The Tension Between
Religion and Religion
That literary and journalistic paragon who has chosen to take the form of Bill Blundell and dwell among us, wrote with eloquence and controlled passion last month on the lessening of tensions between Science and Religion.  His positions were well reasoned and one came away full of hope that the Lion was about to lie down with the Lamb.  What Bill did not touch upon is who is the Lion and who is the Lamb.  Science has done a great many wonderful and terrible things; however, one senses that scientists as a class get along quite well and share through thick and thin.  Organized religion has done a great many wonderful and tragic things; there is little evidence that its practitioners as a class share much of anything.  We share within our denominations, but even there it gets a bit thick from time to time.  So let us examine the tensions between Religion and Religion.

    It has been said that the greatest impediment to peace in the world today is fundamentalist religion.  This immediately conjures images of Moslem zealots willing to blow themselves and a lot of other folks to smithereens in exchange for eternal bliss of some sort or other.  Do not stop there as this position contemplates the hindrance of all fundamental factions in all the great religions of the world.  We all have the right to believe as we wish, but the problem arises when a group directly or indirectly tries to impose its interpretation of belief and behavior on others.  The position in question applies to those who close their minds to change or reexamination, even in the face of empirical evidence that runs counter to their belief structure.

Though not immune to fundamentalist urges, the Episcopal Church is pretty much free of them because, in its best form, it requires question, reexamination and the application of reason as we shape our life in Christ.  As such, we often find ourselves in tension with those who require rules and penalties to order their life and to govern their salvation.  Jesus confronted his religious establishment and its rules.  He was killed for this opposition, but his church, as it has developed over the centuries, seems
 to have replaced those rules with a set of its own.  Is the Church therefore any better than the structure our Lord came to redeem?  Bishop John Shelby Spong, the man everyone loves to place on the fringe of Christian thought, wrote the book, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.”  This thesis is well worth our examination.  Bishop Spong gave an address in 1998 for a special occasion, but his words speak volumes on the subject chosen here.  The Bishop said at a memorial for Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming youth who was tied to a remote pasture fence on a cold winter evening and left to die because he was gay, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about love not hate, acceptance not rejection. It celebrates the essence of one's humanity. It calls people beyond the prejudices of tribe, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. It challenges those who have elevated their religious convictions to the realm of infallible or inerrant truth. But even more powerfully it calls those of us who claim to be disciples of this Christ to stand at the side of those our world would victimize, to counter the rhetoric of religious prejudice, to risk our lives for justice, and to do it quite publicly.”

“And to do it quite publicly.”   That is daunting challenge for the average, sit-in-the-back-of-the-church Episcopalian, but it may well be that we must do it or die.  My ministry is often to older people who ask the question about the church and Christian belief, “Why do we say and do all these things anymore?”  My answer is, “I don’t know, but lets keep looking for the answer until we no longer have the strength to carry on!”  It is overly simplistic and unrealistic to say the answer is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. . . .,” but come to think of it, that is the answer.

James “Noah” Wilson