If you have the faith of a mustard seed...
Do you know the rest of that?
Check this out:
Luke 17:6 NLT: [Jesus] answered, “If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘May you be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you!"
What on earth does that mean?
When I grew up in fundamentalist, Evangelical circles, there was a clear answer: if you plant a mustard seed, it grows a mustard plant and that plant produces more seeds which produce more plants...therefore go tell people about Jesus so they can tell more people about Jesus.
As I grew away from modern Christianity and walked deeper into what I believe to be real faith, that saying continued to ring in my ears. It was like a chord that refused to resolve.
What struck me is how out of alignment the Evangelical interpretation was with the rest of Jesus' message. It got worse when I read the Gospel of Thomas and got a different side of Jesus' teachings.
In the Gospel of Thomas, passage three reads like this: Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father's) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
For those who don't like to accept the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said something similar in the book of Luke, chapter 17, verses 20-21: "And being asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo. the kingdom of God is within you. (ASV)
That's another phrase that has puzzled Evangelicals for years. I remember listening to Alister Begg, a prominent and highly intellectual pastor from Clevland, Ohio pondering this in his heavy Scottish accent. He wondered aloud how the kingdom of God could be both something that was here, something that was to come, and all the while something that was within.
The problem that I see is the same problem that Einstein pointed out when he said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." Christians (to single them out, because, yes, this is a universal problem) tend to see too much of what is happening on the outside, and little, if any, of what happens on the inside.
The thing that is happening; the thing that ties it all together; the answer to the kingdom of God and the riddle of the mustard seed is wrapped up neatly in two simple words: "I am".
For context, let's go back to Moses for a moment. The day Moses got the mission to go back to Egypt and free the Israelites, God spoke to him through a burning bush. When Moses asked whom he should say sent him, God said, "I am who I am." In other translations, God said, "I am that I am," and much ado has been made of it. People all over the New Age movement like to add punctuation and say, "I am that. I am," as they look around their world and imagine the consciousness of God being both within and without themselves in an ever fractalizing spiral of divine self-discovery.
Let's take a moment and unpack the "I am that I am."
Phonetically, the Hebrew phrase is, "ehyeh asher ehyeh" which some say is more accurately translated as "I become whatever it is I become." In other words, it has a sense of being all of beingness. So, what God was telling Moses is, in effect, "I'm the thing that becomes all the things throughout all the cosmos from the monad to the monad and from the Alpha to the Alpha (if you do a study on the concept of dimensions, that will make more sense).
Now, I'm going to stop you right there. I know that some of you are thinking, "That's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!" and some may be saying, "That's Allah!" and some might be saying, "Forget this nonsense." And that's all fine. But I'd like to skip past that for a moment and look at this from another angle.
Think back to two things for me and try to put them together:
What was it the New Age folks are trying to say? Something like, "I recognize that I am a fractal of eternal beingness witnessing a duality of fractalization witnessing itself."
And what was it that Jesus said? “If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘May you be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you!"
What happens if we toss out all the dogma. In other words, let's get rid of all the religious and non-religious stuff. Then let's take these core ideas and shove them all in a blender: "I am that I am", the faith of a mustard seed, and the ever fractalizing spiral of divine self-discovery. What do you get?
I believe you get a statement something like this:
The mustard seed demonstrates its absolute faith in its own beingness through its simple self-awareness of being a mustard seed and opening itself without reservation or ego to the infinite potential beingness that is the cosmic consciousness in its never tiring quest to move from the unreal to the real, and similarly, if we as humans wish to do, have or become anything we can conceive of conceiving we need simply cast away doubt, ego, and self-determination and pursue the purity of faith demonstrated by the mustard seed as it becomes the mustard plant.
In other words, the mustard seed becomes the plant simply by being nothing other than a mustard seed. It doesn't care or doubt or wonder or blame. It embodies the fractal "I am"-ness of being a mustard seed and that which becomes whatever it is to become, finds that single point of willing openness and faith, and becomes the plant.
It works the same way for apple seeds, kittens, whales, humans, and, by extension...ideas.
Ideas are the things that set humans apart. At one point there was an idea for a keyboard, a lamp, a religion, a soda can, and on and on to infinity.
Now...think about this:
What sort of message do you think it sends to that which becomes what it will become when you say:
I am broke.
I am tired of not getting laid.
I am in debt.
I am too fat.
I am too skinny.
I am sick of politics.
I am stupid.
I am more of an Elvis guy than a Beatles guy. :-)
If these are the mantras in your head, then no wonder your life turns out to be not as ideal as it could be.
Try these instead:
I am wealthy.
I am so happy with my sex life.
I am so thankful for the amazing abundance that's always on its way to me.
I am so thankful for the health I have and that I am improving every day.
I am so thankful that I have a lean and efficient build and I can eat things many others cannot.
I love to watch the pendulum of politics swing back and forth and regardless of where it is, I choose love and peace.
I am so thankful that I have a creative mind that bends or breaks the rules at times and shows me new and fantastic ways to think.
I absolutely love the Dave Matthews Band. :-)
If you do this - like, really do this - I promise you things will start to change in your life.