We look for light from the past to light our way.
Our culture has grown out of the tradition of following the Bible. This is ancient wisdom written by wandering nomads who would be totally lost in today's Christian world.
Out of their experiences and what they saw as there need for survival they used their imaginations to draw their lives and then to put their thoughts, their myths and beliefs, their ideas and inspirations into stories.
Words become powerful, a culture has it's own identity as they seek to learn how to live as a community of people drawn together by their talents and ways of doing things. They saw the world as a creation of a mighty force and so they saw God as part of the wind, the rock, the water, the sun, moon and stars. They lived close to nature and found inspiration that awakened in them spiritual reality. God lead them and they became followers. There were those who had a strong sense of what God was calling them to be. Each culture designs it's own patterns that combine the practical with the spiritual.
They re-acted violently when angry and hate invaded their souls. They felt the anger of God when they felt they had disobeyed Him. Out of all this wildness there would be the creative voice of the poet that expressed grief and loneliness and a deep hunger for the love of God. This voice could lead them into repentance that heals the brokenness that sins have created.
We enter a different world when we read the Bible; a different culture, a different life-style, a world of ignorance and superstition, and yet God can speak to us when we try to understand and to learn from their failures and weaknesses.
Sunday morning and I am drawn to church to hear words of ancient truths expressed by these wild desert followers. They spoke a different language and I believe that we misunderstand what they where trying to express. Other religions are followers of the Old Testament and their way of worship and lifestyle is very different than ours. Religion fueled by anger and hate destroys life while forgiveness and mercy creates new opportunities for improvement.
Salvation is the gift that the words of Jesus offers that calm troubled souls and heal the wounds of our past.
So we gather together to hear the Word and try to apply it to our own lives.
Today there is lunch after church as part of bringing fellowship and friendship into this time of worship. Hopefully our hearts have been softened and our faith restored and laughter and conversation bursts free.
Holiness is in the silence as we enter church and in the songs of praise and worship and in our prayers and in the love felt and expressed.
2 comments:
The words of Jesus - right on Mom! Always theh words of Jesus and never the words of the later interpreters, the cruxificion obsessed perverts of the organized churches.
The greatest teaching of Jesus, the one I return to again and again, is that the religious law of the priests and parishees (and just would those folks be today??) is a thing of man, not God, and that each individual can try and communicate with God as best as he or she might manage, WITHOUT the intermeddling of the priests and parishees. Indeed, one could suggest that the central messsage of Jesus was that there is NO OTHER WAY to seek out God than humbly, on your own, aware of your own shortcomings and so on. And those who -- not being able to face the real anxiety, the real test, of trying to contemplate God -- give up and turn instead to religious law, religious hierarchy, relgious dogma, and all the rest of dietary rules, fashion rules, stoning adulters and so on, have abandoned the quest for God and are worshipping THEMSELVES and their own self-rightousness. You see a lot of that in all religions, particularly from those who want to consider themselves fundamentalists. In the result they wear their stupid beards or stupid clothes (whether Jew, Muslim, Christian, Mormon, sect, and so on and on) to make manifest their cruel authority. It gives them, when it works, a secular and real power over others that comes from their own ambition, not from God.
That is what Jesus tried to save us from. So, yes, if we focus on the words of Jesus we all may get a little closer to God. Right on!
Love,
Rick
Wow! Well said Rick!
love mom
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