People come out of Sunday sermon where they have just heard the “Seven Keys To Heavens” or some such simplistic and easy to follow formula and they are excited. They’ve taken copious notes and life is a matter of just following the Seven Steps (originally made famous by Mormon Stephen Covey). Then they go home and read their Bible and it all gets very confusing. God isn’t a capitalist and there is a reason that Rene Girard said, “The Bible is a text in travail”.
The Bible is three steps forward and two back, but religion has so trivialized God!
Sometimes the Bible appears to be two forward and three back. Reading the Bible can make one wonder if there is a god at all. Maybe this is why Catholicism has in times past forbidden people to even read the Bible, discouraged them from doing so, or pointed people to the “traditions” instead of the Book! I’m sure this is why there are more than 30,000 “Christian” denominations in the world.
>Who can make any sense of all the killings in the books of Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel?
>What is one to do with the social injustices of things like slavery and stoning of wayward children?
>How does one reconcile such erroneous and out-dated science matters with today’s facts?
>Which God is to be believed: the angry Old Testament or the forgiving New Testament one?
The list of questions, confusions, and out right inconsistencies simply doesn’t match up with the simplistic sermons of modern-day America where we’re told how easy it is to be the “Champions” and be weathly and healthy all the days of our lives- provided you tithe of course!
This is the heart of Girard’s “text in travail” comment.
Life is a journey and it is filled with days of sunshine and storms. One cannot grasp the reality of the journey without days filled with rain and lightning. The key is to “stay connected” while on the journey: connected to God and all the people around us. And though it all we have to “Trust the process” as Walter Starcke likes to advise.
We’ve made idols out of Popes, priests, and pastors! And, we’re paying the price for such.
Richard Rohr summed it up for me when he wrote, “Most religion is moralistic, ritualistic, doctrainaire, and unhappy while God is merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving, and steadfast in love.” Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion called Catholicism or Christianity. If anything he came to end religion as the Jews knew it and as we’ll fashioned it.
How your journey going? Who are you on the trail with today?
0 Response to “Text In Travail”