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Pastor · Sunday Schedule · FBC
News
2003
From the Pastor
IN THE NAME OF RELIGION
A lot of awful things can be done in the name of religion. It can create fanaticism. It can close off dialogue. It can divide people. It can be used to justify prejudice. Murder, mayhem, slavery have all been done in the name of religion. Nothing seems off limits to the person who is convinced that God is on his side.
I am more often embarrassed than enlightened by denominational pronouncements.
I cringe every time I hear yet another horror story of how religion was used as a means of punishment when a person was growing up.
Religion can be stilted, boring and used as a basis for asserting one’s own moral superiority. Religion tends to end up with lots of rules for everything. And, a lot of religion seems to reinforce very self centered behavior and thought.
I grew up in a home that contained many of the elements I have mentioned above. I know first hand some of the harmful ways in which religion can be used, or at least I know enough to emphasize with those who upon becoming adults resolved never again to enter a religious place of worship.
Yet, there is another side of religion. We are at our core religious. We can pretend not to be, but we still are. It just gets sublimated in materialism or some other form of zealotry. I am struck by the parallels between worship and certain rock concerts and sporting events.
Besides, the absence of religion doesn’t insure the absence of bigotry, persecution or closed mindedness. Look at Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia.
To me the abuses suffered in religion have more to do with human nature than any core teaching in any major religion, but such recognition would never be enough to hold me to a religion. I would be just as well without it.
So, why knowing all I know or think I know or pretend I know, do I keep on? If I am so arrogantly enlightened why am I still a part of the religious establishment, pastoring a church, every Sunday putting on a robe, preaching, teaching and inviting others to participate with me in what can only be described as “religious” services?
The answer comes in images.
It is as a child sitting with my grandparents in their country church. It is the picture of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, hanging on the wall of the Sunday School.
It is our fountain gurgling up outside reminding me of something deep inside.
It is in the images of faces that pass before me from early childhood to old age in whom I saw the light of faith. It is looking upon both new born faces and dying faces and seeing love and mystery and wonder. It is in the end the imprint of every handshake and smile and everyone who spoke a word of kindness and encouragement.
It is as well the counsel of wise teachers, the inspiration of a few preachers, and the helpful insights of many authors, all of whom have help me see beneath the surface of things and see the grace of God.
In the novel, A Country Priest, a young French priest, his body filled with cancer, lays dying in a friends apartment. He has faithfully served a poor parish of divisive people in rural France. Nothing in the priest’s life has been easy but at the end of his life he looks at his friend and says, “It is all grace.”
At the most visceral, deepest level of my being, hardly understanding it myself, this too would be my answer.
It is grace. It is all about God’s grace, a grace for me revealed in Jesus.
Dr. David W. Andersen
           
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