Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 16, 2024 • 0 Comment
The Source
Through the sunshine and rain, Every sorrow and pain,
Jesus still is my comfort and guide.
And His love comforts me, and His grace sets me free,
And some day I shall stand by His side.
I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed!
Every day that I live, I am blessed!
When I wake up in the morning, ‘til I lay my head to rest,
I am blessed! I am blessed! I am blessed!
– Jerry Goff (1935-2019), from “I Am Blessed!” (various dates)
Watching the recent American presidential election play out in the United States felt to many of us like watching our two political parties each carrying out its own gigantic psycho-social experiment on American voters in real-time. One political party was certain that it had the American voter so completely figured out that this party knew just what its ideal voter wanted, and it knew that it could satisfy that voter’s full set of wishes with little variation in its promises. The other political party, though, made what was almost the opposite assumption. In such a big and widely varied country, that second party decided that it really had no idea what any one of the maybe twenty or thirty great political factions nationwide might most care about – Hispanic adult women? Young black men? Veterans? Muslims? Jews? Old-Order Amish? And beyond those few, at least a dozen more? So its candidates for President and Vice President and their helpers put on almost daily and for several months a lot of specifically targeted events, nationwide. And some of those targeted testing events were gigantic! The candidates for the two top jobs of that second party even sat with specifically targeted podcasters. And always, always they kept asking questions of the voters. Then they seemed to target various alternative offers that were tailored to what these groups and collections of groups were asking for. We all were heartily sick of this whole election process by the time it was over on November 5th! But I did find watching these two so very different experiments in gathering votes to be pretty amusing. My goodness, one of the Presidential candidates even was down to working as a fry cook for one lunchtime, in his efforts to better appeal to one sliver of his hoped-for constituents. And he actually suited up and rode in a garbage truck, for heaven’s sake, and I think he even did a stint at handling garbage?
By now, we know how each of these great experiments in seeking the people’s favor turned out. The party that had asked each separate segment of the American voting population what they were most concerned about did in fact run the table. They won not only the Presidency and the Vice Presidency by hefty margins, but also their party took both houses of Congress. And I don’t think that in the end it was the promises made by the politicians that were really most important, so much as it was the generous fact that rather than preaching at the voters, the party that won had instead asked so many of the voters what they themselves were most hopeful about. And especially, what were the voters most unhappy about? All those individual people in all those subsets of the American population really did seem to very much appreciate being asked! Please, Mr. or Mrs. Voter, what might your federal government do to make your life better?
Now, where else in our lives are we also trying to better understand and appeal to and win the approval of Someone whose love and support and whose every day protection we very much want, and we really in point of fact so desperately need? When my Thomas first brought up that analogy to me, I said, “You’re kidding, right?” And then immediately I added, “No, of course not. You’re not kidding at all.” His analogy is perfect! Let us be frank with one another here. We have spent all of human history being too much like America’s Democrat politicians in our relationship with God. We have always been sure that we knew better, haven’t we? We have created each of our religions, of which modern Christianity is just the latest version, by building them around what have been sometimes pretty monstrous human-created ideas and beliefs about God that fit some human religious leader’s notions. And we then have insisted that God must conform to our human-created religious design about how God ought to look and how God ought to perform, and what God should want us to do for Him, rather than our ever once humbly asking God to please reveal to us who God is, or our ever thinking to politely inquire of God what God might actually want from us.
If this level and degree of sheer presumptuousness on our part shocks you now, just know that you are not alone! Jesus was, and He remains horrified by the way that we have so carelessly ignored the notion of even wondering what God might want from us, and we have instead for so many millennia followed our false and entirely human-made religions. Jesus told us frankly when He first began to go about His public teaching ministry on earth that He had come to earth to abolish all religions altogether! He told us that He had come not to support us in our old religions, but instead, He was here now to teach us how to relate to the genuine God, both individually and directly. And yet to this day, most modern Christian denominations care nothing at all about what Jesus said. Just listen to a little bit of what Jesus said to us then about the clergymen of His day! My goodness, even when I was a child reading the Bible, I used to cringe when I would come upon some of these passages! Jesus said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).
From the start of His ministry, Jesus was telling the world, just as He told the woman at the well, 23 An hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:23-25). But of course, the clergy of His day refused to listen to Him, so it is little wonder that soon Jesus was despising and disdaining them! Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And Jesus said, “Woe to you, religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).
Jesus tells us that in fact He came to do away with all the old religious teachings that were of man, and to replace them with the direct teachings of God. And what are those teachings that come to us from God through Jesus? They cannot possibly be any simpler! You know them by heart by now. When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He told us that God boils all of the old ten commandments down to one. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). So God cannot possibly have made this any easier for us! God, our Father, is Spirit. And God’s only command is that we love God to an infinite degree, and that we love our fellow man. That’s ii! Get rid of all those fussy and scary old man-made religious rules. God wants you to follow and love God alone.
When Jesus personally spoke with God, He didn’t do that inside a synagogue, did He? No, and nor did He suggest that we do that, either. Instead, through Jesus God said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
“When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).
Jesus taught us that God is internal. Or as Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). So God hears the smallest whispers of your deepest heart. God does not want or need clergy as go-betweens! And as you can imagine, the fact that Jesus taught about God in this free and radical new way did not make Him popular with the clergy of His day. No, but still Jesus continued to teach that God is not the cold, judgmental, and punitive Jehovah that dwells in synagogues and temples and demands sacrifices. He continued relentlessly to talk about God’s love! And God’s love, and our love in return, to even an extreme degree. Jesus said things like, “You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.… If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?” (MT 5:43-48)
And all of this was very disruptive to the old-style religious order. It could have been even much more than that. It could have begun the new Way of Jesus right then, had not the Roman Emperor Constantine seen fit to use the figure of Jesus, although not His teachings, to build a brand-new, fear-based religion as a useful means for controlling the masses for what Constantine hoped would be many centuries into the future. For Constantine, that idea has turned out pretty well. For the rest of us, though, not quite so much, although we still do have Jesus’s teachings preserved, so as Constantine’s religion dies, we might yet be able to repair what he broke so long ago.
My personal favorite of the Old Testament prophets is Micah of Moresheth. Micah lived seven hundred years before Jesus was born; he was a contemporary of the great Isaiah. What I love about Micah is that it is so clear that he was in intimate and loving contact with the genuine God! And in this best-know passage from the Biblical Book of Micah, he does the same thing for God that Jesus does at God’s bidding more than seven hundred years later. Micah here rejects religious practices, and instead calls for us to begin a closer and much more loving walk with God:
With what shall I come to the Lord,
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
7 Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:6-8)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
