Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

     I want to address what I believe is a terrible bit of theology.  It is the tried and true belief that is still so present in Christian circles: the sacrificial Atonement of Jesus Christ.  It says that to appease God's wrath against man, Jesus had to suffer and die on the cross.  You still hear it in so many songs we sing on Sunday mornings about the blood (Jesus's blood) covering our sins.  And so we are made clean - "white as snow" so the songs go.  But many pastors worth their salt, in my opinion, have distanced themselves from this theology.  Of the four pastors in my life, I know three don't hold this view.  The fourth I have simply not gotten to know yet.      The idea of the sacrificial atonement came out of the old Jewish system of sin and sacrifice.  Many, perhaps the majority, of Christians believe that Jesus was a sacrifice like the flawless lambs that were offered for a sin offering in the Jewish r...

   In all my years of living in the church - in the community of believers, I never would have realized that I was the closest to God when I was a boy hunting for frogs in the marshes by the pond near where I lived.  After all the Christology and the Seminary and the dogma, I have found that God is not in any one place.  He is not in a church building only, but he is there.  He is not in the street corner ministry only, but he is there.  He is not only in the eyes of the needy, but there too, he can be found.  I find him most often now in nature. And I find him in the times I spend soaking to the music on my God mix of secular music.  I find him in the words of Bruce Springsteen  and The Fray and The Killers. I feel I share something with the prophets of the Old Testament, and the desert fathers who retreated to the wilderness and desert to commune with God.  And anyone can do this.  Anyone can go outside, find a quiet and beaut...

     Many of the evils committed in the name of religion are a result of drawing lines according to belief.  Jesus came to the Jewish people who were so burdened by the lines drawn in their belief system from the teachers of the Law. The Pharisees and Sadducees helped develop a complex system of restitution for sin that designated people as either "right with God" or "sinners."  In order to keep from being a sinner, one had to offer certain sacrifices to God in the sight of other men. It was a line drawn between "us" and  "them" and excluded people from many parts of communal life until they did certain things.  There were also groups of people who were designated sinners by their profession, such as prostitutes or, conveniently, tax collectors for the Roman Empire like Zacchaeus.  And there were the "unclean" (which often equated with "sinner").  A group of people who were considered unclean were people with Leprosy because...