Judging or Loving?

Just for fun let’s say that the day arrives when human beings come to a collective notion: Fault-finding or judging is simply not a legitimate way to evaluate the things we do, or don’t do, as people.  For instance, locking up a serial killer until he’s fixed or dead makes sense for public safety but killing or torturing him is irrational.  In a society such as that, would religion be put out of business? Jesus was approached by a man who asked him to settle an inheritance dispute and Jesus not-so-graciously declined (Luke 12:13ff).  So if religion is not about morality us religious folks must be missing the point. And since Jesus refused the office of judge (and therefore the church at a later date was dead wrong in presenting him as a returning judge), then he must have taught something else. There is evidence in scripture supporting both sides of this debate but I’m coming down on the side of a non-judgmental Jesus because it goes against the grain of human nature and conventional wisdom.  Tough issues, puzzling metaphors, unanswered questions (i.e. the parable of the “good Samaritan” in which Jesus did definitely not answer the man’s question – Luke 10:29ff) all point to the Jesus who was out to change people, and the world, radically. Easy, pithy pronouncements don’t change people. I see Jesus moving, challenging, encouraging us to see God personally and intimately.  Doing so is life-changing and nurturing of love.  It’s creative and it blesses both the inner and outer person.  It’s salvation in the fullest sense.  He blessed both those who clung to him for hope and those who murdered him for fear.  It is not a wonder that, in spite of countless errors by his followers, his name is still lifted up worldwide by people who need not to be judged, but loved. 

God Spoke to Me

God spoke to me this week. Yes, in words that I could hear. It was a male voice so it had to be God.  He called me on the phone. I know it was God because the caller-I.D. showed “Yahweh, Inc.”  I didn’t pick up but he left a message. It was a pitch for supplemental medicare insurance coverage. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but it makes sense that God is a businessman.  After all, God knows everything so it would be logical that he could sell anything to anybody and get rich.  Who doesn’t trust God? And we all know that business is the most noble of enterprises and capitalism is endorsed by God as the most perfect of economic and political systems.  It says so in the Bible somewhere. I didn’t return the call and I didn’t buy any insurance from Yahweh, Inc.  I wonder, am I going to hell now? 

“Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” H.L. Mencken

“Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  H.L. Mencken How much of the world’s unhappiness is driven by religious belief? The more I study, the more I understand that the corruption of the gospel began early, with the first generation after the death of Jesus.  There was fear that the movement would die – that Jesus would die – unless his followers got organized and took control.  In my view, at some point not long after the crucifixion, this lack of faith in the power of God and of the gospel got a grip on a frightened and insecure bunch of people.  For them survival became the goal instead of trust in God.  Survival included the tactic “the best defense is a good offense.”  This attitude won, politically, and in doing so lost the soul of the gospel. Christians, now identified as a group of people rather than as a belief, got used to being the powers-that-be.  They governed, taxed, waged war, and took steps to manage the thinking of the masses, steps that did not exclude imprisonment, torture and death. If evil has intelligence, this was brilliant.  It took the persecuted and powerless minority and morphed them into modeling the very persecutors from whom they had previously been hiding and fleeing.  The church dropped the ball and ran from the playing field. Now in the twenty-first century the church, claiming authority over science and human rights, is gaining political power in the promotion of ignorance and placing people at different levels of value.  Judgment is made, based on race, culture, sexuality, gender, and economic status. The gospel needs to be re-established.  Personal conviction and the gathering of communities based on this conviction needs to be nurtured.  Governance and authoritarianism should be shunned, for to subvert evil the gospel needs to stand on its own and not be institutionalized.  That requires trust in God.  Do we have it? 

Heaven and Hell

It’s been a year or two now, at a social gathering, an acquaintance took me aside and said, “I think I’m going to hell because I can’t forgive.” Whoa.  That’s a line-drive coming right at me.  How am I going to play it?  Here is a victim of heaven-and-hell religion speaking the most sincere and troublesome confession I’ve ever heard. There are images of judgment in scripture, but in my studies I have come to question whether a God who is presented in one place as the embodiment of love can in another place be the angry, torturing God of judgment.  I refuse to worship a God who has dual personalities. I proposed to my listener that he begin a journey with a God who just might have bigger ideas than we have, and who is not susceptible to the human weaknesses of anger and lust for revenge.  As for the Bible, it’s not inerrant but a witness like us.  The Bible is tainted with the human weaknesses of its writers and redactors.   I suggested that he take his time to forgive individually those who had offended him.  Were he to die before completion, perhaps this larger God would see a work in progress as a work completed.  He said, “Honestly, I’ve forgiven everyone.  I just can’t forgive myself.” Then he said, “Maybe, by letting God do the forgiving, I can learn again to love myself, and forgive myself.” Is that what I said?  I’m not sure.  But that’s what he heard, and probably because it’s what he desperately needed to hear. And the idea that the God of love can first love, even before we can love ourselves, is a reminder that we do not control the process of our salvation so much as recognize what already is.