Today’s Scripture Reading (January 26,
2018): Romans 3
Edgar Allan Poe
said that “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear,
greed, imagination, and poetry.” Religion, at its most base, is finding
something that makes me feel good, something that I understand. So Sheldon, in
an episode of the sitcom “Young Sheldon,” decides to create his own religion and his own God based on prime
numbers. The solution fits Sheldon. Math brings peace because it can be clearly understood and it is unencumbered by clumsy elements like human
communication. But this God who I understand is not just a construct of Sheldon’s
new religion. It is the basis of all religion.
And this would
seem to be Paul’s point. When you boil religion down to its most basic
components, the result is that we have been chasing after ourselves and not
God. We want what makes us happy. We constantly recreate God in our image. God
believes what we believe. And, therefore, when someone challenges us and our created God, we struggle and fight
and often declare the one who has challenged is outside of what we declare to
be an orthodox belief, or in my case,
orthodox Christianity. We have never really sought after God, we have looked
for a being who would confirm what it is that we already believe about the
world.
Our problem,
which began in the first century C.E., is the Jesus decided not to play by the
rules. Through Jesus, God decided to interrupt human history and step out and
show himself to the ones he had created. Suddenly, a lot of what we believed
about God was on the critical list. God was love, and he was unmoved by national boundaries and priorities. God was
willing to forgive even grievous sin. And God was not after performance-based righteousness, but rather
was concerned about what was on the inside of his people. And this did not
match the characteristics of the God that we had created.
It still doesn’t.
We still refuse to seek God and understand him. We want a God that is the God
of them and us, and where God stands
clearly on our side. We still take the list of sins that is written in Romans 1 and 2 and bash each
other with them, missing Paul’s point altogether. When we use religion as a
weapon, we prove Poe’s point; we begin to believe that all religion is a fraud
base on fear and greed. In the opening of
Romans, Paul is not trying to make us feel guilty and raise a standard of
behavior to which we must measure ourselves, even though this is what we want.
Paul is trying to underscore our need for God – For all have sinned, both Jews
and Gentiles, and in very many ways, and therefore we have missed God. We have
searched and found ourselves, and allowed God to remain hidden in the world. We
have not found him, and we are not
subject to him because the real God is
unexpected.
I am convinced
that God is love. And whenever we react without
love and compassion, whenever we set up laws that benefit us, whenever we allow
greed and fear to govern how we interact with others, whenever we carry picket
signs that put down other human beings, and we say that this is what our God
demands, then we are serving a false God of our own creation. God is
still trying to break into our midst and reveal himself to us.
And we are still
trying to recreate God into an entity that benefits us because that is easier than trying to search out God and ask
what he would have us do. And, often, we are scared of what God might answer if
we ever did ask.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Romans 4
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