The Change of Lineage; Judaism and Christianity 07/03/11

Love and life come out of this concept as far as God is concerned. Taking a slightly different tack this afternoon, I'm going to look, certainly in the first part, at the change of lineage from the point of view of referring to Judaism and Christianity. Those, of course, represent the Old and New Testaments. It's like our formation and growth stage, and therefore everything that we are doing in the Completed Testament Age in the Divine Principle era is built on that. I found, I don't know if this applies to you at all, probably not, but especially when we are considering this with maybe our second generation or people who don't have any kind of religious background, where they've been actively involved in studying religious teaching or this kind of thing, they might think that our Unificationist way of doing things is peculiar to us. But I want to show you how it is very much not peculiar to us. What True Parents are doing is taking forward, developing, and building on what has gone before. Really, God's effort, even as we see from the Principle point of view, is very interestingly some kind of aspect of revelation in the Principle. The fact that God started work to restore human beings even in Adam's family, even in that same family where the problem had occurred way back in the beginnings of human history, God starts to work a restoration providence. This was not understood or seen before because True Parents have understood and revealed to us this process of making a foundation to receive the Messiah through the two aspects of the Foundation of Faith and Foundation of Substance. So those two elements have been understood in their own ways, but these stories have never been traced back as the kind of origin of God's work, even from the time of the Fall. This is our foundation, and once we appreciate this, we can understand that True Parents are furthering this process and opening the way for completing it. That's open to us to do, really, in a short space of time. Maybe we're talking about the minimum time being like three generations or maybe more generations, but still, in terms of historical time, it's a very rapid thing. What Revelation talks about is the twinkling of an eye; historically, it's a short time, and great changes can take place, particularly at this time. For some reason, it's the time that we are living in. It wasn't of our doing, but we are living in that time, quite extraordinary.

As I mentioned a couple of times in the opening talk, all religious practice somewhere is to do with purification, which also involves rebinding ourselves to God in a relationship of love. The word 'religio' that we use for religion means 'rebinding' from its Latin roots. Up to now, salvation largely has been on offer for the individual. By extrapolation, religions have then said, well, then we have to have good families and good marriages, and we have to create a good society. They've understood this but extrapolated from the kind of effort to become a saved or enlightened individual. The way for real salvation has been open to people as individuals, but now it's open to us through the blessing to go a path as families and as couples. Families, as well as individuals, can say they are offering salvation on a family level. It's that kind of significant, that level of significance, and this is happening for the first time. That's why it's so important. Are you with me? It's very important because it's opening the way for family-level salvation, and the family, remember, is the key to everything. The Kingdom of Heaven can come once the problem is solved within the family. Therefore, we've been waiting, waiting, waiting for this moment, and God has been waiting more than anybody. If we think about the restoration course, what we can call the path back, the kind of return to God, traditionally, then, and this is kind of Jewish thinking, you'll see these cycles of repentance, the so-called Deuteronomic cycle, which the Israelites, the Jews, are led through over and over again. It begins with a recognition of sin, what is often called 'chet' in the Hebrew or 'hamartia' in the Latin. A little bit of a Latin class today, sorry, I'll do a kind of Stephen Fry on you or something. But it's interesting because 'hamartia', if you're not sure of the meaning, means to miss the mark. Sin is like missing the mark, like you're shooting an arrow, but it goes off, and you miss the target. Somehow, we have to hit the target. So, missing the mark or going astray is to do with breaking Divine Law; it's to do with a turning away from God. There's a particular Catholic phrase: anybody from a Catholic background here? Roman Catholics, own up. Thank you. So, you know we have this idea of turning away from God, kind of an explanation of the Fall there through disobedience. If you ask the question in terms of the Principle's explanation, is the explanation we give for the Fall of Man a missing of the mark? Yes, it is. Is it a turning away from God? Yes, it is. Is it disobedience? Yes, it is. All these other explanations can be found in it, except it narrows it down to a much more specific misuse of love, especially the distortion of this sexual relationship and the seduction of Eve by the archangel and then of Adam by Eve. This understanding gets kind of under the skin of these problems.

