, 2024
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Thirty-Five: Order, Disorder, Reorder
Positive Disruption
Things standing shall fall, / but the moving ever shall stay. —Basava
Brian McLaren describes how Jesus often provoked disruption to move people beyond the status quo:
[There is] a powerful story at the beginning of John’s Gospel: Jesus’s protest in the Temple [see John 2:13–22], when he drove out the merchants of sacrifice and appeasement and then made two outrageous statements. [1] First, he said that God intended the Temple to be a house of prayer for all people (no exceptions), and second, he said that the corrupted Temple would be destroyed and replaced by something new, which would be resurrected in its place….
Jesus continues to use the imagery of disruption (John 3–4). First, he tells a man that in spite of all his learning, in spite of all his status, he needs to go back and start over, to be born again—perhaps the most apt image for disruption ever. Then he tells a woman that the location of worship doesn’t matter at all—which in their day meant that temples were irrelevant. What matters, Jesus says, is the attitude (or spirit) and authenticity (or truth) of the worshipper. Jesus was calling for a radical disruption in his religion, a great spiritual migration, and a similar disruption and migration are needed no less today in the religion that names itself after him.
A later New Testament writer repeated and expanded upon the disruption and migration Jesus was calling for (1 Peter 2:5). The way of life centered in the Temple must be disrupted because God wanted to dwell not in buildings of bricks or stones cemented together by mortar, but rather in human beings—living stones, he called them—cemented together by mutual love, honor, and respect.
McLaren invites us to trust the Spirit’s call to keep moving:
This disruptive revolution, this liberation, this great spiritual migration begins with each of us presenting ourselves, with all of our doubts and imperfections, all of our failures, fears, and flaws, to the Spirit…. You. Me. Everyone. No exceptions.
“The moving ever shall stay,” [twelfth-century Hindu mystic and poet] Basava said. [2] Those words contradict so much of our inherited religious sensibility. “Stay the same. Don’t move. Hold on. Survival depends on resistance to change,” we were told again and again. “Foment change. Keep moving. Evolve. Survival depends on mobility,” the Spirit persistently says. That prompting tells us that the migration we seek is not merely from one static location to another. It is, rather, from one static location to a journey of endless growth.
If you want to see the future of Christianity … don’t look at a church building. Go look in the mirror and look at your neighbor. God’s message of love is sent into the world in human envelopes. If you want to see a great spiritual migration begin, then let it start right in your body. Let your life be a foothold of liberation.
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