I don’t openly discuss my faith with people. I’m sure there are scores of reasons for this that would be interesting to a psychologist, but I think mainly I don’t talk about it because it always feels like oversharing. I think it’s kind of like going up to someone and saying, “hey, how’s your day, my sex life with my wife is awesome”. You can probably only get away with that with select company.
Anyway, when these discussions do arise, I feel the need to give a dissertation on the nuances of what I believe because the American Evangelical position on many matters is fraught with problems. The discussions veer into the side of the conversational mountain with me babbling on about the challenges of an omnipotent God giving kids cancer, epistemology, and how space/time work. I’ll spare the reader all these long-winded thoughts (for now), but I’ve always thought this was very simple. Painfully simple:
34Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’c 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’d 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:23-40)
(NIV – h/t biblehub.com for providing the content)
I think about it like this…
I’ve gotten on quite a fitness kick lately. I asked one of the trainers in the gym I go to “hey man, if I had to focus on one thing to lose weight, what would that be?”. The trainer said to me confidently “diet…work on your diet and you will be most of the way there”. Cool, I can do that.
I’m going to draw out this analogy…imagine me going to the trainer, asking the same question, getting the same response, then turning around and saying to my wife after she asked me about the conversation “the number one thing I’m going to focus on is building my latissimus dorsi…of everything in the universe I can do to be healthier I think I’m going to work on my back muscles, everything hinges on the upper-back muscles”.
It’s pretty clear. Someone asked Jesus, the Messiah (for the uninitiated, he’s the guy that should know a thing or two about what it means to be a person of faith) what THE (capitalized on purpose) most important rule is, he said love God and love your neighbors (and yourself, by the way). ALL THE LAW hang on these two commandments. All of it…all of them. That’s what this whole thing is about, those two things.
So, if you read the “About the Author” page you know that I attend church far less than most of my brethren. In fact, I’ve been to Catholic Mass far more than a church service in the past 10 years. The reasons for this are myriad, but it all started when I was finishing up my ministerial training and something occurred to me. The post-modern Evangelical church doesn’t particularly seem to embody the Message anymore. As a church we/they have been chasing the latissimus dorsi of spirituality for an awful long time, chasing away the gays and drunks and fornicators and porn addicts and blacks and etc, etc, etc. Some day I will get to writing a post on that, but the ramifications are clear to me.
In short, being a Christian isn’t about your church, your liturgical style, or your “denomination”. It’s about a simple mandate. Love. Love God (easy difficulty), love yourself (medium difficulty), love your neighbor (expert difficulty). Do those things. In fact, focus on those things before you start worrying about your spiritual latissimus dorsi. I’m fairly certain God cares much less about someone’s sexual orientation than whether you love that person. I mean REALLY love that person. Talk to them, listen to them, break bread with them, learn about them. Do those things, and you will be most of the way there. Being a Christian is, by definition, following the teachings of the Christ, whom most Evangelicals affirm to be Jesus. He laid it out pretty plainly.