N. Gordon Cosby

Morality and the Economic Crisis

By N. Gordon Cosby on 10-08-2008

I have a friend who is an attorney with a deep knowledge of the national economic crisis. He made two interesting comments:

He first said that "liquidity" is not the real problem in the market right now--it is that no one knows what anything is worth. So much stuff of questionable value is hidden on balance sheets that buyers no longer know if something is worth what it is trading for, less, or more. So no one really knows how bad things are and cannot put an efficient, valid price on things. In other words, blindness about value. That destroys the logic of the "free market" because efficiency is based on "transparency" of value.

Second, he said that as a result of the first problem of blindness about value, it is difficult to know if persons you are selling to can meet their commitments to you. In other words--blindness about the solvency of parties in the market. That also kills an "efficient" market because it destroys the needed trust that makes the market work.

In spiritual traditions of all kinds, blindness is an old theme---people who corruptly set out to blind others end up blind themselves. We ignore that wisdom at our peril. Morality, once again, is proven to be fundamental to an efficient marketplace.

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The Central Question

By N. Gordon Cosby on 07-17-2008

The church founded by Jesus is intended to be the embodiment, the incarnation, of who he is so that he might be seen, discovered, known, experienced in the local corporate life of those who have been invaded by him. I emphasize the word local. What would a true expression of Christ's body look like today, in the neighborhoods where we live, if it really embodied the essence of Jesus lived out corporately?

I think the central question for those of us who are in Christ and are eager to obey his 'follow me' is how to be authentic church in the 21st century. How can we learn from our unfaithfulness to God's covenant in the past? How can we embody, incarnate, become the local expression of Christ's body now?

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The New Humanity

By N. Gordon Cosby on 04-15-2008

The charismatic person is one who, by her very being, will be God's instrument in calling forth gifts. The person who is having the time of her life doing what she is doing has a way of calling forth the deeps of another. Such a person is herself Good News. She is the embodiment of the freedom of the new humanity.

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Spiritual Depths

By N. Gordon Cosby on 02-26-2008

If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straitjackets of Christianity.

Protestant or Catholic, neither one is structured to contain a mass of devoted people who long for spiritual depth. We are structured towards infancy.

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The Nature of Love

By N. Gordon Cosby on 02-16-2008

Agape love demands the exercise of the whole person to all people--those who are nearest and dearest, to those who love us, to those who are in the Christian fellowship, to neighbor, to enemy, to the world. This kind of love has to do primarily with the mind, with the principle by which we deliberately live, and with the will. Agape is the power to love the unlovable. It is the power to love people we do not like.

Jesus commands us to love our enemies in order to be like God. We are not told to love in order to win our enemies or to get results, but that we may be children of the Father, who sends the rain on the just and the unjust, who looks after both the good and the evil. The predominant characteristic of this agape love is that, no matter what a person is like, God seeks nothing but his or her highest good.

Willing the highest good is a very general sort of thing. But it is also specific, for it provides an atmosphere in which other persons exercise their own uniqueness in freedom so that they become alive. They become fully human and what God intended when they were created. Loving in this sense has to do with the whole way we are put together and the way we respond as human beings. Not merely something we do as a matter of principle--not simply a rule--it is a way of life.

Love has to do with the way we see life and people and their meaning. The Christian sees people betrothed to God through Jesus Christ. This is shocking. God is betrothed to all humankind, regardless of what we are like, so all humankind is potentially in Jesus Christ. Each of us can respond, but God is married to us whether we respond or not. It's ridiculous! It's absurd! The scandal of the Gospel!

Agape love is not something fitful or spotty. In a sense it is not at all selective. How does it use discretion concerning the particularity of loving? How do I give the gift of myself? How do I give the gifts which express myself to a particular person? In this sense love has to use discretion, but in another sense it is not selective at all; it just reaches out to every person and every combination of persons with no exclusiveness or discrimination.

If there are people we tend to exclude--people for whom we do not desire good, happiness, joy, fullness of being, the fullness of humanity; or if there is any combination of people, any segment of humanity, no matter how cruel and how harmful one segment of humanity may be to another or how much an enemy one segment is to another--if we are not for all segments and all people, then this agape has not broken for us.

In addition to the universality of love there is also a particularity which is important. Certain people are given to us for a continuing, more costly involvement; we do not select them. To be with these people in this way, to recognize this givenness, means a much more threatening self-revelation, an opening up in ways that leave us with a sense of awe. In the presence of the inwardness of another, the uncovering of another, we are on holy ground.

The universality and the particularity must be kept in the right creative tension. Both are important. The universality must prepare us for the particularity, and the particularity for the deeper thrust into the life of all humankind. Otherwise we experience that fatal twist: in loving all humankind we will love no one deeply or, in seeking to love one person, we will love him or her exclusively and neglect the rest of the human race.

