Our Curious Problem with Religion

           I’ve never liked certainty.  I’ve discovered that when I am the most certain, it is probably when I am the most wrong.  All around us we have certain people, and this country seems to be getting more so every day.  It is the reason that politics is so disrupted, that congress can’t seem to get anything at all done; and that our religion seems to be more and more engaged in who is right about issues that none of us can prove. 

            The Westboro Baptist church near Topeka, Kansas seems to have all of the answers about what is wrong with this country and how God is visiting all kinds of wrath on us about our behavior, mostly about sexuality.  Somehow they have appointed themselves the judges of all of us and are God’s designated rulers who will straighten us all out and get us to their own certain conclusions.  They aren’t the only ones.  We have recently had our own bouts of certainty in this diocese with a split of congregations that was really unseemly.  Certain Anglicans formed their own parishes apart from the rest of us and consigned the legitimate diocese of Pittsburgh to what they believed to be hell.  It was a terrible time for all of us, but I believe that we have come through it a bit bruised, but still solid, and able to move forward with our Lord and to continue to be the servants of the Gospel that we have all been called to be.

            These kinds of battles have been going on since the beginnings of Christianity.  Since Roman emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity a valid religion in 325 AD, the cross has been marching at the front of armies.  We have imposed our faith on many numbers of people who had no other choice other than death at our hands.  Our history is certainly not something that I would hold up as a wonderful example of what God has in mind for humanity.  As a matter of fact, a close inspection produces the opposite opinion.  When I look at the inquisition and the crusades, the horror of the way that we have used God’s Word to get our own way in so many instances, the wonder is that God has not simply swept us all away and started over again.  Many Christians use the word “conversion” to speak about our mission to other people.  I wonder about that.  Why are we converting people who possibly have answers at least as good as our own?

            All of our denominational lines are moments when we kicked each other out of our churches and started over again.  We celebrate our identities as Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists or Baptists, and we love to proclaim the tenets of our faith to each other, mostly to point out how those other people are wrong and we are right.  But when we do that, we mostly tell the world that we are the ones who have it all backwards.  We even keep out Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and every other religion; even though every one of them has truths to tell us that would benefit our lives.

            In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the crowds:

             “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

                Those are words of prediction that have certainly proved true.  We have taken Jesus’ words of hope and twisted them into doctrine that is so rigid that it is almost impossible to love our neighbor as a person like ourselves. 

            The curious thing is that Jesus never intended to start a religion.  His mission was to bring the Love of God to everyone.  To show us by his life the incredible grace that God wanted for every person in creation.  That is exactly what Jesus did.  It was the rest of us who made a religion out of it and began the process of excluding others from our circle.  That is where the problem lies. 

            We need to hear the lesson that we are provided for by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews which is speaking about all of the saints who have laid down their lives that the Word of God could change the way that humans interact:

            Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us… 

            That is our heritage and it has nothing to do with religion.  It has everything to do with faith and the way that we orient our lives to following the Word that we have been given by our Lord.  To love one another the way that He loved us.