A New Endeavor

This past week I did something I have never done before. Two things, really. First, I went snorkeling with whale sharks in the Gulf of Mexico / Caribbean Sea. There may be another blog dedicated to that later. The other was reading the New Testament (Matthew - Jude) in this very short time. I took a couple of novels with me on vacation, but I had finished both of those by the end of the 4th day under the palms, so I needed something else to read. I decided to read the New Testament, not as an academic study, but just to get a broader sense of the things I've been reading and taught from my whole life. I must say it was quite a difficult, eye-opening experience. By reading the whole thing at once, I found myself engrossed in just a few themes that kept recurring throughout. I was disappointed (even a little angry at times) that my biblical education has been mostly about proving one thing or another about Christian life, spiritual behavior, church rules, what one can or cannot do, etc., but very little about living life as a creation of God.
I will share, ever so briefly, the overwhelming theme I felt during my reading. I know this will be overly simplistic, but that, too, is something that I came out of this with - that God didn't intend for spirituality to be rocket science.

I think God intended for humans to get along. More than that, I think He wants us to love each other, treat each other with respect and dignity and genuine concern for each others' well-being. It wasn't long after he created us, though, that that got pretty screwed up. Almost immediately, humans got selfish and started doing what we wanted and killing each other to get our way. He tried wiping out all the bad guys with a flood, but the evil still crept back in, and people just weren't doing for each other what He intended. In fact, it went so far for so long, that people didn't even remember what things they were supposed to do. That's where the law came in. God gave his law to the Israelites so they could have a check list (more or less) of the things they needed to do to keep themselves pure, with God and with each other. This law existed only because of the ignorance of human beings to understand what God had intended in the first place, so it was there to get them back on track. Nothing about the law was bad, except maybe for the fact that it was impossible! Good grief, very few of us are perfect (that's sarcasm, OK?), so no way will humans do very well at following a list like "the law." (Side note: read Leviticus in your best Monty Python Holy Hand Grenade voice. It works, it's hilarious, and it's pretty much the only way to get through that book with your sanity.) Any way, the law was good in that it got people back on the track of living as the humans God had intended, but it was never going to be good enough. It was just a bunch of rules to be read and followed. The academically inclined liked to talk about the meanings of all the words and what they meant we have to do (which sounds a lot like the church I grew up in and have experienced for lots of my life), but no one was good enough to show someone how to live it. So God came down to earth to show us how to do it. When Jesus was here, he didn't tell us the way to live is to spend our time in church or with our noses in scriptures, he SHOWED us how to love each other. Everything Jesus did and taught was about relationships - human to human relationships. I really believe that Jesus' message was, "if you want to get reconciled to God and live the life your creator intended, you need to take care of each other." When he was asked his stance on the law, he clearly said he wasn't here to do away with it. The law was not the problem. There's good stuff for daily living in there. When he was asked to sum up the law, though, he told us to love God and love each other. See what I mean? All that stuff in the law can be taken care of by loving, and God himself came down here to show us how to do it. Sending down a manual on how to do it wasn't enough. We needed to see it, so he sacrificed himself so we could have an example to look at. Then, as if that wasn't enough, he left part of himself with us to guide us from the inside. That's what I think spiritual living is all about - love. Jesus disciples and the apostles seemed to think the same thing. Everything I read about in Paul's letters and the writings of others in the Bible points me to the same thing.

Like I said, this has been more than a little overwhelming. This kind of thinking is not what I grew up with. I have prayed that God will keep pushing me to find out more if this is really what he intended and to squelch this if it's not. I don't know where this will lead. I'm going to start over in the gospels and try to document (maybe in this blog) the instances that I read that make me feel these things. We'll see.

Someday soon, I'll post pictures of the whale sharks too. They were pretty overwhelming themselves!