True and undefiled religion

Another one from my brother... 

Years ago, I remember sitting in the small, New England congregation, people sparsely dotting the timeworn pews. The pastor had asked for prayer requests, and after the customary health concerns for the Mabels, Portias, and Harolds had been voiced, a father of a couple youth group teens stood up to put in a petition for his daughter’s upcoming softball tourney. I was a bit surprised when I realized this dad was not asking for the vibrancy of his daughter’s “Christian witness on the field,” nor even her bodily safety. He was out for the win.

“Yeah, the girls’ team has been workin’ real hard, an’ I wanna say a prayer that God would reward them for their efforts. They shore have worked hard for this’n. I’d like to see ‘em bring home the trophy.”

Really? Praying for God to pull the game? The house of God becoming a bit of a bookie agency? Say it ain’t so, Joe….

Now I have been developing a theory for some time about the intent of the Third Commandment, Thou shall not take the name of thy Lord God in vain.... I’ve always thought—at least as a kid—that I had an easy with the Third. I’m not a swearer myself: Family mythology recalls me exclaiming, “Oh no!” after I almost cut my thumb off with a circular saw, and my son who has joined the construction industry, often jokes about my list of milquetoast explicatives, ranging from, “Rats!” to the inexplicable, “Sheesh Mateeya!” or “Chow Mein!”

Anyway, I was raised in a culture that using “God” for anything but a title of the divine was similar to swearing. I can pretty safely say that at my robust age of forty-nine, I have never used God’s name in vain. In fact, just last night, when my seventeen-year old uttered, “Oh my God!” at the dinner table, I was a bit surprised and saddened, and I told him so; Tracy nodded in agreement. He looked a bit embarrassed, and I suppose I would have preferred my paternally-modeled “Sheesh Mateeya” even though it doesn’t have any meaning, or at least turn it into a Oh my gosh (lower-cased, of course) because I guess that’s “far enough away” from the original. I would consider the spelling out of the letters, O-M-G as too crass. Frankly, I’m still a little queasy about “Jeeze,” or “Jeesum Crow,” because the former sounds so similar to Jesus, and the latter—well if you revert to acronyms, it’s pretty easy to see that you’re talking about, you know, “JC”—not only that, but Jeesum has two syllables, just like Jesus. I don’t, however, find much wrong with “Jeepers Creepers.” I thought my son knew all of this.

I hope you understand my declensioned rationales surrounding the Third Commandment, but it’s what we religious folk spend our time doing—making up systems of behavior based on some personal extrapolation of a few verses, or in this case, a few words of a few verses.

There are a number of adults I know—neighbors and colleagues with whom I teach—who will remember in mid-conversation who it is they are talking to, and revert to the verbal scrubber on the top of their conversational smokestack. I know because they make the word gosh into two syllables. They’ll start out by saying, “Oh my God!” realize they’re conversing with Mr. Bible-Thumper, and change mid-word from “God” to “gosh.” The happy result is the word, “go-sh” spoken with a slight downbeat and a usually elongated shhhh, as if the conversationalist realizes she has just escaped the impardonable sin. Somehow, this is how the good fight is fought these days in modern American society concerning the Third Commandment. It is a skirmish around a redoubt of the Fortress of Christendom, besieged with acronyms, alliteration, and syllabication.

Well, maybe the Third Commandment is a little bit bigger than determining what someone says when he doesn’t know what else to say. It seems as though it should be of greater significance if Thou Shalt Not Take thy Lord’s Name in Vain made the cut in becoming one of “the Big Ten.” I can’t really see “Oh my gosh!” as lingually kosher versus “Oh my God!” as fit for infidels that is, unless God really is all about jots and tittles. (Charlton Heston probably did some quick soul-searching as God was writing the tablet—number three is pretty high up.)

And, of course, that’s what I now think the Third Commandment really is about: reducing God to an explicative, a thoughtless remark, even a theological construct. I guess using his name in vain is more about using Who He Is in the interests of my vanity—y’know kinda like praying to make the baseball home run happen so I can bring home the trophy.

