16th May 2007, 05:47 AM
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The Religions Of/About Jesus
The Religion of Jesus vs. the Religion About Jesus
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The message of jesus was not a supernatural message. He didn’t think the kingdom of God was coming at all. He thought it was, at least potentially, already here. That phrase “the kingdom of God” was a popular phrase in the first century, and a lot of groups used it. It meant the best kind of world, the world where compassion and justice ruled rather than the values that almost always rule us.
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But the difference between the two religions is fundamental, profound, and often deadly. Jesus hit people between the eyes with his demand that they treat all humans as equally children of God. The religion about Jesus demanded obedience to their teachings, not his, and to their ever-changing and usually strange creeds. Catholics teach that there is no salvation outside of the church. Jesus never talked about salvation at all. Baptists say Presbyterians, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and just about everyone else is going to hell. Jesus never talked about heaven or hell at all - though the community that wrote the Gospel of John put words in his mouth sixty years after he died, that made it seem otherwise.
If you look back through the history of Christianity for its absurdities, as many like to do, you will find virtually all of the absurdities in the religion about Jesus, but almost never in the religion of Jesus. Like people saying Jesus was both God and man, when there has never been a theologian who could make coherent sense of such an absurd statement except as poetry. Churches exhorting believers to go into holy wars and kill other people, as they are now exhorting American Christian Soldiers to kill people in Iraq who look a whole lot more like Jesus than they look like most of us. It’s absurd. They’re also saying the universe is just 6,000 years old, and may well agree with the 17th century Archbishop Ussher that today is the universe’s birthday. It’s a dangerous kind of absurdity.
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And Voltaire’s saying keeps haunting us, that notion that those with the power to make you believe absurdities have the power to make you commit atrocities.
Today, we hear the Christian Coalition, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and a host of other morally and theologically reprehensible preachers say that Christianity demands that the rich not be taxed, that uppity women and all gays and lesbians be excluded and suppressed, and that you don’t have to act as Jesus wanted, you only have to do as today’s priests and politicians say. It’s hard to imagine a teaching designed as more of an insult to the man Jesus. It is the new crucifixion of Jesus. And today, Jesus is being crucified by Christians.
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For the full sermon on this topic, please see here.
What do you think about the differences between the religon of Jesus and the religion about Jesus?
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