Class, take out paper and pen. Pop
quiz time. This quiz consists of one multiple choice question. Listen
carefully. Which of the following is not a religion?
a. High Fiber Cereal
b. Golf
c. The Wall Street Journal
d. The Christian Faith
You may only pick one. You got it right if you picked (d.) The
Christian Faith. You say you always thought Christianity was a religion? No.
Sorry. Christianity is not a religion.
Robert Capon says that “Religion”
is the attempt by human beings to establish a right relationship between
themselves and something beyond themselves which they think to be of
life-giving significance.
So
“Religion” is our feeble human
attempt to get a handle on the key to life, to plug in to cosmic power, to find
the program that leads to happiness, meaning, self-esteem, or whatever it is
that gives a person life. The program may be about God, sobriety, the good
life, good relationships, wealth, health, fitness, or whatever else a person
thinks will give life significance, but it’s still religion.
The Vegan who gulps down great
quantities of cereal with the consistency of sawdust in order to hedge his bets
on good health, the anxious observer of the Dow Jones average, the duffer on
the links six or seven days a week – all can be said to be “religious” in a way
that a Christian is not.
Religions have creeds – formulae for
thinking about whatever it is outside ourselves that is said to tune us in to
the power. Creeds are intellectual recipes which, if you get them right, will
give you an edge over whatever it is outside yourself that will give you life.
Religions have cults – practices evoked by their creeds.
I don’t jog anymore, but back when I
did, I didn’t jog for the fun of it. Nobody eats oat bran because it tastes
good, for heaven’s sake. We do it for our-selves and that something beyond
ourselves – a low cholesterol count, a house in Winnetka
Needless to say, an inevitable
byproduct of most religion is fatigue. But wait! There’s more! Because every
religion insists that you’ve got to do the whole thing absolutely right, we’re
forever flunking religion.
There are uptight, terribly
difficult to get right religions like golf. Even after you’ve mastered a nine
iron, there’s a Mashie or a Niblet staring at you from the bag demanding that
you get it right, too.
There are seemingly relaxed
religions, like psychotherapy, telling you that all you’ve got to do is relax,
let go, and free associate about your relationship to your mother. But in every
religion there is always some creed and conduct that simply must
be gotten right if you are going to get hold of the keys to the universe.
In other words, the relationship to
that “something beyond ourselves” which would give us life is always (according
to religion) up to us. No matter how much we watch what we eat, gobbling up
large amounts of brown rice, there’s always someone on the Today Show to
tell us we got it all wrong and should have been eating bulgur wheat instead. “Sorry, bub.. No relationship with
the source of ultimate meaning for you.”
As a result, Religion is inevitably a
one way ticket to failure. The harder you try, the more conscientious you are,
the more often you’re impressed with how you got it wrong.
Religion will sometimes tell you
that it loves the something beyond ourselves with which it is trying to
establish a relationship. In fact, it’s not love that motivates religion, it’s
appeasement. We can eat broccoli and brown rice only to be clobbered by an
asteroid. Nobody ever got an A+ on
the exam called “Religion”, but since A+ is the only score worth having in get
it right or lose it religion, religion becomes a one way ticket to failure.
And here’s the cosmic catch 22. We’re
all born religious. That is, we all come into this world desperate to
find the key to establishing a right relationship between ourselves and that
some-thing outside ourselves that will give us life. Prevenient Grace, original blessing, a hunger for meaning,
an inborn drive for intimacy with the ultimate is not a bad thing. It’s a gift
that can lead us from broken-ness to joy and wholeness in communion with our
Maker.
But we don’t know what to do with
it. Noticing one day, quite by accident, as we are lying in our bassinet, that
certain facial movements send our parents into paroxysms of glee (“The baby
just smiled!”), we do it again, thinking this may be the key to managing them.
Later, finding that Aunt Hildegaard
will hand over a fiver when we curtsey and bow, we drop to our knees whenever
the old dear enters the room. But then one day it doesn’t work. One day, Aunt
Hildy’s peeved with mom—and doesn’t give us any money. Dang! Just when we
thought we had that scam figured out!. Despite our changing creeds, cult,
conduct, we can never seem to get it quite right.
Now here’s where you and I get off
that cosmic hook. Jesus came to this
earth in order to put an end to religion. Religion as something that human
beings must get right in order to have a correct relationship with God
interested Jesus less than golf. Religion – as that which we do when we get
serious about our cholesterol, or when we really hunker down and give all we’ve
got to our career, or when we really clean up our act morally speaking,
separating the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the in from the
out – was something that Jesus couldn’t have cared less about.
