The Purpose of Religion
This is part of my Sunday Sermons series, where I wrote rebuttals to the Baptist preacher’s sermons while I lived in Costa Rica.
You are sitting in a filigreed garden gazebo with tendrils of clematis and wisteria winding up the six posts surrounding your seat. From where you sit you can see straight ahead through one of the six open spaces. You see shrubs and young trees, backed by older stately and lacy willows. Flowers meander everywhere in spectrums of color, bordering lawns and paths. You gesture toward the framed scene and say, “That is Paradise,” a place you would like to enter to be surrounded by its beauty. But what you do not realize is that you are only seeing one-sixth of this beautiful garden. If you could stretch yourself around you would know that there are five other views of the garden, placing your vine-covered gazebo in the center of it all. Not only are you already “there,” your place resides at the very center, without which the garden would be out of balance.The gazebo is a comfortable and safe place to be. Sometimes you are content to sit on its bench and gaze out, thinking to yourself, “This is Paradise, just sitting and looking at such beauty. I need nothing more.” It is hard to remember sometimes that the gazebo is not organic, but was constructed by human hands.
In this metaphor, the gazebo is like religion, it points you toward Paradise but advises you to stay on your bench if you want to get there. The New Testament states that its hero brought good news: “You are already in God’s garden. In fact, you are the center of it. Rejoice.” In the book, Conversations with God, the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments become ‘God’s Ten Commitments.’ Rather than saying, “You have to do this in order to be with me,” these reinterpreted laws are saying, “You can be assured you are with me when you see these self-fulfilling signs.” We might even go further to say, all the signs do not have to be in place all the time. When they appear, perhaps only briefly at first, you are having a little visit, sitting at the center of Paradise for a special time.
There are many signs within each commitment. For example, you will not want to lie for any reason, and your truth telling will be kind and without judgment. You will not feel the need to save face by defensively denying the obvious. Or, you won’t want to gossip. Gossip is telling another person’s story, usually without permission because they are absent at the time. Gossip is stealing another person’s story, the oldest version of identity theft. Gossip is a betrayal of trust, spreading information out of the context in which it was originally placed. A brief moment at the center of Paradise may only entail a small warning voice stopping your words from going further. Eventually, the inner caution may be replaced by a real desire to go no further, and perhaps further along, the thought of adding your delicious version of the story will not even occur to you.
The point of it all is that you are already there, you’re it, you are the garden and the center, made in the image of God. Already, always. But we don’t get it at first because our vision is limited. The gazebo, in this case religion, gives us a point of reference, a focus, a plan. But it is meant to be only temporary; its point of view is a starting point, at first a place to get your bearings, values and goals, and eventually something to experiment with and test against until you experience the freedom of self-determination. Religion teaches us right from wrong so that we can successfully operate in its world. Eventually we have to trade in that teaching for the neutrality of neither right nor wrong, in order to find our own unique path leading to the central view of the garden.
2012
