CHRISTIANITY: SOME OBSERVATIONS
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People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.
There is a Latin saying, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, which means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”. That may have been true 2,000 years ago, when there was no force equal to the Roman Legions, trained to perfection, irresistible through their discipline and leadership. Also, life then was cheap, with an average lifespan not exceeding 30 years, and natural resources – trees, wild animals – aplenty. Now the world is so crowded, with 8 billion ever more greedy people, that trees and animals are endangered: no more room!
And where is God in all this? Good question.
God brings peace: “Peace on earth!” But now wars are everywhere, and I especially refer to the spiritual and ecological wars, both intimately connected: they really are the wars that end all wars. These ‘world-wide’ conflicts have as their most ardent combatants those who are ‘religious’, the most dangerous of mindsets. Hitler, Mao, Trump, Putin, are all great believers in a specific faith, be that ‘purity of race’ – Hitler – or superiority of the mind – Mao – or the power of money – Trump – or the idol of Patriotism – Putin: they all have their ‘religion’, and, as Jesus found out: Religion Kills.
And Christianity?
And where does Christianity come in? We have seen it in the past weeks: Religion had a front seat in ceremony and pageantry: a new pope, a new name: but where is ‘the Word of the Lord’?
Jesus was asked this question. Here’s what he answered:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”
That sounds so familiar, that we tend to skip this Jesus’ answer, which included the total personality.
He really said: “Love the Lord with every bodily and every intellectual and every mindful part of the human entity”. He really said: “Loving the Lord is totally comprehensive”. He really said: “Loving the Lord goes far beyond the comfortably personal”. He really said: “That love encompasses especially and primarily, without exceptions, ALL of creation, all human action.
He really said: “That love concerns the chicken we eat; that love includes the water we sip from a plastic bottle; that love refers to the shows we watch on television, the ways we move our bodies, the air we inhale every few seconds, the dreams we have while asleep”.
Psalm 139 comes to mind:
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
And it concludes:
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Lead me in the way everlasting? What is it?
A little detour: When I tell people that I love Bach, or Shakespeare or Rembrandt, then my love has no personal connection, is totally different from the way I love my spouse, my kids, my close relatives or friends. My love for these great artists has everything to do with the way I love them through their works, through their artistic expressions, such as the St. Matthew Passion, King Lear, the Night Watch: as persons these famous artists may have been cantankerous, quarrelsome, and unfaithful, but through their works of art, their name and fame live on forever.
That’s too, I think, how we should love the Lord our God: through his works, the total expressions of God’s greatness. Through some quirk of pagan priority, we have distorted the totality of divine greatness, and have grabbed what is not ours by rights, and have distorted God’s Masterpiece beyond recognition. I believe that a sin against Creation is a sin against its Creator.
So…. no wonder people look for God, and fail to find him: Creation/God is seen as disposable. Romans 1: 20 tells it plainly:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Living in and with and through Creation, I have no excuse. Loving God means unconditionally loving Creation, just as Jesus did, offering his life for her redemption.
People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.
The only constant is what God has made: the world we live in, even when we have debased it to the point of planetary perdition.