Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son.”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, July 25, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Forgive me for inhabiting our modern religious-political context, but I see this as a word of warning quite relevant to the present moment. As I wrote yesterday, it’s critical for us to distinguish between human (and therefore highly flawed) interpretations of what God wants for our society and what God spoke clearly through Jesus about the same thing. There is a strong movement (or at least incredibly vocal, if not nearly a majority) of folks who want to impose their own highly-specific and seriously oppressive understanding of Christianity on everyone, and they justify it in all sorts of ways, not least of all insisting it’s God’s will. Yet if we look with complete honesty at (a) what Jesus actually said (and didn’t say) about many of these things and (b) our own motives in wanting others to behave in a particular way just so we can be comfortable and secure, we absolutely must reject out of hand this movement and its ideals. The “testimony that God has given concerning his Son” is found in Jesus’ words of love, peace, justice (political, economic) for all people, and self-sacrifice on behalf of our neighbors. If we claim these things are untrue (or just ignore them completely in favor of our own beliefs about right and wrong) we make God a liar. Strong words. But God was pretty clear in Jesus about changing the status quo in favor of the powerless. So if your agenda concentrates power in the hands of wealthy, white, cisgender, straight, men of a certain religious understanding, you are saying God’s plan is wrong. So, um, yeah. Say that if you want to. But you certainly can’t claim it’s God’s will. It’s not. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Do I behave in ways contrary to what I believe my religious tradition calls me to? Is that an issue with my behavior or my religious tradition?
