83. Who is in your religion?

The following blog may be an indication of why it is a good thing for me to fall asleep quickly instead of lying in bed wondering if penguins have knees, or this offering.

I was out for a walk with a friend of mine.  It is a regular but infrequent pleasure of mine.  The friend I walk with is instrumental in my braving the coming to church again.  The irony that he no longer goes to church is not lost on me.  But we chat about God, and as many Christians do, our focus is on understanding our religion.

          Much of the conversation I have with my fellow Christians is actually trying to make sense out of what we believe.  There are discussions on understanding the bible, discerning God’s will for us, and of course discussing various doctrines.  I think, I would further ahead if I realized that God is pretty gracious and that if I mess up my beliefs he would be as equally gracious about that as he has been about the times I have been an idiot.

          On this particular day, we invited an acquaintance of ours to join us.  As we were walking along, the newer member to our wanderings talked about the religion of others.  He discussed that these other religions were the religion of man, while we have the religion of God.

          I actually left well enough alone, and did not challenge him that ALL religion is man created.  Regardless of how well intentioned we are, all religions are man made. I would hope, that you would believe that what you practice is as close to what God intended as we can get.  It is like the night a friend of mine was talking about another religion, and he said. “You would hope that they would follow what they believe to be god, cause if they didn’t that would be stupid.”

          So, I believe strongly that our religion, any religion, is our best attempt to worship God as we believe he intended us to do. 

Yet, we are quick to take the discrediting of the religion of others one step further than we should.  There are numerous Christians that would hold that other religions, being false religions, are worship of Satan in disguise.  The train of thought is that the religions of others are nothing more than idol worship, and the idol is really an image of Satan.  Thus, we the practitioners of our religion worship God, everyone else worships Satan.

          In our propensity to be the ones that God loves best, we carry this thinking into interdenominational matters. I know of people that think Catholics are doomed for Hell because they worship the saints and the saints are idols....you get the picture.  It is just another version of salvation through correct belief.

          And I wonder...

How many of us are actually engaged in Idol worship?  Join me in thinking about this for a moment.  How many people do you know whose experience, or belief of who you are, has very little to do with the reality of who you are?  So when they talk to you, they are actually not talking to you, but to who they think you are.  At this point I probably should have rolled over and cuddled Wanna and gone to sleep.

          As I have grown and matured in my faith, or at least as it has evolved, my understanding of God has changed.  Some of those changes have been drastic, others not so much.  Those changes have been enough that I know that my earlier understanding of God was close to being idolatry.  Does that mean, my earlier faith was actually satanic worship?  There would be those who would think so. 

            As I read the articles in numerous on-line Christian magazines, and I will at times see the hatred and vitriol that is offered as passion for God, I am left wondering.  It would not take me long to find an article that disgusts me that is written as a perspective of Christ and his love for us.  To me it seems clear that this person has scant experience with the love or grace of God.

               As the apostle Paul says, "I see through a glass darkly."  I see this as an exhortation to be mindful that we don't have a clear understanding. We really are in no position to throw criticism at the practices of others, inside or outside of our faith.,  For I think many of us, are one step away from not worshiping God.

          

So I ask myself, Who is in My Religion?

To come to a close, I think the message for me in this entry is maybe I should be paying more attention to who, or what, I am worshiping instead of trying to decide who, or what, you are worshiping.  Secondly, perhaps I fall asleep faster.