“Love God, Love others” a paraphrase from Jesus
People that desire to encounter their creator have been writing bibles, religious text, angry retributive rants and holy books for thousands of years. These writings are filled with their hopes, projections, faith and experiences that will be judged as sacred or profane by us who read their “prophetic utterances.” Gods of their own constructed imaginations and projections have long enslaved and repressed human thought though history. The religious gatekeepers then create a structure to control the masses in the name of these imagined gods. These imagined deities have been violent, temperamental, jealous, petty and hell bent on embodying the worst of humanity. The ancient Hebrews have been praised as the first group of people to largely adopt monotheism. Like all religions, they where on to some progressive stuff for their day, however they too adopted an image source that was still full of violence. Today many modern Christians have adopted this god image and try to literally live under his violent yoke. I’m so happy to say, this is not the revelation Jesus taught.
The Hebrew Scriptures, “an affair with violence,” contrasted with Jesus and his teaching on enemy love.
My hope is this; as we daily weigh all scriptures that we would do so by setting a higher standard of love and non-violence that Jesus modeled and taught to his followers. We should engage these ancient and modern text with conscience, intention, reason, and with in the spirit of God. As we sift through the ancient and contemporary voices that ponder the divine, let’s not promote those that embody regressive, violent and fearful faith. It’s up to us to judge the past and those in the future will judge us by the good or terror we enact based upon our convictions and faith. Be on the side of love, openness, expansion and goodness for heavens sake. Choose you will, but what and how you affirm your faith will be up to you. Just because we say something enough times, or load enough, or over many centuries doesn’t make it true or good. I can say, “God said,” all I like and after all, God did not say it, I did. Did your faith start with an ancient warlord, a politician, a desert sage, or a failed salesman? You should evaluate their teachings critically, with love and reason for the peace and future of our race and planet. If there is a God and he is violent, then he and most of our religious institutions embodied his violence. However if God is loving, full of compassion, patience and abhors violence, woe, to the human who did violence in his name! Woe to us if we promote hate in his name! Woe to you if our creator is forgiving and you practice hostility, exclusion and judgment! Woe be unto us! For if our creator is love and we do not embody love, what space will there be for us with this deity?
I just finished an excellent book called, “Disarming Scripture,” by Derek Flood. I am sick of oppression, alienation, judgment, and violence done in the name of Jesus and his father. I’m also frustrated by the violence, confusion, and fear in my own heart. Derek’s book offers a detailed neo-orthodoxy and hermeneutic for evaluating scripture that frees people to love and act radically in following of Jesus. If you want to embody Jesus and don’t wish to model your life after what most churches tell you, then this means you may want to also read this book. It gives a lot of answers to my above statements in great detail. Jesus taught enemy love, and I like so many who grew up in the church, had hardly a clue what this meant. I was taught America was a Christian nation, but I early on noticed that our nation acted nothing like Jesus or his teachings. A literalist orthodox reading of scripture promotes, genocide, violence, sexism, child abuse, oppression, nationalism, racism and other isms that to not belong to Jesus or his teachings. Its time we learn how to follow Jesus, our conscience, with in what we now know about science, phycology, morality and the way of love. Both Mohammad and Moses embraced violence and bloodshed as the way forward. The prophets and poets of the Hebrews reveled in the blood of their enemies and spoke as if God but did so in horrible violent terms. These men may have been progressive for their day, but they knew nothing of the way of Jesus, or his teachings. If you want to follow Jesus but feel leery of his followers, this is great. Your conscience is working and you may be well adapted for the way of Jesus. Jesus came to save us not from God, but from ourselves. God is love, he is our creator and Jesus understood this. We are invited into a new era of enemy love, no longer mirroring violence with violence, no longer projecting our worst human qualities onto our creator. There is much we don’t know about God that will in this life remain a mystery. However, if we put our hope in Jesus, we can trust that God is good and that we can follow a new life-giving path and way of understanding and encountering our creator.
Freedom from my own inner violence is a pre-requirement to living in tune with my creator. I continually must confess with all my heart, that I don’t know how to live the way Jesus invites me to. It breaks my heart, that after so many years, I still feel like a rookie. Like a scared kid at his first day in high school I’m still learning what it means to be transformed so I can live this new and wonderful life.
The God Image 