In loving we encounter enormous risk. We must be willing to have something emerge in the beloved that is quite different from what we could predict. We have not been given the capacity to see completely what another will be when his or her gift is fully known or exercised. I talked recently to a friend concerning two possible paths as he made his search for God. One involved participation in the life of this community, its worship, and its more formal phases. The other did not involve being a part of this particular church. As we talked, I suggested that either course was all right with me and would not affect my love for him. 'I know you mean that,' he responded, 'but I can't understand its being all right with you either way.'

It has to be all right either way, because we do not know what path really leads to the uniqueness of the person. But if I love this person unreservedly, if my love in some way calls forth his gift, will the person give himself to me when he has the whole world to choose from? Perhaps we have chosen each other in great immaturity and mutual need. If this person becomes a free, charismatic person, perhaps I will not be in the running at all. Sometimes the opposite is true, and he may choose me and I do not want him to choose me.

Love requires faith in God. I have to know that God is gracious and can be trusted. God is for me...and what God is producing in the other person can be trusted not to restrict me. The very act of loving is a freeing thing and we need not fear what God will do to us through the one whom we love.

Gordon Cosby is co-founding pastor of The Church of the Saviour and now a member of the Friends of Jesus Church. This writing is an excerpt from a collection of sermons called By Grace Transformed.

The Universe Comes to Us Through People

By N. Gordon Cosby on 09-22-2007

People are a part of our universe. So the question, "Is the universe friendly?" involves the question, "Are people friendly?" Many of us would like to consider these questions separately, saying, "Well, I can believe that God is friendly, but let's separate God from the people." But people happen to be a very important dimension through which the universe comes to us.

Are the people friendly? This is where the question gets extremely sticky. We know a little something about what happens when people are denied love. Children are abused, and later they become abusers. Rapists have often been raped. Hitler was beaten every day by his father, and he in turn beat millions of people. And with the help of millions of 'decent' and educated people he exterminated six million Jews. These evidences of rampant evil in the world are not just in the past--not just 'out there.' They are right here--right in our city.

Can you imagine how wounded one must be who spends his life deepening the addiction of a fellow human being to drugs? There are people in our city, in our neighborhoods, who are scheming constantly to strengthen their drug-marketing procedures in order to stay ahead of those who are trying to protect people from drugs and to help those already addicted to return to health. A very sophisticated marketing procedure developed by some very sharp minds is working hard so that people will become hooked.

A few days ago I met with a person who is working with this very issue. He said that the age group from seven to ten is now starting to use drugs. He is developing a kit with which parents can test their children to do away with the denial syndrome and the ignorance of parents as to whether their children are on drugs.

Are people friendly?

Just as we make a faith-decision concerning God and, by faith, say, "God is love; I will rest my weight on that love," we make a faith-decision regarding wounded, demonic people. The demonic comes into human life through wounded people. We know that everyone is wounded in some degree, and that all of us are limited in our capacity to love. We make a faith-decision. The deepest essence of each of us is love. At bottom, we are made in God's image. God is love. I, you, everyone--is love. I will trust that inner revelation. I will treat people, all people, with love. Sensing God in their deeps, with my developed mystic consciousness, I will sense the numinous in them and will totally reverence them. Ultimately, we reverence everything or we reverence nothing.

By nature, by essence, we co-inhere with others. God is in them. If God's love and my love cannot touch the depths in the other, then I choose to take and absorb whatever may be directed toward me out of the evil of the other. That is far better than isolating myself, cutting myself off from God in people. The isolation technique is sure death. If I stay open, any hurt I sustain serves to drive me more deeply into God, who is love.

We sometimes seem to think that we are wiser than Jesus--that we know the world better than he knew it. But Jesus, more than any other, knew the nature of the demonic in people. With that knowledge and understanding he strode in love...into the presence of the demonic embodied in the religious-military-industrial complex of his day, and for this he died. Today, 2,000 years later--in Washington, DC, in what is supposed to be the power center of the world, the power of dominance and the power of control--today we drink the blood that he shed for us.

Jesus, the world's greatest realist, believed the universe was friendly. So, even with what I know about the power of darkness and the demonic as it expresses itself through people, I am going to connect as Jesus did and let people--all people, my kind and not 'my kind'--be the instruments of God's love and presence flowing into me. And I'm going to flow into them. To connect is to relax. It is to rest. It is to trust. It is to let down. It is to be cared for. It is to be nourished. For the most part, we are terribly isolated from people and we remain in a defensive stance toward those with whom we come in contact. To be alienated from people is to be alienated from God.

Gordon Cosby is the founding pastor of The Church of the Saviour and a member today of the Friends of Jesus Church. This excerpt of a 1990 sermon is from the book called By Grace Transformed, available here.

