Metaphysical Easter Message

Easter Sunday | Spirit Everlasting with Josh Reeves is a Sunday message that speaks on the resurrection of Christ. This takes place in the heart of each one of us when we embrace the Truth that there is a greater Life than only the body and our senses. It is the Life of a Holy Spirit, when we awaken to it within ourselves, that connects us with what is truly everlasting. Easter is a celebration of the Spirit everlasting in us all.

Transcript

You know,

I love the Easter holiday as much as any of them because it not only tells the story of Christ,

But to me it also is the holiday that comes closest to telling the story of the human spirit.

And I hope that in the Easter story as well that you can find perhaps a little bit of your own story in the Easter story.

And I would ask you this morning to consider,

Do you believe in a part of yourself that is everlasting?

Do you believe that there is a part of you that has eternal life,

An eternal spirit?

I don't mean like being a ghost after you passed on.

Although I do remember I had the honor of working with a woman for her memorial service before she was transitioning,

And we were planning eulogy and song and all of that,

And eventually she threw all her papers down and said,

Josh,

Just make sure no one says anything that's going to make me want to get up and leave the room,

Okay?

Good role for a memorial service.

Nor do I mean everlasting life in the sense of a life in heaven,

Which I believe in heaven.

I've just never been there.

But the eternal life that I'm talking about,

The spirit everlasting,

Is something that I feel is available to each of us right here and right now.

That it is an essential part of the Easter story,

That you have a spirit everlasting,

That you can experience in your life today.

It might be in glimpses,

But it's something so powerful when we practice and understand these teachings of Jesus that it can help us overcome any obstacle.

The mystic William Blake famously said,

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Those aren't just pretty poetic words to me.

They're something that's available to each one of us when we connect with this inner life within us,

When we allow it to return to life in all of our affairs today.

The Easter story is the greatest story ever told,

Not just because of its religious significance,

But because of its powerful narrative.

How many stories have,

Like the Easter story,

Where the hero dies near the end?

He's murdered not by some supervillain like Thanos,

But by all in all people you consider to be good people,

You hope would be good people.

Theologians have argued for thousands of years who killed Jesus.

For me,

The answer is probably something like we all did.

Humanity did.

Martin Luther King,

Jr.

Once commented that for him the cross was the most sacred of all symbols.

First of all,

Because it represented the potentiality of humankind,

That God could bring to life a human being that represented and expressed a complete unconditional love,

A complete unconditional love,

A complete hope of who we can become as human beings together as one.

The potentiality of who we can be and of what we can do,

A pure expression of peace.

Yet there's another side of the cross,

Too,

That King referred to as symbolizing the sordid weakness of humankind.

That in the presence of that unconditional love and that absolute hope and presence for peace,

That we human beings could kill that man.

And this cross,

We can even take it within ourselves,

Is a symbol of how we approach our own spiritual life.

That part of us that recognizes,

I am a child of God.

I am an expression of unconditional love.

I am an expression of divine hope and will.

And yet there's that other part of us.

God never rejects us,

But we reject ourselves.

We put ourselves down.

We tell ourselves we aren't enough.

And we seek unintentionally to kill that eternal Spirit and life within us.

Perhaps one of the most profound things that Jesus said to me,

Not to me,

But just said,

Josh,

It's me,

Jesus.

Jesus said,

Nothing that ever happens to you can defile you.

Nothing anyone can ever do to you can truly defile you.

Someone can belittle you.

They can spit on you.

They can betray you.

They can turn their back on you.

They can seek to take your dignity.

They can even seek to crucify or murder you.

No one,

Anything can do,

Can ever truly defile you.

Jesus goes on,

Only what comes from you can defile you.

It speaks to me of what Christianity means when it talks about salvation.

That's the phrase when I think of Jesus on the cross,

Experiencing so much suffering,

So much pain,

So much doubt,

But knowing nothing that could happen to him could ever rob him of his Spirit everlasting.

And that each of us has that ability to always choose,

No matter the challenge we face,

To tune into that inner life within us and to express it with greater clarity and greater love,

To know that part of our Spirit is everlasting.

