This morning I turned the radio on and there was a discussion about church and tithing. A caller phoned in and conveyed her opinion to the host and the audience. Afterwards the host responded with something and the caller said, “but I am an Anglican, I am a Christian, an Anglican”. I can’t remember anything else from the broadcast except her statement and how proud we are to announce what brand of Christian we are: "I am a Catholic", "I am an Anglican", "I am born again and we have drums at our church".
I often wonder what God thinks about all this. When he listens in, what does he see? Does he choose one denomination that is closer to the truth than the next? I think not. Please correct me if I am wrong. I think he doesn’t, because he doesn’t even see denominations. He sees individuals, he sees hearts. So saying, "I am a Christian, I am an Anglican" bears no weight in the accreditation of belonging to the church.
A friend recently said to me the charismatic’s have got it wrong and his movement, the fundamentalists, have got it right. I asked him if he was smoking the good stuff because I wanted some. They have got it right? It’s an arrogance exacerbated by many Christian’s across the world that I believe is born out of an insecurity that one little thing we believe about Christianity could be wrong. In my very limited understanding of the beautiful God we live and love with, and Jesus who came to make things more clear for us, it’s my understanding that God sees and judges a heart. Not your denomination, not what you say you believe but what your intentions are. Please, again, correct me if I’m wrong.
Branding is awful in my opinion, not only in supermarkets, people or religions, but I think that God must have a sense of humour and if he does indeed look on us as his children then perhaps he looks at us as I have looked at my own children from time to time....
ReplyDeleteThey belong to me, they are of my body and yet they are so separate, so different to me. They are vulnerable and new in the world and need my care and yet I must let them fall and make mistakes in order to learn and through their own lived experiences hope this learning will bring them closer to me, to understanding my love for them when I could have prevented something but didn't, when their confusion at my treatment of them hurt me and they could not see it. Maybe he looks at us and smiles - especially at our pride, our boasting, our arrogance - I have done with my children. It is melancholic too, this looking on, because as a parent you know or can most of the time quite accurately guess what fall will come because of your own experiences as an adult and as a child. Children make us laugh because they are so bold and certain, and they make us sad because we can never get that back. There is prettiness in youth and naivety, but perhaps there might be true beauty in age and wisdom - we wish this for our children, but we know they will lose something very special in its own right in order to attain this. Maybe when we have children we can more easily understand this melancholy, just as we appreciate our own parents more when we have had firsthand experience of infants and tantrums and all the trials that go with parenting, but there is always space for love and joy and those small moments should be treasured. We need opposites to exist in order to fully appreciate the good - there is no pleasure without pain, honesty without dishonesty and yet we still have a choice as to what we will focus on - the brand or what is in the box, maybe the ingredients are more wholesome than the packaging lets on! Does Coke in a can taste any different from Coke in a plastic cup?