Love, Actually?
Recently, I decided to satisfy my curiosity and see how the US stands with respect to religious beliefs – to see what’s growing and what’s not. My findings were interesting:
The number of people claiming to be Christian in the US has fallen in the past decade by 10%. It is projected that the number of Atheists will surpass the number of Christians by 2042. In the past 10 years, there has been a increase in Atheists 100 times greater than any religion has ever grown. Yes, I found these on the internet, but even if these figures are not completely accurate, the general trend is that the Christian/Atheist ratio is changing dramatically.
Of course my reaction to this would be to ask ‘why’, and all I can come up with is that we need to face the truth. We’ve decided that it’s okay to be judgmental (among other things), but we’ve rationalized it by saying that it’s ‘out of love’. We’ve decided it’s okay to tell people how to live. Since when did God want robots, people who are all the same based on our own interpretation of the Bible?
Thinking of this brought me to John 8:1-10. You probably know it. It’s the story where a woman is accused of adultery and the Pharisees bring her in front of Jesus in an effort to trap him. Jesus asks what’s going on, they tell him, and Jesus says, “if any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And then everyone walks away because they realize they have all sinned too. Then Jesus, who is without sin, helps the woman up. Tell me, Christian Church, when does Jesus condemn her for her actions? In fact, he only says ‘neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more’. How is it even possible to translate this as ‘what you did was very ungodly and you need to change before you can be a better Christ follower’? I have had far too many discussions in which people try and convince me that telling others what they’ve done wrong will help them in the long run. ‘I AM loving them…by telling them how to be more Christian-like so they can get to heaven.’ What about Romans, where it reminds us that we’ve ALL sinned? We still commit adultery. We still lie. We still steal. So instead of living in hypocrisy, why don’t we accept that we all have faults, Christians and non-Christians alike, and just love? What we’re doing now is teaching Christian laws, not Christian love. Remember what Jesus did to the lawmakers, the Pharisees? He rebuked them. He implored them to forget the laws they so adamantly held on to and to love.
Love.
Unconditional love. Never-ending love. If someone wrongs you, forgive them. It’s loving people because they’re God’s creation. Let’s leave the judgment up to the only one perfect enough to understand it.
During the World AIDS Day chapel the other day, we heard the story of a woman who opens her house and her life to homosexuals, prostitutes, and other social outcasts. Why do stories such as these touch our hearts? Because they’re stories of uncommon, sometimes seemingly unwarranted love to the social outcasts of our society. Is this ringing any bells out there? Jesus? Lepers? Adulterers?
The fact that this level of unconditional love is so rare in the Church – whether we’d like to admit it or not – is why so many are turning away from Christianity. This goes straight back to those statistics I found online. They have no choice because we have told them that their personality and lifestyle is unacceptable for our terms.
Also, remember what the Pharisees did to Jesus in the end? They crucified him.
We’ve driven ourselves so far away from the love that Christ stands for. We’ve surrounded ourselves with the rules of the Christian Church and forgotten the love that it is supposed to represent. I think it would be nice if Christmas happened again so Jesus could show us the way, but given the current mindset, I worry that all of us Christians would crucify him and miss the point all over again. So like I said, let’s leave the judgment up to the only one perfect enough to understand it, and we can spread the gospel of Christ’s love like we were told.