Yesterday, my oldest son, Reed, came home from a different church than I attend, where they watched a video-recorded preacher tell the audience that as things stand, two billion people in the world are on their way to hell because they are not going to be exposed to the Gospel. Two billion folks will be eternally separated from God because they did not receive the right information. That was what Reed pulled from the meeting, and that was the topic of his spirited discussion with some men of that church. “How can God damn people for eternity for having the wrong information?” he demanded from me when he got home. It is a question with which I have struggled in the confines of my evangelicism for the past thirty-five years. That’s one of the reasons that those in my theological camp have spent so much time and effort disseminating the Good News in handheld tracts and nifty object-lessoned strategies to share with strangers while waiting for the bus.

Speaking from my own experience, the major part of my “walk with God” can pretty easily be turned into a highly-polished apologetic with which I am to destroy an opposing worldview—and trample on any tendrils of possible relationship. I was ecclesiastically raised to believe that my primary joy in life should be to sow seeds of the Gospel, as if the fulfilling the Great Commission is the surest way to satisfy the Great Commandment.

There was a time when honing my apologetic was actually perhaps my highest religious calling in the vein of Paul’s charge to Timothy, his young apprentice, to be a “workman who needs not to be ashamed.” JW’s and Mormons were not shooed from our stoop. In fact, they were whetstones to sharpen my spiritual acuity. I remember Tracy commenting once that, although she couldn’t hear all of the details of my conversation with the visiting Jehovah Witnesses in the driveway, she could tell “how the conversation went” by the volume and tenor of my carping voice from across the yard.

“But,” I explained after the two had retreated down the road, “it was the John 1:1 argument—y’know, what does the original text say about that definite article before the word God!” I knew that I had nailed them because last week I had spent some of my spare time reading up on the original Greek and the use of the definite article—just in case I happened across some JW’s “on mission.” I better do some more study on the tetrgrammaton. I was a little rusty on the ancient Hebrew, but I sure got ‘em on John 1:1.

I guess I’d say that’s approaching blasphemy—reducing God’s grace to a supply-side economy of doctrinal information with the hopes of counting coup—or better yet, taking home the trophy. At that point in my life, this was the walk, fighting the good fight, running my course.

I remember two statements my dad made to me concerning my primary role as a beginning public school teacher some twenty-six years ago. He said, “Tom, every conversation you have at school should be in pursuit of leading someone to Jesus. Secondly, in the first class of every year, you should fully explain the plan of salvation to all of your students.” In short, he was telling me that dissemination of the Good News was the most significant thing about what I do and how I find my meaning. In short, the relationships I had with students and their AP test scores were second only to the altar calls that he suggested I incorporate into the text of my class syllabus. In twenty-six years of teaching, I have had six of my students make professions of Christ who told me about those decisions. Not an impressive track record, especially in light of the number 2,000,000,000. Perhaps I should have spent my time in the streets passing out handbill tracts or going door-to-door in neighborhoods, taking Saturday-morning “spiritual surveys” under the auspices of a national poll (two activities that I have participated in numerous times).

I remember being “on mission” with Campus Crusade in the borderless region of northern Kenya, showing The Jesus Film to the Turkana living in the bush. Once, an English-speaking imam asked me to clarify my message.

“You come here to my land for a little time to tell me to give up all I have—my lifestyle, the way I raise my children and have my family, my friends and business—everything that you see that Allah has given. You come here for a little time, and ask me to do this? Do you understand me? Do you have children, a home? Do you speak my language, and know my ways? Do you have camels that you need to keep alive and move in different seasons? Why do you tell me that I need to say some words from my heart about Jesus because of a cinema that you have shown from a camera that you have brought from far away?” His eyes took in his surroundings, and then he looked back at me in disbelief.

I racked my brains for what it was they had instructed us to do back at the compound in Isiolo if we ever actually got into conversation with someone, which had not been expected in our job description. Mostly, us white guys were just supposed to drive the truck and run the generator and projector—leave the soul-winning to the indigenous translators. My silence was his answer, so he nodded and took his leave. 

Is it blasphemous to reduce a relationship with God to a particular body of interpreted information about him?

I have been meeting on a weekly basis with a friend who is a Moonie in what I believed was to be his inquiry of my Christian faith. What a surprise I had when I figured out that I was the object of his proselytization. This fact dawned on me when my acquaintance became frantic one night trying explain some of the more enigmatic doctrines coming from Sun Myung Moon. He ended the meeting with an invitation to partake of some “holy, unifying wine” along with my non-present wife.

           

I was shocked. Here I was thinking that our meetings were about an emerging friendship and some mutual interests, but it turned out to be more of an attempt to fulfill a religious quota. I was turned off almost to a point of disgust.

