Our theological belief system goes by many different names, but the term that best describes it is Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is important, one needs to have a proper frame of reference in which one can move, its important to know where the boundaries begin and where they end. But these same boundaries also have limits in that they can keep us locked in and other things of equal importance locked out.

The limitation of orthodoxy is that it asks little of us As Richard Rohr points out ”information is not the same as transformation”.It is good, right and proper to have a workable belief system but belief systems do not change people. Some of the most rigid and inflexible people are, sadly, Christians who have a perfect orthodoxy. They subscribe and defend the idea that “believing all the right things” is mandatory-and of course this is true-yet remain unchangeable. Of course this is not unique to Christianity but to all religions.

Sometimes the church seems a little too concerned with teaching creating the impression that this is the only thing that matters. In placing too much emphasis on teaching the implication is this; if we believe the right things it will lead to the right outcomes.

This may have its origins in modernity in that believing in Jesus became the only means by which we could go to heaven and going to heaven seemed to be the only thing that mattered. In those heady days of the Billy Graham style of preaching salvation was, all, about getting your “life right with God” and then being safe in the knowledge that “going to heaven when I die” would be a certainty, with that all sorted one could get on with his or her life. Brian Mclaren called this view of salvation as ”an evacuation plan for the next life”.

In his book  The Scandal of an Evangelical Conscience  Ron Sider writes about the failure of evangelical christianity in that it seemed to be all about  ”belief systems”. Sider says that we do not change as people because of what we believe, yet, this is implied. It’s a rather sobering reminder that the Hebrew text speaks about the orthodoxy of Satan! in that he believes all the right things this alone is some cause for consideration.

Many of us are more than a little disturbed when we find people outside the Christian faith who feel just as much found or even saved as we do, we then dismiss this as being totally improbable or even impossible and then we put our hands over our ears and sing as loud as we can ” I don’t want to hear this…la la la”. The implication being ” if they are right I must be bloody wrong”

Christianity is the only way! In saying this we are stating categorically that any other way is, no way at all.

We may not like or even agree that God is above and even beyond the confines of christianity we may believe that those who claim to have been saved or found can only be christian. What can be said is that when you are lost you know it and when you have been found you also know it. To suggest that you have not been saved or found because the lifeguard or search and rescue party were not from the only authorized source is to have missed the point.

Imagine a lifesaver being told that he could, only, rescue those within the limitations of the red flags and that the ocean, which is greater by far, was out-of-bounds. You cannot, pretend, to be saved or found knowing it is above that.

The question is simple, have you been found? not was it by the, right, authorised source?

“I no longer call myself Christian” this was part of a long text message I sent to a good friend recently. It’s not that I have no desire to be Christlike but that I find it increasingly difficult to identify with Christianity-at least the way it has been defined. I’ve found it necessary to distance myself from that western phenomena called Christianity because it no longer defines what or who I am or where I am going.

The pursuit of truth is not abstract it must be more than words on paper, no matter how good those words are, it’s not about believing all the “right things” – which seems to define so much of christianity in the west. It must be more than holding tight to certain biblical truths, even though this might be important. If your religion doesn’t lead you to your true self if it doesn’t call you towards the only journey that matters, the inward  journey, where you find the only thing of true worth, your authentic self, something is seriously amiss. True, it may not be the fault of religion, perse, but it might mean finding a path that helps you or leads you in that direction and if you find that christianity is not the way courage is needed. It’s hard to identify the right path when your present, frame of reference, describes a way you can no longer identity with its even harder when the language seems to have little or no bearing with the direction that you are going.My text message finished with these words “I’m willing to admit that I could be making a very foolish decision, re: Christianity, but its one I simply must make and strangely it feels life-giving”

If I had to define, now, what it means for me to BE christian, as opposed to CALLING myself Christian, it would be the following reflection by Richard Rohr;

The Christian life is a matter of becoming who we already are, and all that we truly are! Can you imagine that? Is the seed already within you—of all that God wants you to be? Do you already know at some level who you authentically are? Are you willing to pay the price? Even the mistrust of others? Could that be what we mean by having a unique “soul”? Most saints thus described the path as much more unlearning than learning. There are so many illusions and lies that we must all unlearn. And one of the last illusions to die is that we are that different or that separate, and finally we are all one and amazingly the same. Differentiation seems to precede union and communion, for some strange reason.

What if God had asked many Mary’s! maybe 20 or 30 or, God forbid, hundreds?? each time he moves on not in judgment but in grace and mercy.

The great miracle before “that miracle” is that God found, someone, who said YES!! . And of course we have completely dismissed such a possibility, in that we have created a picture of a women who is so holy and so pure as to be completely untouchable and unreachable therefore making any other picture near impossible to imagine.

It’s that “time of year” yet again. I continue to struggle with this, Christian event, not just because it’s become consumerist in its meaning but for other, more, sobering reasons.

We go through the birth narrative each and every year and, for many, it has become a tired even worn-out story. Not so much because it is not true-although elements of it are open for debate- but because of the way the story is told. It’s become a little to patronising a little to syrup-ey. In this day and age its a story that has all the hallmarks of an Aesop fable it asks, the average person, to believe what is not only improbable- in our the world we live in- but also impossible. It’s a little to cute and other-worldly and if taken literally, as we demand that others should, could almost be embarrassing.