Our own founder,

Ernest Holmes,

Put it a different way.

He said,

When that which comes from you is no different than that which you would gladly have return,

Then you will have found your heaven.

When that which comes from you in your life is no different from that which you would gladly have return,

Then you will have found your heaven.

Jesus' resurrection wasn't the result of his death but the result of his life,

The result of his teaching.

His teaching,

I want to share today,

Gives us the instruction on how to experience our eternal life today,

How to get glimpses of it in each and every moment by practicing this incredible teaching brought to us over 2,

000 years ago that is still as profound and challenging as it was back then.

And to try and sum it up in the ten minutes or so that I have,

I'm going to use three virtues.

And I'm going to put the word active in front of them because there is nothing about Jesus' ministry that was passive.

Jesus taught an active humility,

An active faith,

And an active inclusivity.

And if we can bring these three together in our lives,

Our eternal self will come forward and be at the forefront of our experience.

Jesus taught an active humility.

He tells the story to anyone who would listen of a Pharisee coming to pray.

We can put a modern-day phrase on it.

A Pharisee might be like a university professor who's kind of maybe kind of an elitist in the story here,

Kind of snubs his nose at others.

And there's a tax collector there as well.

And maybe we could use the term telemarketer,

But it is tax season,

So we can go and keep that person a tax collector.

And the Pharisee prays,

Well,

God,

At least I'm not like this telemarketer over here.

At least I'm not calling people at seven in the morning,

That kind of thing.

And Jesus says that the tax collector says,

Lord,

Have mercy on me,

A sinner.

And Jesus goes on to say that he who exalts himself will be humbled,

But he who humbles himself will be exalted.

A passive humility just seeks to not be so prideful,

But an active humility steps into it,

Steps into teaching what Jesus taught,

That the person who is greatest among you,

It becomes your servant,

To always put others first.

Jesus' disciples,

They can be a little bit egotistical sometimes.

And they say things to Jesus like,

When we go into the kingdom of heaven in the afterlife,

Can we be like your entourage?

Can I be on your left side?

And can he be on your right side?

And how great can we be?

And Jesus calls over a small child.

And he says to the disciples that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven,

You must be like a little child.

You must humble yourself like a child.

This is an active humility,

Where we sometimes see those so-called least among us as the strongest and the most powerful,

As we step into humility in our everyday lives.

Benjamin Franklin,

Perhaps the first great American mind before he was a founding father,

He was a scientist,

And he famously took 12 virtues that he thought were the most important virtues that they were,

And he sought to practice them every day.

And he actually kept kind of a calendar and would mark where he missed the mark.

Pretty cool,

Huh?

And a friend looked at his list of virtues and said,

Ben,

You're kind of missing an important one,

Humility.

And he even added to Ben that I noticed that when you speak,

You seek to lack it sometimes.

And Franklin would come to believe that humility was the greatest of all virtues.

He would share,

There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard that we are so hard to subdue as pride.

Beat it down,

Stifle it,

Mortify it as much as one pleases,

It is still alive.

Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it,

I should probably be proud of my humility.

So it's not easy,

But sometimes it means being willing to even accept human foibles and jest.

A passive humility still has us carrying around this image of trying to be a perfect person.

Humility allows us to accept ourselves just as we are.

I had a reminder of this myself two weeks ago.

I came to church,

I walked out of my car,

I looked down,

And this is all two shoes,

Similar in shape and size,

But two different colors,

One black and one brown.

And immediately my pride spoke up,

You can't go into the church like this,

You've got to get home,

What's wrong with you?

Thank God it's not Easter at least,

Right?

But I knew I had that choice to be humble,

Right?

I had that choice to embrace my mistake and maybe the next time you walk out your door with two different colored shoes you say,

Hey,

I'm just like Reverend Josh and accept yourself a little better.

We can all try to be an example in practicing that self-acceptance,

That humility that allows us to always seek to make whoever is around us the most important,

The most special.

What a gift when we can do that,

What a gift when we think about the people who've done that for us in our lives.

