I remember very well a funeral of a beloved close friend more than a decade ago, as I stood before a crowd of five hundred, who were looking to me, as his pastor, for answers. I opened up the funeral ceremony with the words, “I don’t understand it and it hurts like hell”. Of course now that I don’t believe in hell, I‘ve added yet another level of hatred and OPPROBRIUM to my life.

Good thing I’m no longer a pastor (using that word as a NOUN). I am pastoral (the verb usage) though. Does that count?

Thankfully I am now a part of a loving community that allows people to have differing ideas. Love isn’t based on doctrine or beliefs. It’s okay that I will be cremated. I try not to “view” open caskets because I want to remember the life that I saw in their eyes and their faces and not that stilted make up face of death. Why do we do that? Hey, it’s okay if you want to go that route. I’m cool with that for you.

And I’m okay of you’re agnostic too!

I am too on some things. It’s okay!

An interesting word for Barack Obama to use three weeks ago when he said he was agnostic about higher taxes. Maybe he was listening some of the time, when in Jeremiah Wright’s church. Listen doubt is a part of life. There would be no need for FAITH is there wasn’t doubt. C. S. Lewis became in part who great he was because of his initial nagging doubts that led him to finally write the book, A Grief Observed.

It’s just life! How are you doing with it- and other people’s view of such?

Do you think it matters to God what you call her?

There it is- that pesky pronoun! Having grown up in a patriarchal society wherein the writers of the Bible were MALES of course Jesus called God FATHER. It’s not being macho, it’s just speaking the FACTS. Of course that was “their facts” some 2-4,000 years ago. God is a BEING, but God is not a male being. God is not a GENDER. God is SPIRIT (surely we can agree on that).

I have been PILLORIED for many things but taking away God’s MALENESS is a biggie.

Ah, let’s be friends and not worry about a NAME for the un-nameable infinite. Let’s not try and put God in any BOX, let alone a gender box. God is much bigger than anything we can imagine. How many millions of galaxies are there, not to mention universes? Wow! So, let us not stumble over pronouns or anything else. Let’s just be the LIGHT & LOVE that we are even though much of it is layered over with ego, suppositions, doctrine, cultural bias, geographical upbringing, and the like.

Isn’t life much bigger than the trivial matters that we seemingly always argue over?

And, how much better, if we could see more of the female side of God, the nurturing nature of God. We need to be reminded of the wisdom (Sophia) of God. We’ve created so much damage to women in society, and to ourselves by a “Males ONLY” country club, church, and general society.

So, lets’ use whatever pronoun is appropriate at the moment and realize that the Creator is that and yet so much more!

One of the problems with the Protestant Revolution is that it replaced an infallible and SACROSANCT Pope with an infallible Book!

Isn’t God the only one that’s infallible?

The Bible is the Christian community’s sacred book. It POINTS the way to God and spiritual living with hundreds of examples over dozens of centuries, from various cultures. Let me say that again. The Bible is a POINTER to God and not God! As someone has said, deer tracks and not the same as the deer. But, if deer hunting is your thing, you might look for the tracks which just might lead you to the deer.

Is this that difficult?

Tom Harpur writes, “Sacred books tell of the encounter with God of other humans much like us. They point to where and how we can have a similar encounter ourselves.” The reason that so much (too much) emphasis is placed on sacred works, trying to turn them into infallible, God channeled words, is the egoic need to trump other sacred books.

God’s not into competition, but recognition.

Could you tell a deer track if you saw one? Can you recognize and see God in every person you meet? Everyone does carry a divine light within. Some lights are really hard to see but we can if we look hard enough. Humanity and divinity usually occupy the same geographical territory.

Didn’t the church fathers say Jesus was both fully divine and fully human?

I learned early on how to CONFORM: my EFFICACIOUS teachers left a mark on me!

I stayed within the broad road of my first denominational experience. I embodied the mental image of my teenage years. Since I was raised in a non-Christian from the age of six to sixteen, that decade of wandering taught me to hold tight when I finally got some religious indoctrination to the truth (of my denomination).