Recognising sin is the first step, and that leads to repentance. Under God's guidance and leadership, the Israelites came to repentance, and that's a very sincere kind of point where you stop what you're doing, stop going in the wrong direction, turn around, and head back to God. It's a kind of three-stage process. Repentance is not just saying you're sorry; it actually means you're stopping what you're doing that's wrong. You are turning around and acting differently, heading towards God. That's the process of repentance, and that's what we can do in our physical lifetime and on our physical body in a way that is relatively so much easier to do here than in the spiritual world. So, God is encouraging people to sort these things out in our physical lifetime, and then that leads to atonement. From its origins, again, that kind of derivation of the word is to do with being 'at one'. This is reconciliation as the goal, making some reparation. It's a little bit like indemnity; we talk about this as the law of indemnity. But atonement, by my understanding, is something that's consciously sought by the one who wants to repent and change their life around and reconcile with God. So, it's kind of a conscious thing. The Israelites will be encouraged to make some acts of atonement, and that, having confessed the sin, might involve animal sacrifice or something like that and going to your priest and actually feeling that your animal is being sacrificed where it should be you, and having that kind of heart to renew yourself and feel serious about your misdeeds and grateful for the forgiveness which comes. So, that leads into then forgiveness, and that's reconciliation. That's coming and starting on a new footing in our relationship with God. This tends, without the solution to original sin, to be a cycle that the faithful people go through. They go through this cycle, and as soon as you think you're okay and everything's fine and you're doing all right, that's a kind of risky time in your spiritual life. I'm okay, I know I'm doing fine spiritually, and then maybe that's the time when suddenly you come to an awareness that actually there's something more deeply wrong with oneself than you realised at first and have to repent more and have to turn your life around and have to make some condition of indemnity and have to seek God's forgiveness and reconciliation on a new level. So, it's a kind of cyclical process or maybe spiral process that we go through. It's always kind of overall progressing, but you know, you might feel sometimes people describe this in the spiritual life like peeling an onion. When you peel an onion, there's always a few tears involved as well, isn't that right? You can take off one layer, and then you think everything's okay, but there's another layer you still have to get that kind of slightly brown layer off before you can continue.

This path back is that diagonal arrow which we saw before and we'll see again in the Christian tradition, also kind of growing out of the Jewish tradition. The first person we really hear about doing this, but it was probably a practice that happened elsewhere, was John the Baptist baptising people, getting them ready for what? For the coming of the Messiah. Getting a new start, a new life, a readiness, a repentance, and a seriousness about being ready to meet the one who is coming. John felt very serious about this as his mission; he understood his mission this way, to get people ready. In the waters of the Jordan, like this, they're being baptised. So, in the Christian tradition, this is called a sacrament. A sacrament is a kind of inward and outward sign of some inward grace or something which is coming from God, and it's giving an outward kind of form to it. This is what human beings can do. We can talk about it, we can go through it, and we can say this represents x, y, and z. Although it's kind of symbolic, we have to use that word with caution. You use it quite a lot in the Divine Principle, don't we? Something was symbolic. Symbolic doesn't mean unimportant; symbolic is extremely important. Symbolic embodies everything which is going to come in substance and reality later. So, doing things symbolically is extremely important, and it figures largely in the religious life and different traditions. The process of baptism has this kind of symbolism which is very meaningful. When you go through total immersion baptism, has anybody done that here? Christine? Has anybody else? I did it in the River Jordan. It's a little bit commercial when you go there, and then you get your white robe and you pay your ten dollars or whatever, and you know it's kind of a little bit commercial, but I felt I should do it. I did it because I was with a group on the MEPI; I was with a group of American ministers, mostly Black American ministers, and I felt this is a great chance to maybe solve something of our collective sin. So, I put myself in the hands of this American minister. They're up to their chest in the water doing the minister bit, and I come along into the water. What happens then? As somebody getting baptism, the person in the priestly role will hold the back of your head, and then one, two, three, whoosh, you're under the water. Right, I'm under the water. Now, what do you feel when you're under the water? Ah, I can't breathe! I can't breathe! Breathe! Right, I'm dying! I'm dying! Right? So, and then whoosh, you come, ah, I can breathe! Right, life has come back. It's symbolic of dying and then being born again. Rebirth is there already; we've got to re-reborn in this way. You're kind of dying to your old self. Even to put yourself in that position, you're saying I recognise I am a sinful person, and in a way, I deserve to die in front of God. But God is giving you this opportunity to start again, and you're saying from now on I'm really not going to do this and this and this, and I'm going to be very different, making some kind of resolve at that moment. I got a new life. This is the meaning; this is what John the Baptist was encouraging people to do to get ready, making a foundation to really meet the Messiah. Therefore, you know, probably a person who put themselves through that with that kind of recognition of sin and repentance and readiness and desire to make a new start would have been quite a good person to meet Jesus and to understand what he was talking about. They'd kind of catch his words and yes, that's it; they'd be able to understand his language. They'd be on a little bit the same wavelength, and especially Jesus coming down to talk to them in ways which they could understand. They'd be the first to kind of say yes, I know what you mean, absolutely, I'm with you, let's go together. This is the process of getting ready. Water is just an outward sign; it's just kind of getting wet. From one point of view, you could say it's not so important, but we imbue it with meaning. Human beings can do that; that's a special quality that God gave us. We can give things meaning, and you know, with God's kind of approval, if it has that meaning, to that extent, Satan has to back off. Satan has to obey that too; it's approved by God in the hands of those people, then Satan has to back out. So, it's kind of life-giving, it's cleansing, it's purifying, and we see references elsewhere in the Bible to this kind of cleansing through water. For the Christian, for the saved Christian, then it's a kind of representative of what Jesus went through. It's like dying with Christ and then being reborn through Christ. So, there are certain gifts of baptism. I don't know how familiar this is with you, but it's a little summary of some of the key sacraments within Christianity. I think it's very helpful to know this because it's our foundation. This is the kind of growth stage effort to change the blood lineage, and in baptism, it's all part of this process of changing lineage. Therefore, it's done with a sign of the cross. If you have an infant baptism, little babies are kind of at the front crying usually, but it's being signed with a sign of the cross. It's representative of Jesus' victorious life and inheriting that kind of victory there and receiving that blessing. The child at that point, certainly in the Anglican tradition, will receive the name, and it's called the Christian name. Traditionally, I know on our forms we fill out today, we don't say that, just first name, family name, or second name, but traditionally in the Christian world, it's your Christian name. You're given that almost like a new name; you're given a new name means you're like a new person, isn't it? So, this is my Christian name; this is because I'm identifying with Jesus. Therefore, people would like to choose names of great biblical figures, David, looking around here, Saint Raymond, Saint Roy, all right, all these people. I want to choose some name which has a kind of ring to it or not, but you know, it's still your Christian name, even if you make it up.

