THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's talk about the world.

I saw on television recently that certain Southern pastors had formed a fight club. They hoped to increase membership and, supposedly, interest in faith by beating on other pastors. It is all good fun. Fightin' for Jesus!

The doctrine of the world is quite simple. What makes us unique as Christians, unique among other faiths, is not difficult to comprehend. It is so simple it seems foolish.

It is, in fact, the wisdom of God that makes the world foolish. It is the wisdom that shows the world’s wisdom to be inane and downright stupid.

I can spell this word of wisdom in four letters:  love.

We are the only faith grounded in a God of love. We are not believers, but a family, exceptional in how we love.

But are we?

Now, I do not believe in any Pollyanna kind of love. No hippie “Make love, not war” here!  Although that saying fits well Christian lips.

Love is tough. It’s hard to love mean people who suck at life. It’s virtually impossible to forgive an asshole 490 times. Still, we are commanded to do it by God!

What’s easy is being pious. If only being a Christian were all about being pious. 

Don't or do?  Don't have fun or love?  Which truly distinguishes a person? Makes him or her holy?

Okay, so being an ascetic is hard, but anyone can do it if they set their volition to it. 

However, something supernatural is required when we turn the other cheek again and again. A dedication beyond the will to power, beyond right and wrong, beyond good and evil, beyond self flagellation is commanded of us.

Yes, it is easy to be pious, but it is hard as hell to love poeple during every second of every second of our lives.

Did you know that for the first two hundred years of Christianity's emergence on this planet not one Christian joined an army?  Christians separated themselves from the world to await Jesus’ return. They formed loving communities. They were too busy loving rather than too busy killing.

But Jesus never returned and the task of being Jesus in the world loomed large and nigh improbable over time.

After Christianity became seduced by the enticement of power and domination when InConstantine became emperor, the faith that preached "God is love" became just another worldly belief system. It became just another religion. 

If our faith is not about our God of love, about love, about the love Jesus preached, then it might as well be Islam. Indeed, hearing some Christians preach, it is very Islamic.

I mean that with no disrespect to those Muslims who believe that Allah is love.

You don’t have to be a Christian to love. God’s love reaches out through many vessels—sacred and profane. Indeed the opposite seems true. I could argue that being a Christian means throwing up all kinds of obstacles (or stumbling blocks to use Biblical language) against love. I could cite many instances in church history to prove that to be true.

Consider that we have had two presidents who refused to tout violence as solutions to our national problems:  Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. They were and are reviled among certain evangelicals who have neither the brains nor the faith to comprehend them. Moreover, they are arcane to this lousy world in general.

That is because our world preaches an anti-gospel. It preaches domination and violence are God's way of being in the world.

Yes, the world is too much with us. We see it in our weapons of mass destruction, our wars, our retributive justice, and our pugilistic pastors.

The world is too much with us. Peace through strength. Might makes right. He who has the gold makes the rules.

The temptations that come with the domination forces in our society entice so effectively that we twist our faith into a camel that fits rather easily through the eye of a needle.

Blessings...