Why is religion so complicated

Justin wonders what the base class of a church is (he's being geeky here), and wondering if its too hard to abstract the common elements. The answer is, it is and it isn't.

While looking at scripture, we find the base class of God's law.

CLASS godslaw {
   ABSTRACT COMMAND honor_god() ;
   ABSTRACT COMMAND honor_each_other() ;
} ;

But that was too abstract for the israelites and for the new testament Christians. So we ended up with specializations:

CLASS tencommandments : PUBLIC godslaw {
   COMMAND no_othergods() ;
   COMMAND no_idols() ;
   COMMAND no_misusing_thelordsname() ;
   COMMAND honor_sabath() ;
   COMMAND honor_fatherandmother() ;
   COMMAND no_murder() ;
   COMMAND no_adultery() ;
   COMMAND no_stealing() ;
   COMMAND no_falsetestimony() ;
   COMMAND no_coveting() ;
} ;

Even that turned out not to be enough for the nation of Israel so there were hundreds of other rules and regulations that got to be a big todo. Living your life right turned out to be a lot of work, and infact, some Jewish people believe that the reason for all those rules, was to make it impossible to be blameless or perfect (there was always something to work on).

It is interesting to read some of the other things that happened back in the early days. God wanted the nation to be self-rules, with priests to help guide each person spirtually. But the people said, nope--not going to happen. They pointed out that they were not with-it enough to pull that off and that they'd better have a king or everything would be lost. So God had to give them a king, which turned out to be a disaster, but they muddled their way through for quite some time.

There seems to be something frightening to most people about taking complete responsibility for one's life. If we could do it, we'd just need those first two laws and that would be enough to guide us. But we can't.

Things had changed somewhat in the time of Jesus. It wasn't necessary anymore to avoid eating animals with split hooves (good thing, cause ham is delicious, we even eat it on Easter). It seems like about half of the ten commandments have been tossed out as well, I certainly don't see very many people honoring the sabath any more, and leaving elderly parents to the whims of social security and medicare is probably not fulfilling the spirit of "honor thy father and mother". Even so, Jesus spent months and years spelling out hundreds of ways we could trip up in our hearts, even if we didn't actually take action.

Matthew 5:21-22: "You're familiar with the command to the ancients, 'Do not murder.' I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother 'idiot!' and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell 'stupid!' at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill."

So we have two troubling trends spelled out here: one is that we (as flawed human beings) need more than just the abstract laws (which are immutable and unchanging), the second trend is that the specific examples of sub-classed laws have changed over time. Some laws have gone away, and others have popped up to cover new ground.

So if there's at least two examples of conflicting rule-sets that implement the base class god'slaw, what's the chance that we're going to be able to create a common ground between all the modern churches with anything more specific than the abstract base class?

Astonishing God

While Justin has been listening to Podcasts and getting into the spirit, I was reminded of the Northpoint Sermon Archives gathering dust on my computer. I had used SDB do download a couple of streams and so was ready to go as I sat down to get some work done this evening.

I started with Aug 8, 2004 which is the first of six in a series called IGNiTE which is all about faith. He points to a story of faith in the bible which has always been a guiding story for me. Andy does a great job of making this story bigger than life, because there's lot of odd things about this story. For one, its the only recorded time in the bible that Jesus is astonished. And he's not even astonished by one of his disciples or anyone from the entire nation of Israel. It was a roman centurion that came up and asked for something, and when Jesus offered to go help him, he said:

Matthew 8:8: Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed.

That's the kind of faith I aspire to, and sometimes it feels like I even pull it off. I've told stories before about some early leaps of faith, but sometimes I can put a few verses together in an interesting way and experience some real power. Like we know while Jesus was on earth that he basically had command of everything. Whatever he wanted®Zap, and it got done. That's not to say he was always happy with what was going on, but he knew it was all part of a plan and so he went along with it.

So what did he say as he was leaving? "Ok, here's the keys to the car, they're all yours." Basically all the power over the earth that he had, he handed off to us, his followers. That's some serious trust, but he meant it. Its real, and when you turn the key, it starts.

One example of that was during my trip to Promise Keepers last year. We get to this huge auditorium with at least a couple thousand people, and God starts in on me right away, "you need to work on your ministry skills." This is not a surprise to me, I mean, I scored a -15 in ministry on the church gifts evaluation test not that long before that. What I'm really good at is running the lighting board or folding up tables after an event. I'm kind of like the super invisible helper. Its an important job, things don't get done if we're not around; but it doesn't directly get anyone to Christ.

So what's my assignment that night? Well there's going to be an alter call after the last speaker, and they need a couple hundred volunteers to go down and pray with all the men that come forward. God says, "you should do that." Now you might think that I'm quaking in my boots at that point, but I'm not. I mean, I don't want to do it, but if I have to... Besides, if I totally screw up, its going to make God look bad more than me. So I figure, he's motivated to make this work out.

But I realize there's more at stake here than just me going down and leading a prayer for one or two other people. This is an opportunity for a lot of people to get straight with God and to really re-establish the connection in their hearts. While I'm not usually known for my empathy for others, I can sense that this is an important time. So I take it up a notch.

"Jesus, you have power over all the earth, and over all the beings operating here. And you've given that power to us, or more specifically to me. So here I am. I'm calling you on it. Protect this event, shield this event, cast out the forces of evil, of distraction, of avoidance. Let no one here today be connected to anything but your love.

That was my request, no, my command. The power was given to me, so I used it. And I thought that was it. At the end of the night, I went down, did my prayer with another guy (and didn't spontaneously explode on the spot), finished up, went home and went to bed.

What I wasn't expecting was the astonishment that the organizers felt from what they saw. The next day Reggie Dabbs got up in the morning and all he could say was, "whoa". They had already done more than a dozen weekends like this in other cities over the summer, but they had never seen a response like they had seen the night before. Over 15% of the men attending had come forward that night, and people were still making decisions the next morning. Nothing they had seen previously had come close to that. They were just astounded.

I was up in the stands that morning thinking cool, that's some power you gave us Jesus.