Re-Thinking Religion
High church has got a bad rap. If much of evangelicalism claims to follow Jesus, they have picked and chosen the parts of Jesus’ teaching and ministry they want to adopt based on what is most comfortable and convenient. If American Christianity is blind to the ways it is syncretistic with the gods of military and money, power and consumerism, how does one repent and follow Christ? I would argue, it is not simply a matter of ideas and information, it is a matter of narrative, imagination, and desire.
Just as the western world has built systems of commerce, government, and protection, by crafting stories of their importance through historiography, national symbols, and ceremony, the people of God need to wake up to their own story, and recover their identity as a distinct nation of Israel with their own distinct history and understanding of time. This demands not only the acknowledgement and repentance of desires and ways of being that are in conflict with the worship of Christ, but it challenges the people of God to understand their role outside of “religion” to become a people who display a new way to be human within a secular nation state. Christianity has been relegated to religion, when in fact it offers a cosmic vision of all things and comprehensive understanding of the human in the midst of a world sustained by God. It is a Spiritual Kingdom in that it is empowered not by an army, but by the Creator’s Spirit, it is a physical Kingdom in that it demands humans to offer their bodies as living sacraments on behalf of the Kingdom of God FOR the life of the world.
But how does this process of repentance happen? Over time, by the spirit, in a life of liturgical habits.
How do we know when it is over?
It will never be over, but we know it is happening when we are growing in love and care for ourselves, others, and Creation, BECAUSE we first see that love in GOD’S LOVE FOR US.
What is the process?
I argue that ancient Christian tradition offers this process, but since the reformation, the intention of the process has been misunderstood, maligned, and abandoned by Protestant faith.
What is the misconception of Religion?
Participation in Christian liturgy, icons, sacraments, and calendar are not a way in which Christians earn their way into God’s favor. The practices of the liturgical Christian tradition is a system of worship that should be used as a way of TRAINING Jesus’ followers into the STORY OF GOD, a life of love for Christ and a polemical alternative to the liturgy, icons, and sacraments of false systems of desire. Much of the religious tradition of Christianity has been misunderstood (by Christianity itself) and totalized into Christianity itself, becoming a closed system of human control and authority.
But just as football players practice their plays, repeatedly visualize the situations they may find themselves in, and undergo rigorous physical training to prepare for competition, so the religious structures of ancient Christian tradition can become moments where the church can “practice” their faith, transform their imaginations through the Holy Spirit into the life of the Kingdom, and train their souls to worship the King in order to live the life that liberated their “faith [to work] itself through LOVE”.
This is all dependent upon 1) a community of practice looking for the Holy Spirit in the slow working of the seasons of our lives as well as transforming us in moments of Kingdom in-breaking, 2) ability to read and meditate on Scripture to the fullness of narrative and metaphor that are to guide our hope as disciples of Christ, and 3) a willingness to act in response to the imaginative seeds of the Kingdom that are placed within our hearts.
Through practice and play, the people of God grow together from the inside out, begining to love the things that God loves, desire the things that God desires, and act the way that God might act. They begin to own their identity as Christ’s body on earth, playing out the Creator’s game plan in the power of the spirit, just as they had practiced, to faithfully witness to the reality of God’s rule and Christs redemption story to the many cultural contexts and social imaginaries across the earth.
But as the history of the Church shows, engaging a personal God in the process of becoming like God demands that the process not be completely under the control of our human leaders or our own soul. We are a community of persons on a journey of desiring the things God desires and loving the good things God loves, not only to accomplish a task or achieve a goal, but to be in closer union with God and each other throughout the journey. Yet, what is found within the community that follows Christ is that the macro-mission of introducing every human in the world to Christ, welcoming them into the loving community of those that follow Christ, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey is only achieved in the proper accomplishment of the micro-mission of closeness to God and each other. Whatever we aim our attention at as the people of God and begin to desire, must be seen through and beyond the face of Christ whom we love, in the steps of Christ we follow to his goal, and not seen apart from (as a task we leave God to accomplish) or in separation from the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit. For just as Israel did not wander alone or were tested as observed by God, they were led by a cloud and a pillar of fire, with the presence of God as the central defining power in the life of Israel.
Though the practices the church might use to orient our desires and train our actions may seem under the control of our human hands, the Father that has called us, the Spirit that enlivens our flesh and the Christ that leads our people, this God must be seen as the Priest in whose train we follow to form us into himself.
But yet we are still creatures, creations of the original God, who must take a cue from our creational existence. What does it look like for us to grow into health and reproduce? What does it look like for the seeds of our life to be scattered? What does it look like for those seeds to grow and then reproduce? We cannot use the metaphors of marketplace or business. We must go to our bodies, our land God’s creation to understand the way his kingdom grows. For the kingdom of God is not an entrepreneurial venture for the sake of the stakeholders benefit, it is an organic and natural miracle that happens at the hand of a gardener, and the intention of the gardener is to create a interconnected, symbiotic, and beautiful landscape of plant, vegetable, and flower families, that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts, but are more fruitful because of their presence alongside one another.
What we need is to respect the ways God has built humanity to learn and change, and invest our attention into the fast and slow practices that will both heal our hearts and form our loves around the Kingdom of God. What we need are consistent and structured experiences of the stories and images of the Kingdom that open our eyes to the way God is alive and with us in the present and manifesting his love for us and our neighbor. The only way we will see the false idols fall away from our lives is to wrap our affection and desire around the abundance of love, acceptance, peace, community, and joy that comes when we are overcome by the revelation of God's great love for us.