Beat Up the Church. Ok. But Can we Have Some Good News?

Faith and Religion: Go Ahead, Beat up The Church. In many ways We Deserve it. But That Won’t Change Anything Either. Only a Turning by All in and out of Church Will Do.

I am more than aware these days how many with creative and thoughtful minds are eviscerating the Christian faith because of what has grown out of a an orthodox and culturally bound Christianity in America to morph into what is now an emotional (as opposed to intellectual) Christian Nationalism (see David French, “One Reason the Trump Fever Won’t Break,” NYTimes Opinion, Oct. 1 for a helpful analysis of the difference). Nobody in their right mind (and heart) wants a religion that runs scared but fights back while its running instead of simply leaving the field and cruelly and brutally kills the “Other” in the fighting.

But where is my voice? Where are the voices that speak of a first century Palestinian Jesus that changed my life and not a Transglobal Jesus that mythically delivers empty promises?

Faith is not a belief system that is not scientifically knowable. Nor is faith managed doubt. Faith is critically seeing and hearing and thus being totally aware of life exigencies and contingencies and the triumph and tragedy of human endeavor and all the while, all the same, loving without consideration of the cost.

I get a daily “Word of the Day” from Wordsmith.org. This week’s theme is “Biblical people and places that became words.” The website’s author, Anu Garg, is thoughtful and not religiously minded. He writes, “As a non-believer, I have probably spent more time with the Bible than many believers have. I have a deep interest in religion, in an anthropological manner. I often invite door-to-door missionaries in for tea and a chat. I like to learn what they believe in.” The first day’s word is “Goshen,” and responding letters to Garg and the site have already poured in. I am going to include one whole letter below from a gentleman from Wisconsin because I think it exemplifies this thing I am saying about people excoriating religion. After I share what this gentleman writes, the sentiment to which I am sympathetic, I will share what I wrote in my journal this morning before I saw anything about this Week’s Word of the Day and this gentleman’s views on religion and faith.

This Wordsmith Letter to the Editor Writer writes:

Religion per se isn’t a problem. Left to itself, it’d just be a hobby, like collecting stamps, going bowling, or reading Harry Potter. No, religion is just a symptom of the real, underlying problem, namely faith -- the mindset that deludes people into thinking that they can somehow or other “know” things without a shred of supporting evidence, and frequently in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. Faith gives us not only religion but also homeopathy, astrology, objectivism, ufology, conspiracy theories, climate-change denial, false accusations of ritual satanic child abuse, numerology, anti-vax movements, a host of superstitions, personality cults, dowsing, jingoism, imperialism, racism,psi phenomena, quackery, Chinese traditional “medicine”, feng shui, and the insidious brain parasite that leads people to endlessly obsess over anyone named Kardashian.

Faith is humanity’s all-time, blue-ribbon, gold-medal, undisputed, undefeated, heavyweight world-champion worst method EVER of making decisions! Nobody rational ever uses faith for anything that can be tested or measured or that really matters in real life.

The priestly class, needless to say, praises faith to the skies, because its members’ paychecks depend on suckers continuing to fall for it. Religious believers are the victims in a huge con game.

Don’t believe me? Test it for yourself. The difference between education and indoctrination is whether the person at the front of the room welcomes questions from the audience. Try it the next time your minister finishes a sermon.

I write, earlier this morning:

Finally, Some Good News

There is no hope for the redemption of humankind.

There is only love, and perhaps better said, love is the redemption of humankind.

Knowing this, and living this, is called faith.

So faith, hope, love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. Paul, in First Corinthians, of course.

By all this I mean that with all the passion and perseverance poured out by all of us into the dilemmas and challenges we face, be they personal or global, things can and do get fixed, repaired and even restored, but we will not live to see it in some kind of whole serenity where peace is actualized and complete. The only thing we will know is our death, and that is all that you have and that is all that you need.

I’m thinking here of Jesus.

What did his suffering (both the physical torture of the Romans and Jewish Elite and the spiritual blunt force trauma of God’s abandonment) accomplish?

Nothing.

The beast of human brutalities has never let up, and in fact in this century just passed risen to monstrous heights.

But yet, everything.

Everything, because there is no end to our inhumanities until we painfully and sufferingly let them have their way with us without retaliation. There is no end until you love, and that is your end.

The victory over death is not conquest of life over death. It is love over and in death.

Do we see?

Jesus’ resurrection means his suffering and death for God’s reign of distributive justice is the way forward for all of us. Jesus’ resurrection does not give us a pass from suffering and death, that is to say, love, but rather the suffering (putting up with God’s indifference and abandonment of our agendas but not our needs and living out the world’s meanness) and death (death to self, death of self) is the way of life and to life.

What I am trying to say is that the gospel, the Good News, of Jesus is not a turn of events (my, it is brighter now!) but rather an event of turning.

We shift our orientation. We turn (the Bible calls it “repentance” as in the “repent, and believe in the Gospel” of Mark Chapter 1) to find only One who loves us but does not rescue us.

The way I paint this picture of this salvation is of a Life Guard who swims out to me in my frantic and panicking drowning and, rather than dragging me ashore to ensure resuscitation, simply wraps her arms around me to quell my flailing and tells me all this is fine and that she will go down with me and die with me.

Again, do we see? There is no glory here for us. There is only love.

How can I live that love today when my body is strong and die in that love when my body gives way?

God only knows.

And God only provides the way.