It took me to about the half of the drive home to realize that my bitter feelings of “being used” for his religious gain was exactly what I had planned for him: a quick couple-month introduction to the doctrine of salvation, a point of decision, then some mentoring and discipleship. I winced with hypocrisy. How many times had I done this same thing: looked at acquaintances, students, colleagues, neighbors, random passersby as possibilities of conversion to a system of beliefs rather than real people in need of relationship. Had I used God’s name in vain—that is, for the purposes of my own vanity?

Yesterday, Pastor Charles said in his sermon from Galatians 2 that the people who were entrusted with the “law” don’t necessarily have anything over people without the law. It’s not enough to simply know the rules, because the rules—by themselves—don’t hold any sort of justification in God’s eyes. This seems to say that the information that is in the law doesn’t matter as much as what someone does with it. In fact, when there is someone who “doesn’t have the law,” that person can often live out the intent of the law better than someone who holds the actual copy. Maybe that way there’s less to distort.

           

The idea that I could probably scrounge up around thirty copies of the Bible that lie around our house, in probably six or seven versions (along with assorted commentaries), says nothing to the real point, which is—do I live according to the law’s design? And, of course, Paul says a lot in his writings that the actual law is not really the point. Those who live “by the law” are actually doomed to destruction. In my mind, this parallels Romans 2 and 3 where Paul makes some dangerously big statements that folks who live without the law become a law unto themselves, either condemning, or justifying themselves. Such statements seem to indicate that the actual information that I have may not be as important as the way that I actually live my life.

I recognize that these revelations are not at the cutting edge of emerging Christian thought. In so many ways, this is the basic message behind Christology 101, to wit: “For God so loved the world….” The message is all fairly simple; it’s just what we in evangelicism do with that message. We hammer and shape and embellish, often forgetting and betraying the intent of the original armature. It’s taking God’s name and using it in (our own) vanity. When I look at the Third in this light, it seems much more significant than my son’s rather flippant “Oh my God!” at the dinner table.

Reed and I have had conversations about the rich irony embedded in the idea that during the American Civil War, both sides of the conflict were absolutely confident that they held the banner for God and Righteousness. If you read some of the primary sources—letters and meditations—of some of the Confederate officers, such material puts the highest of my spiritual longings to shame. These guys were after God for the real deal of pleasing him, and the elimination of the Union enemies (remember—the Union were the good guys) was easily applied to the longings of deliverance spoken by David in the psalms. But hold it! So too were the Guys in Blue. Can it be that men from both sides of the war could be pleasing God simultaneously, regardless of their martial objectives? Maybe it’s less about what we’re doing and more about how we’re doing it. Maybe that imam wasn’t off at all in terms of righteousness before God, even though he had never strolled down the Romans Road.

I’ve begun to wonder if the spiritual laws that govern salvation through Jesus Christ are more like foundational principles that are theologically impossible to comprehend, and for that reason, the law-based intricacies of how it all works is supposed to stay in the background. It allows those who will fully live and pursue right relationship with God to actually do so, without having to rehearse and obsess over the laws that make such a relationship possible. I should be really conversing with those JW’s about living, loving, and the pursuit of a relationship with God rather than boning up on my ancient Hebrew lettering regarding the rendering of the name Jehovah.

It’s sorta like quantum mechanics. These are laws which govern how the physical world works and is organized, and the substance of these laws is what makes living possible. But their study and dissemination is not what true living is to be about. The esoteric workings and nature of our Creator, compared to our puny knowledge, is similar to the failure of my untrained mind to begin to grasp quantum theory. My whole existence depends on quantum realness, but my living is independent of its minutiae and stipulation. It’s more that God gives the message, “Love others, and I’ll take care of the rest,” rather than, “You’ve got to figure out how I put it all together and bash people over the head with it.” My over two decades of pursuant study of scripture supports the former. For some reason, we in evangelicism opt for the latter. I wonder if that’s blasphemous, putting up a construct in the place of a real and loving God.

I wonder….

So I can ruin a perfectly good friendship arguing about the personhood of the Holy Spirit; I can turn off my students by insisting that their pursuits are eternally void and empty without a regenerate heart; I can reject anything that a pastor has to say because of her gender.

Or, I can pursue a loving relationship with any and all of these people, even though I may not know all there is to the way that people approach God. Is there anything, based on personal experience, that I can say about the way that He might approach people?