Jesus didn’t get into religion. Our anxious, tiring, ultimately futile
attempt to get it right. He didn’t run around desperately trying to make things
right. Because, in him, God made it right. Jesus freely and lovingly made the
only act—the only sacrifice needed to be right with God. In the temple, the
priests stood before God and offered sacrifices for us. Why? Psalm 50:14-15:
“Offer
to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High. I will deliver you.”
the laity. Only the priest was holy
enough to go up into that Holy of Holies and place our gift into the hands of
God. Every Yom Kippur, when the High Priest stood before the altar, holding
before God our little lives, it was “an
annual reminder of sins” (Hebrews
10:3).
That’s religion for you. No sooner
have we finished our sacrifice than it’s next Sunday, and we start the whole
thing over again. You come out fresh, clean from being made right at Yom
Kippur. On the way out the door of the chapel, somebody bumps into you. “Hey,
watch it buddy!” He nudges you back; you shove him. How long did your post repentance cleanness last this year? Five
minutes? Sorry, back to the temple and start the whole process over again.
The priests were instructed in Numbers 16:9; and Deuteronmty10:8. to stand before
God in the temple Of course they stood. I don’t know about you, but If I’m
counting on some poor priest is going to be setting things right between God
and my sin, no way he’s ever get a chance to sit down, much less
a day off.
No
matter how beautiful the service, no matter how utterly sincere the sacrifice,
the poor priest will be kept perpetually busy running back and forth between my
sin and God’s justice. The very busyness of the priest, the fact that there’s
no chair for him to sit down in the Holy
of Holies is, for the writer of Hebrews,
testimony to the utter ineffectiveness of our “religion.”
“And every priest stands day after day at
his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take
away sins” (Hebrews 10:11).
In
contrast to the posture of standing priests (See? I’m standing even as I speak
to you.), Jesus sits.
“When
Christ offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the
right hand of God.” Okay, Job
done. Jesus could be seated.
The veil in the temple, separating
us from God, was torn in two at his death. In his great gift, he put religion
out of business. Now, there was no point in getting on some treadmill of right
thoughts, right words, right action, because that right relationship we so
desperately seek was made right in him. We had only to trust that he had indeed
done what needed to be done.
In contrast to all those elaborate
instructions for Temple Religion
Now class, I’ll admit that
Christianity, in its attempt to trust what Christ has done, has long made use of
the forms of religion to present its radically nonreligious message. So there’s
good reason that many of you answered A, B, or C when you were supposed to say
D. Look at today’s service; you can find creed, cult, conduct. But there’s
nothing here that can get you right with God.
All of this is here
as a joke’s on you reminder that Jesus has done it all for nothing. Now he is
seated.
Prayer is not a con job to get God
to be gracious. God gave us grace on the cross. We don’t baptize, break Eucharistic
bread, read scripture, or listen to sermons in order to beg God to show up
here.. God’s already here. God’s work is done even before the service
begins.
That’s why Jesus sits. That’s
why we call it “Gospel,” good
news. “Religion” is irrelevant for us. If
it were religion, it would be the bad news that there is still some
secret to be unlocked, some ritual to be gotten right, some little sin to be
purged. No. In Jesus, this thing between us and God has been gotten right.
You might think what with the “Gone
Out of the Religion Business” sign on our front door, the world might be
beating a path to us. But that’s not the
case. We’re human beings can’t get away from that religious impulse.. So we
breathlessly try to find the key or batten down God’s door. But the joke’s on
us-- the door’s already open. Look at Jesus and look at us. We’re so busy
trotting back and forth to our altars of good health, right conduct, correct
thinking, and there he is, seated, for heaven’s sake.
But someone may ask: isn’t there
good (revealed, God certified, true) religion and bad religion? There certainly
are benevolent religions, like
Kiwanis or scientific research---that work to make this a better world. And
there are sinister religions like
racism or greed--that inevitably yield only pain and despair. And there are dispassionate religions, like golf or
running—that don’t make the world better or worse. But none of them—benevolent,
sinister, or dispassionate—no religion can help us get right with God.
Forget about religion. Jesus didn’t
tell us to be religious—he invited us to follow him. He never told us to do anything
in a quid pro quo, do-this-get-that
sense. Our puny human attempts to control reality cannot be substituted for his
grace. If we are going to be rightly related to him, it will be because he does
what needs to be done, not us.
And the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says that
he has. The One who promised is faithful.
Christ’s work is done. God’s got no more quarrel with us. We come up to
the cash register only to discover that our bill has been paid. Jesus, the
great priest, is sitting down, seated at the right hand of God.
His work is done. You and I are forgiven. And we are free. Free from the effort to “be
religious”. Free from the sometimes ridiculous expectations of others. Free
from living our lives based around stern duty and fear of hell. We are free to
simply “let go and let God.” We are free to answer his call to “Follow me” simply because we yearn to
be more like Him.
We are free to live lives of
integrity and authenticity. We are free to live the life of meaning, the life
of joy, the life of hope—for its own sake, and for the sake of our love for Him.
Because we have come to realize that ultimately, life in Him, lived in the here
and now, is really the only life worth living.
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