In religious science,
We like to say that we honor all faiths,
And yet I would argue that in truth there are only two types of religion,
Outside religion and inside religion.
Outside religion is based on the idea that there is a God,
A creator,
A man upstairs,
Whatever you want to call it,
That is as far away from you as you can possibly imagine,
In another dimension,
In the cosmos,
And yet at the same time you're intrinsically connected.
You and God have a relationship and yet something has gotten in the way to fragment it.
God woke up,
Said she's going to go get a gallon of milk,
And never came back.
Or there's something with your humanity,
Something about who you are,
That has somehow ticked off the creator,
God.
And outside religion is all about our individual pathway to reconnect with the creator.
And I respect all faiths,
And yet I want to be tough today on outside religion.
I want to be tough on outside religion because of the psychological damage that it creates when we use something like religion as a way to separate us instead of connect us with God.
Because outside religion consciously or unconsciously invented the pyramid marketing scheme.
The idea being that in order to reconnect with God,
You can't look within yourself,
But you need some sort of mediator,
Some sort of church,
Some sort of messiah,
Something that isn't you that you have to surrender to that will then fix your relationship with God.
And no matter how screwed up this human life may be,
Perhaps create a promise of greater connection in the future.
I am not saying that there isn't a transformational experience that happens when we take Christ in our heart.
I'm not saying that there's not something beautiful about the devotional practices and faith that help connect us with God.
I am saying there's something quite sick in the idea of anyone telling you that in order to get to God,
You have to go through them,
Through their system,
Through their ritual,
Through their particular faith.
In this sense,
Outside religion becomes a kind of hell because it serves against its very purpose.
And like Henry Nouwen once alluded to,
What is hell but our own rejection of ourselves from entering heaven?
God would never reject us,
But we reject ourselves.
It helps me think of what our founder Ernest Holmes said,
If you want to stay out of hell,
Then no one can ever be in because when we blame,
When we reject,
When we put people outside of good,
We inadvertently put ourselves there too.
And that's one of the problems of outside religion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Our philosophical forefather,
He left his job as a Unitarian minister,
Mostly because of this idea that he didn't want to teach people that he,
Through performing the Eucharist or communion,
Could help people connect with God.
For Emerson,
The very existence of our mind was the very existence of God in us,
As us,
Expressing.
And that leads me to inside religion.
And inside religion,
As complex and multi-layered as it may be,
Is quite simple.
You find God within yourself.
You find God within yourself.
And as I'll complete the message today,
But I'm going to go ahead and throw it out now.
When you discover God within yourself,
You can then find God anywhere.
But until you can find God within yourself,
You can't find God anywhere.
Inside religion believes that we find a spiritual connection.
We unveil that the divine has never left us,
Has always been there with us.
And yet we've had to overcome some of our own confusion,
Our own negative self-image,
Our own falling into the traps of the world that have us think that we're not connected with something divine,
Our own losing our way in the midst of outside religion.
We have to overcome those things to find a connection with the divine in our heart.
And when we overcome ourselves,
It can begin to speak to us through all things.
For me,
One of the greatest spiritual movements ever happened in America in the 19th century.
We have this new independent spirit,
This newfound value on the self.
We have this frontier-ism,
This idea of learning exotic and new spiritual things,
As well as entering landmasses that we had never seen or experienced before.
Those who came from Europe,
Of course,
Our indigenous people knew it well.
And one of the things that came with that is a newfound realization of the divine speaking within us.
Harold Bloom talked about this in a classic book he wrote called The American Religion.
And you can think of the dawn of Pentecostalism,
This experience of people finding God within and all of a sudden God speaking through them in tongues and words that you and I can't understand and even the person who's channeling them can't.
Then we have Joseph Smith,
The founder of Mormonism,
Who had a newfound belief and understanding that God could reveal him or itself through any person at any time.
Sometimes today,
I still love to see a member of the LDS pray because when they pray,
They'll hold their arms around themselves and feel the presence of God.
This happens to a certain degree in American Quakers as well,
Who wait for the presence of God to speak through them and stand up and share that wisdom.
And then there is Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New Thought Movement.
Emerson,
Of course,
Believing that as we embrace the spiritual birthright of individuality,
Which for him is God as us,
And we see nature not as sinful or as an evil place,
But as that which speaks the language of God to and through us,
We realize the divine in all places.
And so this incredible religious movement,
In a sense,
Although all of these faiths have aspects that disagree greatly with one another,
They all have one thing in common,
The inside religion.
And what I would argue,
And why I say there are only two types of religion is that every faith has an outside and an inside.
Every faith has its outside aspects that tends to put God way far away and a set of rules and practices and intermediaries that if you somehow do everything right,
You might be acceptable to God again.
And every faith has its mystical branch that points us within.
And once again,
When we see that,
We can see that a Catholic can be so outside and yet so spiritually hip and inside.
A Buddhist can be so outside and yet so spiritually hip and inside.
Every faith can have its inside aspects that can help us grow.
And part of what religious science is,
Is promoting the inside aspect of all the great faiths and seeing that inside religion doesn't discriminate.
It doesn't exclude.
It honors all the paths.
So how do you find God?
How do we find God together?
It starts through something unique and beautiful,
Something no one or anyone else can do.
Enter into the interior aspect of your being.
Celebrate your glorious uniqueness and have revealed to you the very existence of a divine unity,
Of an infinite mind,
Of an indescribable beauty.
And as we listen to it,
It speaks through us.
It speaks like the divine spoke through the Psalms and through the sutras and through the spirituals.
It's that voice of the divine that calls us to live a spiritual life.
And as we do that in an inclusive way,
Not in an in an outclusive way,
To coin a term,
We begin to live the religion that's right for us.
And we find God each and every day.
And if we're lucky,
The divine finds and delights in us along the way too.