Gradually, I discovered that blind faith and the lack of intellectual integrity were too much to supply the answers to life that I needed.

Even more slowly, I began to read books that my denomination told me were “of the Devil”. I listened to men who I was told could “lead me astray”. I even held conversations with people of different faiths whom I was instructed would “dilute my faith”. When you mix dirty water with clean water, you know what you’re going to get!

The problem though, was that I could no longer CONFORM to the rules, rituals, dogma, doctrine, creeds, and customs that once seemed to right! My inner voice, the spirit within me was calling me elsewhere. I was to later see that spirituality was much different than religion. It didn’t have to be that way, but it was!

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote, “Jesus Christ came to abolish religion and the need for it altogether.” Wow, did that ever send my head spinning.

Religion can be a good starting place. Religion can embrace some of the best of spirituality known to man; however, more often than not, religion seeks to have its members CONFORM to whatever the denominational RULES are- that’s why it’s called a denomination.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God”, and “put away childish things” now have far more life than they once did. Are you experiencing the ABUNDANT LIFE (which isn’t the popular sermon of just material wealth)?

I walked the isle at age seventeen in a North American Convention Baptist church where the pastor was supportive of Nixon.

I liked John F. Kennedy but maybe that was only because he was young, as four years later I ran for political office while still in college (Kansas 144th Representative district vs. LaVerne Spears) as a REPUBLICAN! How did I get from “liking Kennedy” to running as a Republican four years later? More PARADOXICAL still, how was it that I was an avid backer of Barry Goldwater as well?

Political skizophrenia?

Carl Jung liked to speak of the SHADOW part of humanity, of the individual. In the last decade we have talked more about a “shadow government”. But, what history has shown me is that ever since the church got in bed with Emperor Constantine way back in the early fourth century, the church has sided with “conservative government”.

Maintain the status quo- of years gone past!

Thus, the church, and especially the fundamentalist right wing of Christianity in America has been on the Republican side of the isle- especially in the last century. The ideal model was the evangelical backing of George W. Bush. The church backed his militarism, just wars, capital punishment, and of course ‘compassionate conservatism’, whatever that was.

The prophets of the Old Testament and the prophetic voice of the New Testament leaders who espoused non-violence were shoved off stage; however, a few men have broken through the “shadow government”. Can you say Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela to name a few.

God is not a politician! God is certainly not a Republican, not a Democrat. Therefore it was easy for Jesus to simply say, ‘Render unto Caesar what belongs to him and unto God that which belongs to God”. Usher in the Kingdom of God which is neither a Blue state, nor a Red state, but a state of consciousness described as unconditional love.

The Judeo-Christian God seems to specialize in guilt!

Guilt is one way that the church can keep one beholden to the institution. All too often the Sunday message starts off with the topic of SIN and then ends with the solution being to come to confession, make amends through financial offerings, or submit oneself to the priest, minister, rabbi, IMAM, or pastor.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the top theologians of the past century, warned people to run from such “spiritual quackery”.

Unfortunately such guilt begins even before we had a chance to do anything to be guilty for. Since two people (back before artificial insemination) came together and united in bodies to create me, here we are a product not of any choice but love or maybe passion gone loco. Before we take our first breath we are GUILTY.

Bummer!

And of course the church lightning rod is SEXXX. St. Augustine railed against the SIN of SEXXX and the apostle Paul would have nothing to do with it (we think). It’s amazing that the Song of Solomon got canonized; however, the church so emptied it of romantic love, and the goodness of sexuality with spiritualization, that it lost the buzz- and reality of the message.

How about you? Do you have a healthy outlook regarding who you are in God and your human failures called guilt?

But while sex was the core for building guilt there was always more things to fll guilty of such as: lack of attendance, failure to tithe, disrespect of leadership, missed communion, disagreement with doctrine, and on and on and on!

