MindHunterINFJ

SUNDAY MORNING, COMING DOWN (ON RELIGIOSITY)


NOTE: The following I posted on Ocbober 8, 2006 as my Sunday "sermon" for communicants and "lost" souls, including me!

G,
GOOD morning, my Jewish friend! I have a message for you: God could not get into many Christian churches this Sunday morning either, for, if He came, it would be without a suit and tie and without a reservation or even a welcome.

Imagine with me, if you will, this scraggly Jewish rabbi approaching what Christians call a "mega-church", maybe one with a $250,000 golden steeple with a cross atop soaring upward from a $50 million complex of sanctuary, gymnasium, fellowship hall, Sunday School rooms, and so on.

Two questions to you, my Jewish friend, and to me: (1) What would they, those who call themselves by His name, say and do with Him? and (2) What would He say and do with them?

Answer to first question: There is no room in this "inn" for a smelly, long-haired, sandaled, scraggly hippie wandering in from the Galilean desert or perhaps from the inner-city skid-row, the slums beyond the railroad tracks, the tittie bars in the xxx-rated red light district, or fresh from the dumpster behind the Kroger store where he searched last night for food and curled up for warmth against the winter chill.

No, no room, they would say, maybe not in so many words, but by their actions---or more precisely their inaction. For, you see, this lowly Jewish rabbi would not come knocking at the crystal or granite cathedral alone. No, that is not His way. He would bring His followers, his converts, with him on this bright and serene Sunday morning, and as he knocks the scruffy horde would be lounging and milling in the background, their smell alone over-powering the faithful who eventually open the door.

Who are these folks who follow Him to an edifice that proclaims His name but which, in reality, is a sacrilegious altar to human pride and vanity and folly and self-deification: or, more correctly, to the deification of "religion" itself?

I will tell you, my Jewish friend, precisely who His followers would be on this peaceful Sunday morning: the riffraff, the drunks, the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the homeless, the poor, the hungry, the bums, the misfits, the mentally insane, the hungry, the orphans, the helpless, the children, the strippers, the queers, the voiceless, the transvestites: in short, those whom He calls His "lost sheep", "the little ones", and "the least of them."

Yes, come with me, my Jewish friend, as this man of your faith knocks on the door of this "Christian" church. Let yourself who, I sense, like me, does not "fit" the norm set by the "normal" people who insist in putting us into a box of their creation so as to "understand" us be in that crowd of outcast humanity, it milling about us, waiting for our leader to gain admittance to "His" church.

As the door is opened, the stench, the sight, the implicit threat of this mob overwhelm the cultured sensibilities of the staunchly religious deacons who open the door. How will they answer this rabbi's knock? Answer: they would turn Him and His followers away and they, His chosen people, would crucify Him anew.

How do I know this? Because they crucify Him every day that they righteously proclaim His name and yet turn blinded eyes and hardened hearts to those hurting and outcast souls who are "different" than the righteous who praise their God within the $50 million walls of this edifice erected not to Him whom they turn away but to human vanity, pride, folly, self-deification, and deification of "religion" itself.

You see, many, perhaps even most, churches look inward; they are deified social clubs for business connections and hobnobbing with "normal" folks like themselves. They say they look upward, but upward is NOT upward: it is downward into the filth and the gutters where suffering humanity grovels, cries, hurts, groans, and dies.