I want what you have -- an Indian parable, the Gospel according to John, and the Christian witness

This past Sunday the Gospel reading was again from the Gospel of John, and a homily suggested that in the reading sin is associated with failure to believe. It was left hanging for us to ponder.

Many of us have heard the idea that we have to "believe in Christ," but this has been reduced by fundamentalists to an intellectual assent to a proposition, namely, agreeing to a particular identity for Jesus. Does Jesus deserve the title of Christ? That is, a piece of God in a human suit sent to be killed for your benefit? If so, and you if you publicly say so, you get a ticket stamped to a future paradise after you die where you get to be just like you are now but with a spiffier physical body. And this is where many people today head for the aisles or close the door. That model of proselytizing has poisoned the well for a lot of common phrases used in evangelizing.

I don't personally think that's the message at all. I don't think the apostle Paul does either. What if instead to believe that Jesus was the Christ is to believe that we were meant to be who we are and are cherished for that. Not for what we do, the good or bad choices we make or their consequences, but for being ourselves. What if believing that Jesus is the Christ means that we can also move beyond the lines that divide us, beyond the religious and irreligious squabbles, the petty tribal politics that persist even in modern nation states, and into a state of being in which we can appreciate and grow from all circumstances in our lives. To be able to maintain a subtle joy in our hearts and expand our consciousness and conscience into a unity with our Source. Out of many, One, and out of One, many. A wealth of diversity in unity known as Christ.

Reconciling tradition and contemporary insight: Connecting the vision of the Gospel and salvation and debates about faith vs. works

This is part of a series of essays exploring ways to honor religious tradition while making its message accessible and relevant to people today. It isn't officially endorsed by any group, it is an attempt to spark people to move forward with their faith. It draws on another essay sketching the outlines of two visions of the Christian message.

Too often we see important elements and individuals in religion reduced to lists of rules and theological reflections. The overly familiar images and language becomes sterile, and they make the way we speak or think of God lazy: "Almighty God", "in the name of Jesus", "who with the Father and the Holy Spirit", etc. Many have an idea that they should use these things because they are Christian, but what if we took away those convenient, easy and familiar words and the handy reactionary assumptions of theology that they hide?

Because some overarching themes became so ingrained and taken for granted in major swaths of the Christian traditions, people just assume what terms like sin and holiness mean and never really bother to explore them beyond the impression the receive from the environment in which their beliefs were formed. But what if there is more to it? What if a failure to take into account the original context of an idea or to ask how it might have been expressed today isn't just lazy, it shows a disrespect for the idea itself. It also means many people will find the idea sounds outdated or irrelevant, no matter how much its proponents shout and stamp their feet.

Let's continue from where we left off  and examine how a mystical approach to the identity, life and passion of Jesus can inform us about the Gospel and the role of the Church.

Standing for and standing with -- solidarity with those on the margins

What is the best way to help those who are on the margins -- in terms of social or economic status, power, or in some other fashion?  How you do envision a solution, partial or whole, to the neglect or abuse of those who fall into such a category?

This is a perennial question for those working to improve living conditions for those on the outside -- those excluded based on some quality deemed inferior, insufficient, impure, inconvenient or otherwise undesirable.  A major model employed with particular vigor in the US has been the human/civil model, which has its critics such as Andrew Sullivan (writing below about discrimination involving homosexuals):

Liberalism properly restricts itself to law - not culture - in addressing social problems; and by describing all homosexuals as a monolithic minority, it is able to avoid the complexities of the gay world as a whole, just as blanket civil rights legislation draws a veil over the varieties of black America by casting the question entirely in terms of non-black attitudes.