from our Lay Leader
Think of religion as how you deal with reality. It’s about how you relate to everything around you. It’s what governs your way of living. Everyone has a religion. Everyone has a god or an idol that they live for or give themselves to. For those that don’t think they have a religion, their god is themselves. They worship themselves and live for themselves. Many of us start out that way. But at some point, most people become disillusioned with being god and look for something bigger than themselves, something they can be a part of, a group they can belong to. Belonging is an innate need of human beings.
Human beings have spent millions of years trying to figure out how to best live in this world and have passed their knowledge along, generation by generation. We don’t have to figure out from scratch how to live wisely. We can benefit from the perennial traditions that have been tested and proven true throughout human history. These have yielded about 6 major religions that have much in common, although followers of each tend to focus on their differences.
Being a Christian is more a way of life than a system of beliefs. In fact, this could be said about all religions. Instead of calling them beliefs, if we consider them a framework of our understanding of the universe and our place and role in it.
These are some of my understandings:
In the scale of time and space, I am a very small part of the universe.
The beauty of all things convinces me that there is a Creator who made these things out of love.
Indeed, love is the connecting force of all things.
It is my discovery of the love of God that compels me to live with love as my core motivator, wanting to love others and love all things as much as God loves me.
Most people who profess to be a member of a major religion, including myself, have failed to love others as God loves us, and therefore, most people have a negative view of religion, because they see the practitioners of these religions living in very unloving ways.
I believe that God came into the world in human form to show us how we behave in unloving ways and more importantly, to show us how to live a life of love as He intended. Somehow that got translated into the belief that if a person simply accepts that God died a human death and was resurrected that we are saved from eternal death no matter how unloving we might be. It’s like believing that Jesus died in your place and you received a get-out-of-jail-free card. It misses the main point that Jesus clearly said, “If anyone wants to follow me, he must let go of his self-importance, and do what I have been doing, which is putting others before myself, even to the point of dying” (this is my paraphrase of Luke 9:23).
It doesn’t take much intelligence or effort to look around and see that most people behave in very selfish ways, even people who appear very loving at times. The reason for conflicts, fighting, violence, abuse, oppression, hatred, prejudice, and discrimination is that people pursue their own ambitions and interests, not those of others, which is the opposite of what Jesus taught and showed us (Matthew 16:24, Luke 6:30-31).