Faith and Religion

            I have a memory of Sunday school when I was a kid.  We were making Jacob’s ladders out of paper for some reason. I had mine made with all of the rungs of the ladder in place when the kid next to me reached over and tore mine apart.  I was devastated.  I had worked hard on this thing and his tearing it apart was a terrible thing to do.  What I remember next is the teacher coming to me and helping me to make another Jacob’s ladder.  I don’t remember anything bad happening to the kid who tore it, but I never forgot her care in helping me to get over what was really in retrospect a minor bump in the road.   The wonderful part of all of this has nothing at all to do with Jacob’s ladder; but with that teacher taking a moment to take care of me.  I think that in essence is what faith is all about.

                 The Pharisees were criticizing the disciples of Jesus for not following the rituals surrounding eating meals.  They said that the disciples ate with “unwashed hands”.  Jesus cited Isaiah when he responded to them telling them:

                              'This people honors me with their lips,

                             but their hearts are far from me

                             in vain do they worship me,

                             teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

                            You abandon the commandment of God

                            and hold to human tradition."

            That, for me is the essence of religion; rules that we have made up over time for our comfort.  Faith is entirely different.  It is an acting out of our relationship with our God in our relationship with other people.  That is what that Sunday school teacher was doing for me in that class when my Jacob’s ladder was ruined.  She was taking care of me, and teaching me something far in excess of whatever the lesson about the ladder was about.  She taught me that she cared about how I felt and about what was going on in my life. 

            Every week in church, we recite the Nicene Creed; a list of doctrinal items that we say that we believe about God.  These are vague enough to mean different things to different people.  That is what religion is all about.  Faith is something else.  It is the stamp of God’s love that we keep inside us that helps us to look at other people and see God in them also. 

            Sometimes we get all of this mixed up and believe that our religion is more important than our faith.  This is why we have so many religious denominations in the world.  Each of them is a moment when we couldn’t agree on our doctrine.  When that happened, we sometimes also lost our friendship with each other and became terrible examples of what faith is all about in this world.  

            I know that is what is going on in the Middle East with ISIS confronting other Muslims about the “true” way to practice their religion.  It has resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people and endless grief for their survivors. I know that God weeps when this is seen.  It is essential that we find ways to agree about our religion in this world.  The way to do that is to practice our faith; to do what our Lord taught us: to love one another as we love God.  When we really practice that, we show the essence of God to this fractured world.  I believe that is why we are here, and why our religion is not the end, but the means to do this.