What Lies Beneath

By N. Gordon Cosby on 06-09-2007

No matter where on the planet we are born, we are profoundly affected by our culture. The particular culture into which we're born determines much of who we are, and we can't break loose from it on our own. Two underlying, almost irresistible forces pull at us: knowing and doing.

We are born 'needing' to know, carrying an in-born curiosity. Early in life a child begins to ask, "What?" and "Why?" and "How?" All our lives we want to know and understand. What makes this work? Why is this happening? What are the causes, the consequences, and conclusions? Who's to blame? What's the FULL story? There's so much we should know in every area of life: international relations, world poverty, law, childhood development, sociology, physics, teaching, medicine, foreign affairs, local politics. So much of our life energy is spent in the pursuit of knowing.

The second pull that is nearly irresistible is doing. We say we wish we weren't so busy, that we could be persons of leisure. But, of course, this is the 21st century. I must work out to keep my body in shape. I must keep my car on a regular maintenance schedule and keep my important papers filed in an orderly way. I must update my computer software and clean and de-clutter my house and keep my yard and garden tidy. I must keep up with medical appointments and read several newspapers and magazines and respond to letters and e-mail. All this, in addition to attending to my job and family and friends and the big and little emergencies that occur.

And once in awhile, I owe a few tasks to God, not to mention needing some sleep. Oh, and recreation is important. I need to read the latest books, go to that movie everyone's talking about, take a trip to relax and get away from it all.

We want to know and do because someday, when we leave this sphere of life, we'd like to have achieved something worthy, at least enough to have an impressive obituary. And isn't that what's honored at that point - a long list of what we've known and done? It's hard even to imagine an interesting life without knowing and doing. How boring it would be!

Not long ago I was with a group of young people who are very smart and very active and wondering about the next steps in their lives. Wanting to establish the 'ground rules' for our meeting, I suggested that we talk only about what's beneath knowing and doing. This made it hard to know what to talk about.

For all of us, there will come a time when our knowing and doing will be greatly diminished: perhaps short-term or long-term memory loss will strike us, leaving us with little capacity to expand our knowledge or even to recognize our loved ones, and for all of us, at some point, unless we die suddenly, we will become helpless, unable to act on our own or another's behalf. Are we no longer persons at this point? Is there anything beneath the knowing and doing?

Is there an essence that God loves now and eternally? Is there a real eternal self that we can claim now and begin to deepen and expand into forever? The determining question is whether or not this unique, deeper person exists. Is it real, although unawakened? Is there another culture that is uniquely suited for each of us and that calls forth our inner truth, who we really are?

We can keep living from the shallow, surface self or we can claim the real, the deep, the inner self where the Spirit of God already dwells. Only then do we become free. Only then will we experience the freedom that Meister Eckhart says comes from "needing to know nothing, will nothing and have nothing." This inner place of freedom is the culture that is our true home.

N. Gordon Cosby is co-founder of The Church of the Saviour. This is an excerpt from a sermon preached on May 13, 2007.

Entering the Stream of Inexhaustible Life

By N. Gordon Cosby on 04-14-2007

Jesus on that first Easter breathed on his disciples and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit' (John 20:23). And in that moment they were in the stream of inexhaustible life. One receives the Holy Spirit by surrendering the ego to Jesus, who is then discovered deep within. He who surrenders that narrow ego, who loses his life, is the one who will find it.

Creativity is a function of the inner imagination, not of the ego. The ego does not create out of itself, but gives form and expression to the creativity which comes from within. An ego out of touch with the inner world can never be creative, but only rigid, and can only mimic creativity. When the ego is willing to die ('Blessed are the poor in Spirit'), then we touch inner springs, we meet the inner Christ, and we connect with that torrent of life that we call the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, 'Out of your inner life will come streams of living water.'

Many people are angry - some way down deep, some not so deep. They spend a lot of energy and time trying to keep their anger within reasonable limits. Then once in a while it erupts, and often out of all proportion to the accompanying circumstances and with little reference to the poor souls that happen to be around at the moment. Of the many reasons for anger, one of the least understood and yet most important is this: the denial or blocking of creativity.

If you need to write a poem, better struggle to write it, even if you have to eat simply and live in a garret. If you need to write a book, you had better write it. If you need to create a piece of sculpture, you had better do it. If you need to build a beautiful friendship, you had better do it, even if you have to stop a lot of important things. If you need to be with your child and just love her and let her know how important she is to you and God - even if it keeps you from your promotion - you had better do it. If you need to dig in a garden and plant a seed and watch a flower grow, better do it. If you need to build institutions which will create new neighborhoods where people may flourish as in a watered garden, let nothing stop you. If you need to sing a song, sing. If you need to dance, dance. Give yourself to whatever is the special area of your own creativity. And if people do not understand, then simply know that it is their problem and not yours. Know that you must do it, else you will be angry.

