I’m not going to say that my experiences of God and religion in my youth weren’t genuine. Quit the opposite actually. I was there. They were real to me. It’s just that I don’t know what to do about those experiences anymore.
On last year's Easter I didn’t bother attending church, so Easter consisted of eating ham and hiding eggs for my kids to hunt, but this year marked my first religious Easter celebration as someone with a conscious struggle with the belief of the divinity of Christ. I’ve told only three other people this about myself, and now here I am, posting it on my blog for all to see. I may get private email messages from people attempting to evangelize to me (I’ve gotten plenty already with my previous writings). I may also get comments from people who wish to give me proverbial pats on the back, congratulating me for emerging from my childish mythical thinking (I’ve gotten plenty of these responses too). And yet I wonder. I wonder if more people will resonate with what I have to say next than not.
About 10 years ago, I turned against the writings of the Old Testament, thinking that if I was to be a Christian, I wanted nothing to do with the kind of God who wiped entire nations of people off the face of the planet, the kind of God who would require his people to drink gold and die in agony. I didn’t want anything to do with the God who would pass over the homes of families who had lambs blood painted over the doorways of their homes, and for the families who didn’t, kill their firstborn sons. The God painted in the Old Testament, to me, sounded like a tyrannical monster, even though I had been taught for my entire life that “God so loved the world”.
About 5 years ago (I know, I’m a slow processer), I turned against many of the writings of the New Testament as well. I could no longer deal with the apocalyptic writings of John or with the teachings of Paul (most of the New Testament after the Gospels). I thought Paul was incredibly full of himself, especially in the celibacy department, chauvinistic, and completely closed-minded. So I decided to stick to the “red letters” of the Gospels, you know, the words that Jesus himself said, because the “red letters” are really what should comprise Christianity, right?
I guess so.
But then, Jesus himself said some pretty messed up things too: “Divorce is never merited. God only allowed you it because your hearts were hard,” “If your eye causes you to sin, poke it out and get rid of it,” and “No one gets to the Father except through me,” an idea that inherently (and quite literally in other scriptures) asserts that if you don’t accept Jesus, you’ll burn in hell in conscious torment forever. He was a pretty swell guy, that God. Oh, and my personal favorite, the one that has wreaked havoc on multiple members of my family, the teaching of Jesus about how believers should discipline a fellow believer who’s living in sin. I like all the other stuff about Jesus though, how he attacked the money changers, how he fed the poor, and healed the sick. Jesus was, for the most part, a humanitarian rock star, especially for his time in history.
But he still said some pretty messed up things.
So what do you do about your beliefs as a Christian when you start questioning the entire structure of what you believe?
“It actually pisses me off when someone assumes I’m a Christian,” I admitted to a friend a couple of months ago.
“Me too,” she too admitted in seeming complete understanding.
“So it’s pretty hypocritical what I do, you know, getting up there in front of a church congregation, singing about how much I love Jesus, so what if it is an ecumenical Christian church? I really like the idea of Jesus, but I don’t know if I view him as my savior like everyone else seems to.”
“It’s not hypocritical,” she said with a bit of a scoff.
“Why not?”
“Think about it, I don’t sing about things I believe hardly ever. When I’m in the car, I sing about how I want to cheat on my girlfriend or rub up against some hot guy in a bar. I sing because it’s fun, not because of the lyrics.”
Up until this point, I had been seriously considering quitting church music for good. Forget it, I might be good at it, I might truly enjoy it, but what’s the point if I can’t resolve the theology of each song within my being? Jesus born of a virgin? Jesus rising from the dead? Come on. I’m just a fraud.
I've heard almost every Christian say that the God of the Old Testament isn't necessarily the God of the New Testament; the coming of Jesus changed all that, so Jesus essentially came to save us from God's wrath. What if I don't want to be reconciled to a God who would kill my firstborn son if I don't perform some sort of blood ritual? What if I don't believe in hell in the traditional sense? Then what did Jesus die for? What if Jesus was simply a man who showed up with his revolutionary ideas and world view, and it was so fundamentally different than the God they knew and worshiped, that they killed him?
I've heard almost every Christian say that the God of the Old Testament isn't necessarily the God of the New Testament; the coming of Jesus changed all that, so Jesus essentially came to save us from God's wrath. What if I don't want to be reconciled to a God who would kill my firstborn son if I don't perform some sort of blood ritual? What if I don't believe in hell in the traditional sense? Then what did Jesus die for? What if Jesus was simply a man who showed up with his revolutionary ideas and world view, and it was so fundamentally different than the God they knew and worshiped, that they killed him?
On Easter this year, amidst all my doubts, I believe I connected with the beauty of an ancient story and a tradition, with the singing of a hymn, specifically. It’s about sacrifice, something we don’t see a lot of in our self-obsessed culture. It’s about love, something that has become conditional and distorted. And it’s about the resurrection of our hope -- some would say that’s Jesus.