When I think about the birth narrative I think about a story within a story. I think about Mary.

What if we look at the story from another angle? What if Mary had said….NO!!

The story has become so over-spiritualized that it has become almost untouchable. How could we see it any other light, when we create a God who, our theology teaches us, never makes mistakes and never, ever takes any risks. If the outcomes are wrong, we are always the ones to blame, because our Western definition of God is a flawed definition indeed- God simply cannot make mistakes.

Mary could so easily have made this a ”worthiness contest” as so many catholic and protestant Christians do. She could have said No! I can’t, I’m not worthy enough or holy enough or pure enough, I don’t have the victory yet and I don’t FEEL spiritual enough“

The great miracle is in the beginning of the story. Mary said…YES!

What ever we mean when we say salvation it must, at some point, come down to this; me saying YES! to God’s YES.

Now the concordance has its place and used correctly can be a most valuable asset.

I have observed something at work in my life In that I have a strong propensity towards biases in fact my own biases influence almost everything I do and say. I have a book in front of me The Journey of Life- finding your true self some people will not read this book because the words true self are on the front cover, now if we judge a whole book based on just two words what happens when we read chapters even whole books of the Bible.

As Richard Rohr points out there are nine levels in which we can understand things and we all find ourselves on one of those levels and if I communicate something from the fourth level and it is interpreted by someone at the first level misunderstandings will prevail- all the time thinking that they have understood what it is I am communicating. One such example happened recently when I preached about the love of God. At no point during this talk did I make any reference to any wrath or anger or judgment yet afterwards- when speaking with a women- she felt condemned and judged.

All to often the concordance has been used as a way of  ending and not opening conversation and all to often, due to our own “internal buffers” we cannot conceive of ourselves being “biased” that happens with those other people, in particular those non-christian people.

In the cold light of day I now see that and I went looking for verses to support my biases but at the time I called them beliefs.

In the seventies and early eighties I remember seeing that bumper sticker God said it, I believe it, that settles it  looking back now I think it should have read I believe it, and God says it, that ends it of course it was always purely good fortune that God happened to “see things” the same way as I did.

Those of us who drive cars don’t see the car as being “us” we only drive it, it’s not who we are, yet we do this in so many other areas of our lives. What we do for a living, where we live, the people we mix with, the church we attend, the clothes we wear, where we were born, etc, go into creating our identity. In his book, ” The Journey Home” Simon Parke says; “The parent sits down to watch the school play their child is performing and they have made the costume themselves. They sit in the audience and watch. They are restless for the appearance of their child. They are some way into the performance and still no sign. They begin to get irritated by other performers hogging the stage. They want their own child to shine.

They are restless now, not noticing very much at all. Certainly they do not notice the child in tears, who missed his cue and came in late. They have eyes only for their child, in the costume they made!

The virtuous parent identifies with their child. What could be more natural? But such attachment is unwise. Attachments make us blind. Identifying colours our perceptions. We become blind people who notice nothing and enjoy nothing. We become the plaything of our ego.

Attachment is unhelpful, unhealthy and often dangerous, as Parke points out it makes us blind to everything else. Where do we begin? and how do we begin? it seems we have a un-natural propensity towards attachments of all kinds even God. The greatest thing we can do for ourselves is not add this to our, already, long list of things that must be done. We can begin to observe ourselves but not in judgment or anger or frustration but with gentleness and compassion. What is not observed cannot be seen, what is not seen cannot be brought into the light. When we bring these things, gently, into the light they slowly lose their power.

The ego finds its strength through the lack of any observation it can only survive and thrive through ignorance and blindness to the same extent that we are ignorant of our ego’s to this same level is its dominance. Little wonder that Jesus said Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. He was speaking the truth they had NO idea, they were blind to their own attachments.

We may subscribe to all manner of theological truth- at an intellectual level-if this does not resonate as being true-no matter how WELL we try to conceal it-this is the REAL message that we communicate.

I came to the conclusion that “God-loving me” was 2 tiered. If I NEVER became a Christian this “God-loving me” produced a distant, disappointed God who stood on the sidelines saying  “Oh! well things could have been so different” it’s almost as if God was waiting for me to change- become a Christian- before his REAL love could come into play. I now see that this is entirely untrue. Even though a message of ”unconditional love” was preached what was, really, communicated was very much the opposite. God loves you, no MATTER what you do or don’t do.The following reflection, from Following the Mystics through the narrow Gate captures this much better than I ever can;

“God always entices us through love. Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. If the mystics say that one way, they say it a thousand ways. But because most of our common religion has not been at the mystical level, we’ve been given an inferior message—that God loves me when I change (moralism).

What that does is put it back on you. You’re back to “navel-gazing,” and you never succeed at that level. You are never holy enough, pure enough, refined enough, or loving enough. Whereas, when you fall into God’s mercy, when you fall into God’s great generosity, you find, seemingly from nowhere, this capacity to change. No one is more surprised than you are. You know it is a gift”.