Aspiration Toward Inspiration

This is going somewhere. Stick with it.

Hebrew is normally written without vowels. They’re not necessary, for the most part. Someone who reads Hebrew knows where the vowels belong. Vowels are included for those learning Hebrew.

In the Jewish scripture, vowels are included for “YHWH.” This is all fine and dandy for the English reader, but if you’re a Jew, you understand that the vowels are placed in positions that don’t make sense… positions that show the word is unspeakable. Naming something gives one power over it. Read Genesis. Or this old blog entry.

We cannot have power over God. This doesn’t mean that we can’t contradict God’s will, but it means we cannot ultimately overcome it.

We each have our own contexts. We each have our own needs. God transcends all of them.

God is mystical. God is subject to certain laws, but God is eternal. God might not be able to grab a microphone and speak to us, but God operates through those who can understand God’s will.

If God is beyond our naming, how can we define ourselves as followers? We call ourselves Christians. It was a name imposed on early Christ followers by Romans. It was name-calling that stuck and was reclaimed by those who wore it.

I feel like “Christian” is name-calling again for me. I don’t want to be what people think of when they think of “Christian,” but I want to be what I am. I want to reclaim the title. I think that requires giving the title back its context. It requires educating people who claim the title so they know what it means.

We throw around our Christian vocabulary and think we’re communicating. We have changed the meanings of our own words. We sometimes understand them differently and mis-communicate because of it.

As much as I hate to identify with the Evangelical movement, I cannot help it in this moment. The idea: “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” I’m going to show you what I mean about words.

Sin is an alien word for me, not because of its meaning, but because of the meaning we gave it.

Literally, “sin” means to miss the mark. There’s nothing wrong with that idea. Of course all of us try to be our best, but we fail. Because we are in the image of God and because we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, we understand that failure. We know it when we make mistakes and when we act against our better nature.

The connotations of the word sin have made it alienating. If we understood sin as wandering off the path, whether by daydream or curiosity or a simple childish rebellion, it would not hold its power of guilt. If sin could be understood as it was meant, as an honest mistake or a failure to live up to our potential, it couldn’t haunt us the way it does.

If sin could truly be understood as missing the mark, we would all understand that all of us fail. We all miss the mark because perfection is an absurd idea brought on by thinking Law is there as more than an example to strive for, but as a set of exclusivist rules by which we can create an esoteric cult. If Law was all that mattered, God would have given us Leviticus and been done with it. We have good news and it is not that God is an exclusivist. It is not that God wants you to believe x, y, and z.

Jesus didn’t just sit and believe things. Beliefs can’t do anything on their own. Really, when we look at the history of religious belief, what can we say for ourselves? Beliefs don’t seem to help advance science or save countries from war. More often than not, religious beliefs have bred hostility.

And yet…

God’s very nature says, “You cannot define it.” We cannot name God. Any power derived from naming is ultimately arbitrary.

The title Christian, in the grand scheme of things, is arbitrary. It’s the reason I can claim it. I can claim it because I know that calling myself Christian doesn’t make me more like other Christians or less like Muslims. A name is not a source of identity any more than it’s a source of power.

What is a source of power?

I was born into an American family with parents raised Roman Catholic and Mormon, yet who decided that their children had the strength to find God on their own.

I have found God. I have found God in my place of worship.

I imagine that I can also find God a mosque and a field. God seems to find people wherever they are.

Before I could claim an academic understanding of religion, my understanding of God was very different. It is because of my education that I understand God to be inclusive, to be pervasive, to be limited, despite whatever desire we may have for God to preside over the trivialities of our lives. I also know, however, that God is unlimited in the way that God is active in every Human mind.

If we can nourish God’s mustard seed in our minds with education and context, I know that our contexts can meet and bow to each other and worship together knowing that the ritual, the naming, the scripture (the search) cannot alter God and cannot matter more than the now, because now is all that God is ever working with.

As much as I despise the Evangelical phrase “hate the sinner, not the sin,” I have to embrace it and extend it into my context. “Hate Evangelism, not the Evangelical.”

I have to know that education trumps ignorance. Religious Studies has made me love God and love reality in ways I couldn’t have without it. Religious Studies creates unity and heals ignorance.

And it needs to be in our churches.