I've never met that guy

I've been thinking lately about what makes my sort of religion--the sort of religion I practice anyway--different from other peoples.  I don't mean this in a superior way.  I'm not sure what way I mean it in, actually.  I just know it's different from the way other people approach it.

I'm not afraid of God.  I'm just not.  I'm afraid of being separated from God, I'm afraid of what I'm like when the connection gets shaky, I'm afraid of disappointed sighs from Jesus, but I am not afraid of God.  I don't like it when I feel like God is angry with me, but not because I'm afraid God is going to make me pick my own switch and beat me with it.   Don't get me wrong, God the Father has soundly, metaphorically, whipped my ass before.  I deserved it.  Deserved every single bit of bad karma that came down the pipe at me like a wave of pain in an ocean of 'you totally deserved that'.

But that's not what motivates me to do the things I do.  I'm not afraid of God because I know he loves me.  I know this because I've seen it.  Time and time again, I've been blessed.   I've also believed since I was teenager that perfect love casts out fear.  I believe that God loves us.   All of us.  The whole of us.  No reservations.   During Holy Week this year I had a friend ask me what would happen if she missed Maundy Thursday at church.  Will I go to hell?  I was shocked.  Go to hell?  Over missing a service?  Really?

I would like to say I was tempted to lie straight my teeth and tell her that little Baptist girls who miss Thursday night in Holy Week have a room reserved for them in the Seventh Layer of Hell  but I was in too honest of a mood at the time.   Truthfully I was horrified she even thought Hell was an option after taking a baptism and, being Baptist, having been 'saved'.  How can someone's faith offer so little comfort?  How can that be anything but a prison?   How can that be anything but a heavy burden that someone tied up and laid on one's back?

Sunday's gospel lesson provides an illustrated point in this.  The Pharisees point out, technically correct I'm sure, that the disciples didn't wash their hands that day before eating.  I don't know what kind of grime they had on their paws, I don't know what cruel woman didn't put out a wash basin for them to clean up before dinner in, (Pretty sure first century middle eastern men could absolutely NOT take care of themselves in this regard) or what possessed them that day to dig in without scrubbing up.  I have no idea.   I do know that it's bloody nitpicking.   In this case I actually mean nits.  I mean straining out a gnat and leaving a camel in the stew.  I mean, seriously, you guys called out their rabbi because they ate with dirty hands?   That's like posting a photo shopped picture of the President of the United States supposedly flubbing up flag etiquette--- It's not important in the grand scheme of things and is probably bullshit.

In the case of the flag picture, I know it is, because that's a white hand on a brown body but I digress.   I understand that ritual is important.  I understand that the Law is important.  I get it.  You're reading the ramblings of a woman who has actually gotten down on the floor and picked communion bread crumbs up off the carpet before vacuuming a church.     I fall down when a kid carrying a cross passes by.  I don't enter a church for worship without praying first thing and I bow EVERY TIME I pass the alter.  I get it.  I'm high church with a capital HC and a charcoal incense burner in MY HOUSE.  

Those things aren't the point though.   In the grand scheme of things, they aren't even important, they don't even matter compared to this simple truth:

Mark 7:6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. 'You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Why is he saying this?  Is he angry about people washing their hands?  Something tells me it's the picking of the nits...

 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

 It's not the things you do!  It's not the things you don't do!  It's you!  It's what's deep down in your heart.  It's the coldness, the anger, the things that send you through the roof for no good reason.   It's your INDIFFERENCE to the suffering of other people.  That's what makes you cold to the love of God.  That's what makes you cold to your neighbor.

That's what makes you worry you're going to hell for missing church.   There is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear.  It makes it go away.  Love conquers all.  It warms up cold hearts.    Fear piles up rules and defenses.  Fear takes things away because they aren't required.   Fear frightens people into chanting an incantation to make the bad go away and cowering beneath the steel gaze of a preacher who wants to scare them into salvation.  I don't want that religion and I've never met that God.  I don't know that guy.  I don't want to know that guy.   I'm saying this out of love:  God is not an asshole.  You can quote me on that.  You're not a rat in a cage he's set up so you can't ever get the cheese.   It's going to be okay.