people with more purposeful perspectives. The great irony of life is that when we give up and let go we then truly gain and become more grateful. Jesus said, “For whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life, for my sake, will save it.” (Mark 8:35) This saying is recorded in all four gospels.
Tantra
This sermon was scheduled to be entitled “Kenosis and Tantra.” I began with this intention and explained a number of new old words. I wanted to remind you of Instantiation, Metanoia, paenitentia and Kenosis. With little time left for Tantra, let me simply say it is a Sanskrit word meaning to stretch and is the warp of a loom. It is used in both Hindu and Buddhist practices. Tantra practices serve as a structure for intertwining the teachings and practices in order to weave a tapestry toward enlightenment. Tantra combines physical, verbal and mental expressions of practice, which braid together creating a wholistic path of development. A goal of Tantra is pleasure, but more about intimacy in many ways which even surpasses pleasure – if one can begin to imagine this. Cynthia talks about Tantra as a complete transcendence of separation and duality – through a complete self-emptying or self-outpouring. Essentially, Tantra is a mental, physical and spiritual union. Tantra bridges the notion of emptying and true abundance. When we fully give, we fully receive. It is more blessed to give than to receive has many applications.
Gift of the Magi
Metanoia, Kenosis and Tantra are related and can be best concluded in this incredible story suggested by Cynthia in her chapter of Kenosis entitled “The Gift of the Magi” by the well known American author known as O. Henry. Della and James are newlyweds; they’re madly in love with each other. They are also poor as church mice, and their first Christmas together finds them without sufficient funds to buy each other gifts. But each of these lovers has one prize possession. James owns a gold watch given to him by his grandfather. Della has stunning auburn hair falling all the way to her waist. Unbeknownst to Della, James pawns his gold watch in order to buy her beautiful silver combs for her beautiful hair. Unbeknownst to James, Della cuts and sells her hair in order to buy him a gold watch chain. On Christmas Eve the two of them stare bewilderedly at their incredibly generous and now completely useless gifts. They have both emptied themselves and by so doing have shared their most abundant love each for the other.
It is Only When We Lose Our Self that We Gain Our Self
Jesus said it is only we lose our self that we gain our self. It is only when
we empty our self that we genuinely fulfill our self. It is more blessed to give than to receive. It may very well be the primary irony of life. Cynthia writes, “Jesus’ teaching assures us as we move toward center along this very reckless and in some ways abundant and extravagant path, not ‘storing it all up’ as in the classic ascetic traditions of attaining being, but ‘throwing it all away,’ that divine love is infinite and immediate and will always come to us if we don’t cling.” Cynthia concludes, “This is I believe is the path that Jesus taught and walked, the path he called us to, the path he still calls us to.” Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Drive
Aspen, Colorado 81611
970 925 7184
http://www.aspenchapel.org