God is a creator. God's being, God's life is the source of all that is. God is constantly bringing into being that which was not, that which is new. Newness is constantly breaking forth in God, through God. The flow of energy in life continues. The flow is limitless - will never give out. Coming from the limitless depths of God's being, the flow is infinite, inexhaustible. So you don't have to husband your resources and dribble them out. You can be lavish and prodigal. You will be embarrassed by the new riches being poured into your life.

Don't you know there is a limitless flow of life - a superabundance of love and caring? You simply cannot exhaust it. It may be tough learning how to touch that current, how to get into that stream, to feel the flow and power of it, to be carried by it, but one thing is certain: the stream is there. And it is limitless.

N. Gordon Cosby, together with his wife Mary and seven others, founded The Church of the Saviour in 1947. He continues to preach weekly, casting a vision of an Easter people boldly living an Easter life. This writing is excerpted from a sermon preached in 1986.

The One Journey That Matters

By N. Gordon Cosby on 03-28-2007

The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within one's self. To reach that place is to be at home; to fail to reach it is to be forever restless. At the place of 'central silence,' one's own life and spirit are united with the life and Spirit of God. There the fire of God's presence is experienced. The soul is immersed in love. The divine birth happens. We hear at last the living Word.

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Is the Universe Friendly?

By N. Gordon Cosby on 02-03-2007

In the beginning of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Matthew Fox says that Albert Einstein was once asked, "What is the most important question you can ask in life?" Einstein answered, "Is the universe a friendly place or not?" Evelyn Underhill put the same question another way: "Is the universe safe for souls?" That is, is it the place where souls can unfold?

We immediately sense the importance of the question. Unless we believe the universe to be friendly in all of its various manifestations, we surely will not relax into it. We will not seek to deepen our connections with it. To connect deeply is to relax into, to give to, to receive from, to trust, to let down, to be cared for, to be nourished by, to nourish.

When we question the friendliness of the universe, we take a stance of resistance. We naturally seek to protect ourselves from it. We erect defenses against it. We seek to exist as isolated individuals protecting our precarious, isolated existence. We become cut off and lonely. And often, in that state of "cut-off-ness," we become very angry or we become deeply depressed.

The stance of defensiveness contradicts our deep nature. We are made to trust, to be nurtured, to connect with the whole, to be persons deeply attuned to the whole universe in which we live. But the protective stance makes us fugitives from all that we were intended to be and to be at home with.

We can look upon the universe as friendly, as hostile or as neutral. However it affects us, it impinges upon us primarily in three ways: first, God comes to us directly; second, God and the universe impinge upon us through people; third, God comes to us through the whole creation, through the created order. All three are ways of connecting with God. All of them have to do with our redemption through Jesus Christ.

What I want to consider here is the idea that God comes to us directly, that we can experience God with the mystic dimension of our natures. A function of the right lobe of the brain, this dimension of our natures is, for most of us, seriously undeveloped. As we develop the mystical dimension of our being, we can experience God directly. All of us have had such an experience at one time or another.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had an experience of this mystical directness about two weeks after he had organized the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He received a threatening phone call at midnight, and he said this about that time:

"I discovered that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it.... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night, 'I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.' And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.' He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone."

Now God, the being of God, the presence of God, the numinous, the holy, the ineffable is with us and in us every moment - the very medium of our existence, just as water is the medium in which the fish lives and swims. There is not a moment when we are not sustained and held in existence by that presence. We forget God, but if God forgot any one of us for a moment we would not be.

This love energy, this presence, this hope is inexhaustible. With God there is no scarcity. The flow is infinite, never ending. "Take no anxious thought for tomorrow." Why? Because what you need for tomorrow will come in the inevitable flow. "Consider the lilies of the field." Relax into God's infinite bounty. You will be taken care of. You are safe. God is friendly. The manna will flow. Deepen your connectedness with the unseen, real realm beyond this world.

In a meeting I recently attended, one woman said, "You're talking about all this stuff, but we have to live out there in the real world." I said, "Let's talk a bit about what the real world is. If the world you are living in - the one you call the 'real world' - is the real world, God help us all. I'm talking to you about the real world. You're talking about a very broken, distorted world."

We need to make deeper connections with the real world. We will then be sustained and nurtured every moment of our lives. We will live with a sense of awe and amazement and wonder and delight. The room where you now are is full of the Presence. All the rooms of your home throb with the Presence. You may not think it, but your work area, wherever you are, is throbbing with the Presence. So tune in, and be carried. God is very friendly, ever present. We can touch God, can connect at any moment. It is important that we learn to connect and to develop that mystical consciousness.

N. Gordon Cosby is co-founder of The Church of the Saviour and a member of the Friends of Jesus Church. This writing is an excerpt from a collection of sermons called By Grace Transformed: Christianity for a New Millennium, available here.