Jesus taught an active humility and he also taught an active faith.

For me,

A passive faith has beliefs about all sorts of things and spiritual things and it maybe sees God in the church somewhere and maybe in the scriptures and maybe in some beautiful spots in nature,

But an active faith seeks to take God with you wherever you go,

Wherever you are.

It's not just the faith of belief but it's the faith of the principle of recognizing that no matter what situation I'm in,

I honor and recognize that there is a power greater than I am that can come through and that this power has the ability to make a way where there seems no way,

That it has the ability to bring forth blessings beyond my comprehension,

That it has the power and the presence to heal,

To bring together,

To forgive,

To demonstrate grace.

I'm inspired by the story of Rabbi Philip Lusowski who was a young boy in Poland in 1941 during World War II.

A Jewish boy,

He was outcast from the city and he lived in another place and as the war was dragging on,

The Jewish people were being gathered all together and he knew that many of them were being sent to their extermination.

Here he is,

Just a little boy,

And what he was able to notice is that the people who weren't being sent were sent to be those who had a trade,

Like a doctor or a cobbler or a carpenter.

He saw a woman there in a nurse's outfit,

Two little girls with her,

And he walked up to her and he said,

Will you be my mom?

She said,

I've got two little girls here.

Why not have one more?

Grab onto my dress.

And I think about the courage it must have taken for that woman to do just that.

And it strikes me as I think today that there may be people in Ukraine or in other parts of the world who are going through these similar struggles and similar pains.

So he held onto the dress and the Nazis passed them over and they were separated and the boy thought he would never see them again.

He would grow up and as a teenager in 1947 he would immigrate to the United States and build a life and career for himself.

He was at a wedding one day and was small,

Talking with some people at a table.

A woman asked him where he was from and he shared the city that he had been outcast to.

She said,

I know a family that has a beautiful story about saving a young boy's life during World War II.

And he responded with excitement,

I was that boy!

I was that boy!

And she was able to put him in touch with the mother and they were able to talk and he went and visited the mother and he saw the daughters all grown up.

One of them was named Ruth and he began to take a liking to her and has liked her for almost 70 years.

We have a picture of Rabbi Philip and Ruth.

The rabbi would share,

Your mother saved my life.

I then married you.

And that's how our family began.

We have been together as husband and wife for 66 years.

We had three children,

Seven grandchildren.

So all in all,

I am very thankful to be alive.

And God was good to us.

What has an act of faith,

Perhaps even unbeknownst to you,

Done for you in your life?

How has it shown up to help lead you to relationships you never could have imagined?

To opportunities that laid out a path that helped you discover your own soul and your purpose in life?

A faith that helped tell you that sometimes miracles only happen when they absolutely have to,

When we bring ourselves right to the seeming challenge or the obstacle and to have faith in that invisible essence within us and all around us to demonstrate the work of our soul,

The purpose of our being,

The joy of our becoming?

Jesus was often healing people all around Him,

But over and over He would say to them,

It is not me,

But your faith that has healed you.

Where is your faith?

It doesn't have to be in a thing.

It doesn't even have to be in a thought.

It just has to be in that presence of knowing your life and being willing to show up recognizing this magic,

This wonder,

This power greater than we are that we can use.

I love how Kahlil Gibran once put it,

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

But when you touch that spirit everlasting within you and you show up to whatever is in your life,

Who knows what might be demonstrated?

Jesus taught an active humility,

An active faith,

And an active inclusivity.

It is hard for me to pick the term that means unconditional love and forgiveness.

The term I have chosen today is inclusivity,

Because that is what God is for Jesus.

That is what the Divine Father is—the most inclusive presence of love that has ever existed.

No one ever taught or talked that way about God before.

Like an unconditionally loving parent that accepts all their children,

Jesus would often compare the kingdom of heaven to a vineyard.

He would tell parables and stories about a master of the vineyard and even a foreman who invites people in to come and work in the vineyard as a wonderful example of how the kingdom of heaven operates.

Jesus is always challenging the common sense.

As the most famous vineyard story goes,

The people are gathered and they are working at all different times of day.