The family is chosen to have a special relationship with a child to assist in their spiritual education. In the Anglican service, it mentions protecting the child from Satan, which is part of the role of a godparent, extending beyond that of the physical parents. The ideal is to raise the child as a good Christian, whether as a boy or girl, and this moment of baptism often signifies entry into the church, into the family of Christ, or the body of Christ, as it is referred to. These metaphors are employed to give meaning to symbolic acts, and symbolism is rich with significance, marking important stages in life.

Baptism signifies union with Christ, as expressed in the metaphor of Christ being the vine and believers as the branches. Some argue that baptism should occur when an individual is an adult, conscious of their choice, while others believe it should be performed on children to protect them from evil spiritual forces. Parents can choose baptism for their child, expressing a sincere desire to protect them in the presence of God, often with the support of friends and family. The ceremony includes the use of water, hymns, and the presentation of a baptism certificate, which serves as a cherished memory for the child when they are older.

In traditions that practice infant baptism, there is often a requirement to reconfirm or confirm one's faith later in life. For example, in Irish Catholicism, confirmation is a significant event, marked by girls wearing white dresses, and it involves the cooperation of the school, church, and family to create a memorable occasion. This process acknowledges the necessity of spiritual milestones, and many embrace these traditions out of faith and recognition of their importance. Through baptism, individuals become children of God, experiencing a new birth into God's family, allowing them to stand as brothers and sisters in Christ.

This brotherly love, this true love between siblings, is a legacy that Jesus left during his lifetime. If we take Jesus' words seriously, we could envision humanity living as brothers and sisters, transcending racial and national divides. If we truly embraced these principles, we would not have war or racial hatred. Sadly, many do not live by these ideals, but baptism offers a pathway to inherit God's kingdom. From a theological perspective, this process represents our adoption into the lineage of God, transitioning from the fallen lineage of the world into Christ's family, which is often referred to as the bride of Christ.

Adoption signifies a different route to belonging, allowing individuals to be counted as part of this new family. The concept of rebirth through Jesus and the Holy Spirit is significant, indicating a change of lineage on a profound level. In Romans 8:15, Saint Paul states that we do not receive a spirit that makes us slaves to fear, but rather the spirit of sonship, which includes daughtership. This exclusive language highlights the intimate relationship believers have with God, calling Him 'Abba, Father,' akin to a child calling out to their parent.

This spirit of sonship is a remarkable gift, especially considering that prior to this, individuals were merely fallen beings. Outside of the restoration process, one would be a servant of a servant, enslaved to Satan—a miserable existence. However, through this adoption, we elevate our status and dignity before God, receiving so much more. Saint Paul further explains that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, indicating a longing for redemption. We, who have the first fruits of the Spirit through the resurrected Jesus, also groan inwardly, eagerly awaiting our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, which need salvation alongside our spirits. This reflects the ongoing struggle against the invasion of evil, as articulated by Saint Paul, a holy man speaking on behalf of saved Christians.