Below are four of Jim Rigby's recent posts on Facebook. I commend them to you.
1. BEING NICE IS NOT NECESSARILY KIND
There was a time early in my ministry where no one had a bad word to say about me. I didn’t realize that my supposed popularity was based on blending into the hierarchies of oppression and not standing up for anyone.
My silence in the pulpit about controversial issues meant I was a guilty bystander to the church’s abuse of women, the LGBTQ community, and to non-Christians in general.
Eventually, I learned if you truly love others you have to be honest enough to risk losing their approval. Being nice is not necessarily being kind.
2. BET IT ALL ON LOVE
I love the kind of religion where people can gather to ask the great questions of life, but detest the forms of religion that pretend they have found all the answers.
I detest the kind of religion that place the sandaled foot of the Savior on the throat of the culture's scapegoats, but I love the forms of religion that humbly serve the world without needing to preach.
I love the forms of religion where people can come together to celebrate ordinary life as a miraculous gift, but detest the forms of religion that can only find the sacred in the supernatural.
I detest the kinds of religion that bribe us with promises of a gated heaven, but love the forms of religion that bet it all on love.
3. BIBLE BULLIES
Christians who join in the persecution of religious or gender minorities may quote Paul, but they have not understood that Paul’s ultimate punchline is almost always that we are all in need of grace. Paul said a lot of unhelpful things, but his summary statement was almost always that the law is only fulfilled by love. Paul expected us to outgrow his limited understanding. Even if we find verses in Paul’s writings that directly contradict Jesus’ ever expanding message of love, Paul himself taught we are to follow love, not religion, and not Paul.
And, let’s be clear, when someone says they take the bible literally it means they take it superficially. To persecute people because they do not fit your religious stereotypes based on a superficial understandings of ancient texts is not piety- it is spiritual ignorance and political fascism. Spiritual piety is not appointing ourselves as God’s bouncers. Spiritual piety is living our own lives as sacrificial offerings for others whether we think they are worthy or not.
Judgement finds no place in the Sermon on the Mount and it should have no place in the church today. It is strange indeed for Christians to claim that providing food and housing is government overreach, but that imposing our own sectarian moralism on everyone else is not.
To the LGBTQ siblings in our human family, I offer my deepest apologies for those members of the Christian faith who have offered you judgment instead of grace, rejection instead of hospitality, and ancient moralisms instead of love in our own place and time. Please know If a Christian cannot look beyond your genitals and see your loving heart, it is they who are trapped in perversion, not you.
4. THE MOST DANGEROUS WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The word “God” is perhaps the most dangerous word in the English language. I can’t think of another word that so completely makes a room full of people believe they are sharing the same beliefs when, in fact, every person in the room means something different.
I do not believe the symbol “God” is essential to the life of reverence. When people do use that word, it seems to me, the symbol “God” usually refers either to one’s own quest for love or one’s own pursuit of power.
If some some people in this culture use the word “God” to refer to an imagined white male on a golden throne, their religion may consist of little more than a theological mask for the sins of racism, sexism and classism. Religion that worships God as power may simply lift national and cultural injustices to a divine status.
But if, by “God” one means a personification of the tie that binds us ALL together, the word can give emotional texture to an abstract idea of unity. If one finds the sacred, not the the crafted idols of theology, but in the living faces of imperfect and struggling people, and in the frenzied pulse of nature, then the symbol "God" can be a poetic representation of the felt “heart” of a life lived in love.
What is important in any symbol is not the image it conjures in our heads, but the experience of reverence and interconnectedness it reveals in our hearts. The iconoclastic destruction of our religious images is almost as important to the life of love as is the creativity that crafts religious imagery in the first place.
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