We have descended into this third dimensional, lower consciousness of life with the purpose of growing into the hidden identity we really are.

Who knows all the reason why we are here, but shouldn’t that be one of the most important questions to embrace? Doesn’t everyone have within them the divine spark of the Creator? Aren’t we all to some degree the incarnation of the Divine? Thus, shouldn’t we be living more of a spiritual life than we currently see? The constant thread and theme that’s woven through the tapestry of the Bible is the awakening to the reality of who we are.

I AM!

There is a spiritual light (Sun-Son) at the center of the universe that we are. We are the STEWARDS of this LAMBENT Light wherein the universe of our body (with it’s billions of cells) awaits orders from within. Once we fan the flames of the divine within, we can then cast a bright light on those we come in contact with and not the darkness of the ego.

Let us be encouraged as to WHO we ARE and therein be a LAMP unto others. Life is not about LAWS as it is about LOVE and LIGHT. So, let your little light shine which means coming forth out of the cave (Lazarus) of darkness and death.

Let me say up front that this historical character (fact or just mythology) is whom I want to be most like. Jesus is my model! I do not deny you of your models, nor a differing view than I have because obviously as the title of this commentary says- there are many views!

I do not believe that Jesus was God in any sense that is not open to each and every one of us: we just didn’t do as Jesus did. I do believe that he lived the most perfect life that I know of any man, and that his life took away the greatest sin of mankind- thinking that we’re separate from the Creator. He was totally open and filled with the Spirit as no human being I know. That he was a man gives me the hope that I can do what he did and more (John 14:12).

When I once saw Jesus as the “only begotten Son”, divine in the fullest since, there was no hope that I could follow him as he told me. His humanity gave me HOPE, and endless encouragement. Was he both divine and human as the founding fathers said? Yes, and so are we! God WITHIN us, the hope of glory!

I see God in the words and in the life of Jesus as I’ve never seen in any other man. I am open to the fact that there may be more; however, the society and culture within which I live (Western-Christian) has been my major area of study so there are many other religions to which time on this planet have not allowed me to be so in-depth in my study: though I have studied all of them somewhat.

The first chapter of Romans tells us that we don’t need a savior, nor a religion, to KNOW God! God is everywhere in nature, and everywhere in everyone! Treat the world as sacred- it is!

Jesus didn’t teach a creed: he simply lived life LARGE! He offered radical forgiveness, unseen mercy, and he preached the Kingdom- not religion in a CACOPHANY and hate filled environment among religions. He lived such a short time, and taught in an even smaller condensed time frame that we only know but a fraction of what we could have know had he lived to 50, 70, or 90 years as many other religious leaders. He even told us there was much more to know (John 16:12).

Jesus discovered his true nature as a child of God. I’m getting there. I hope you are on that journey and I pray that you will be tolerant of every living being (human, animals, and plants) regardless of the culture from which they come, and the ways in which they worship the ONE TRUE GOD!

I agree that the Bible is the WORD of God, but not the WORDS of God!

The Bible should be the sacred text of all who purport to call themselves Christians, but to move it from the subjective sacred to the objective inerrant is a position without defense. If every WORD is pure, perfect, inerrant, and infallible- WHICH WORDS would that be? Are we talking the King James Version, the NIV words, the REB words, or maybe the Amplified Bible WORDS?

The Bible is more than just a good BOOK, it’s a LIBRARY of sixty six books (unless you’re Catholic of course).

We can no longer divide the world into THEM and US! It’s not quite that simple. I’m reminded of the man in the Gospels who said, “Lord I BELIEVE, but help my UNBELIEF”. Say what? Most of life is a mixture of this and that, good and bad; and we need to stay away from so many man-made religious absolutes and break through the BIVALENT veil that causes so much pain and agony.

Let the WORDS speak to each person as they may, but above all, may we be a demonstration of the light and love that we are. Let’s stay out of the box making, judgment rending, and classifications that develop into hierarchies pointing fingers at who is IN, and who is OUT!

Is anyone really OUT?