They are asked to all line up,

Beginning with the people who started working last,

All the way back to the back of the line,

The people who started working earliest.

They all get paid the same amount of money.

It drives us all crazy when we hear that story,

Because from the human conception,

It is absolutely true.

They aren't getting paid what they deserve.

But when we see it in light of that kingdom of heaven,

It is such a beautiful example of the all-inclusive presence of the Divine.

It doesn't matter when you show up.

It just matters that you welcome yourself in to the kingdom of love,

The kingdom of hope,

The kingdom of depth,

The kingdom of healing,

The kingdom of understanding.

If you came and showed up earlier,

Good on you.

It just means you get to hang out there longer.

But that love of the Divine is there for everyone.

Jesus,

In my interpretation,

Did not mean His teaching to be universal in the sense of a church that everyone needed to affiliate with in order to be acceptable to God.

Jesus meant His teaching to say that it is a universal teaching because of a universal loving God that loves you no matter your faith,

No matter the geography of your birth,

No matter your orientation of whatever it may be in life.

All are welcome here.

All are welcome in that divinity.

And God never rejects us,

But we can reject ourselves.

A passive inclusivity is just saying,

I believe in inclusivity.

It's that sign on some churches that say,

All are welcome here,

Which is a wonderful thing to say.

But what does it mean to live in inclusivity?

What does it mean,

As Jesus would say,

What credit is it to you just to love the people you love?

Could we perhaps go as far as Gandhi did to say,

I am going to love the meanest of creation even as oneself?

What does it mean to actively seek people who think differently than you?

What does it mean to open your heart to others that it may have been close to?

Is this not one of the major challenges of our times?

I've learned in my own life that when I seek to open my heart to one,

I can't leave it close to another.

What does it mean to make your heart a ground—not that you have to agree with everybody or even like everybody—but what does it mean to make your heart a ground for healing,

For forgiveness?

Perhaps there's someone right now that is trying to let back into your heart again.

Does it mean you don't need boundaries with them?

Again,

It doesn't mean that you even have to talk to them.

It just means that there's space in your heart for everyone again,

As your divine Father,

Mother,

God would have it be as well.

Humility,

Faith,

Inclusivity—these are the virtues that Christ invites us into.

And when we practice them,

We welcome the divine into our lives.

When you practice humility,

God enters.

When you practice faith,

God enters.

When you practice inclusivity,

God enters.

And there is grace.

There is that divine joy.

There is the spirit everlasting of yours and of mine.

May it awaken in you and as you today and every day forward in awareness that you are skin and bone,

That we are mind and emotion,

But we are an eternal being,

One with the most infinite life as expressed in the life of Jesus and in the Christ consciousness that blesses us today.

So moving into a moment of prayer,

If you so choose to join me,

I just want to invite all of our incredible prayer practitioners who might be present with us to stand and just hold consciousness.

And perhaps this morning we can hear in our own heart the words of the Beloved that were spoken to Jesus,

That I love you with an everlasting love.

Yes,

I believe there is a spirit right now speaking in the depth of each of our being,

Saying,

I love you,

My precious child,

With an everlasting love.

And thus it is our charge to not give in to the temporal,

To let go of false senses of perfection,

To release the criticism of our own lives or relationships,

And just let that love in.

Allow it to come through the cracks of an opening mind.

Allow it to fit through the tiniest mustard seed sizes of faith that may be in our gut.

To allow it to break any locks that might be around our heart center.

For us to know that this eternal love that sent us the Christ is also sending a divine awakening for us today,

Individually and collectively.

How might this love show up in your life today?

With an acknowledgment of thanksgiving for the life you've had,

For the people you love,

For the moment of stillness where God holds you in the center of its heart,

To somewhere in the rat race moving as fast as we can trying to get things done just a moment of grace that tells us that all is well with my soul.

All is well.

All is well.

All is well for all is God.

And so it is.

Reviews

Great message for not just Easter but for the rest of eternity. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights about eternal love with me I am grateful to you.

I’m so grateful to find your church! Thank you and Happy Easter!