Jesus vs Religion

After much radio silence, here is my return to blogging. I have actually been blogging for the past several months for my church's website. This is cross-posted to that site and I will cross-post most of my posts from there for the course of this spring. You can check either site.

There is a certain spoken word poem that made the rounds on that little social networking site called Facebook (oh my gosh, Facebook doesn’t get the red squiggly line from Microsoft Word… it is now a real word!) last week that sets forth the message that Jesus simply hates religion and that if we follow Jesus we should hate religion too. First of all, let me say that I liked most of the poem, and think that this fellow believer’s focus on Jesus and the cross was really exemplary. Furthermore, poetry is an interesting medium, given often I believe to overstatement. One of my favorite religious poems of all time, if I hazard to use the word religious in a non-pejorative sense, a Holy Sonnet by the great English metaphysicist/pastor/poet John Donne ends: “For I/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” And those are some strong words. Given that, I am ready to forgive a bit of hyperbole in poetry.

So, I don’t really want to address or critique this poem directly. If I did I am afraid it would come off as mere jealousy. After all, in my wildest dreams nothing that I ever write will be read by almost 13,000,000 people, the current total for viewers of the video. Also, I believe this video to be an overwhelmingly positive thing. But I do want to address and critique the easy disassociation of Jesus and religion, and this poem and its rapid ascent to coveted viral video status provides a convenient platform for this. Also, I believe this critique will ring true to many readers of this blog and am not trying to be controversial here.

A good portion of this issue surrounds our definition of religion. If, as this video suggests, religion is nothing more than a manmade effort to appease the god(s) then I agree that Jesus is against that. There are many different definitions of religion typically given by a dictionary, though, and none of them have this narrow conception. I don’t want to sound like the third grade book report that begins, “According to Webster’s…”, but according to Webster’s religion can mean “service or worship of God or the supernatural,” “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices,” or “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.” To define religious, for good measure: “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity” and “scrupulously and conscientiously faithful.” And I think that most people who reject the manmade effort to appease the gods version of religion would gladly support these definitions of religion and claim that the faith they have in Christ resembles something along these lines.

Now that we have a working definition in place—to systematize it, let’s say that religion is a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith and that a religious person is a faithful and conscientious adherer to this system—let’s briefly examine the life of Jesus and see if he was against religion.

It becomes clear that Jesus was against outright excesses of religiosity. He calls the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27, etc.) and berates them for adding to the standards prescribed by God in the Mosaic law (let us not forget in our fervor over religion that it was God, after all, who established the law in the Old Testament), and for neglecting the weightier matters of justice and mercy and the love of God (Luke 11, Matthew 23). And these are all valid critiques of religion (as if Jesus needed my nodding approval). But this is not all that Jesus had to say about religion.

In the Sermon on the Mount, that wonderful collection of the teachings of our Lord, Jesus denies coming to abolish the Law and the Prophets and condemns those who relax even the least of these commandments of God (Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus established the Church, that erstwhile factory of religion. He goes one up from there and established church discipline in Matthew 18. He instituted communion at the Last Supper. And, finally, in his last words to us, the calling from which our movement of churches has received its name, he commands his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” (Matthew 28:19-20a). He does not want a group of converts, who are “into grace” (I will deal with grace shortly), but a group of disciples who obey what he has commanded. Rituals, obedience, adherence to the law, and discipline. That sounds a lot like religion to me.

The more that I read the Gospels the more it becomes clear to me that Jesus was reacting against what ailed the people of God at his time. The normal faithful Jew was snowed under by the excesses of the law foisted upon them by the religious leaders of their day. And it grieved the heart of Jesus (and angered him immensely). Just as I believe Jesus was angered and grieved for the Catholic Church doing the same thing to the average believer in the pre-Reformation era. But the question that I ask myself is if this is the real problem with religion or Christianity in America today? An excess of religious devotion. Doing too much to try and please God. In some quarters no doubt the answer to that question is yes. I have felt the pull of legalism, as most believers have at one time or another. But overwhelmingly in our nation I do not feel this to be the case. The problem with Christianity in America is not excess of the law, but a general lack of obedience and discipleship. And I think that this is generally the case throughout history. It takes a pretty strong theocratic state to make legalism compulsory and the Church simply does not possess that power in most of our country today (this is a good thing). The problem with our generation, in my admittedly anecdotal experience of it, is that we don’t want to do anything very demanding. And grace, God’s wonderful, redeeming, bountiful grace, is demanding.

Charlie Meyers, one of the pastors in our association of churches, gave a sermon this year at our annual conference on these matters called “Blessed Through the Power of His Grace.” And I believe that Mr. Meyers is spot on in his treatment of grace. Too often we tend to define grace down to forgiveness. But the reality of grace is that it is so much more. The grace that provides us forgiveness and redemption is the same grace that seeks to bring us into conformity with Christ. This is what the saying in the poem sort of glosses over with its line about how the church is not a “museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken.” I understand what he is saying, but the point of any hospital, as my wife the nurse confirmed for me, is to make people better. The goal is not to make someone feel OK with their broken leg but to heal it. The Church should offer understanding, compassion, and a spirit of non-judgmentalism to those who walk through her doors, but the goal of course is that they walk out changed. A significant piece of the hope of the Church is that, by the grace of God, grace in its fullest sense, people can change. And the hope is not that they change into people obsessed with rules and who seek to add to what God already did, but people who steadily become more like Jesus into whose image we are destined to conform.

And often the way that we do that is through rituals, customs, and other measures of obedience. I really did like most of this poem. And I believe the man who wrote it probably has some sort of system for reading his Bible, regularly partakes in the Lord’s Supper, was baptized to signify the death of his old self and his union with Christ, and wishes that he prayed more. Just as I do. Just as most faithful followers of Jesus do. And that is religion. Good religion. Religion given to us by God and God-in-the-flesh. Religion that remembers the weightier matters of justice and mercy and love of God. Religion that gets grace and knows that we are worthless sinners apart from God and that it is only by his mercy and for his glory that we have any hope in this world, and that our loving and faithful response to this scandalous grace is to want to be more like him day by day. And that this end, frankly, does not come easily.