Sunday, August 25, 2024
Sunday Reflection: What you must believe
When I was younger, I encountered a lot of people eager to tell me "what Christians believe." Universally, they were explaining what their own relatively small group of Christians believed, of course, and some of the beliefs were oddly specific. Sometimes it included positions on things Jesus never addressed (ie, abortion) while ignoring those he did (ie, how we treat the poor).
In a way, a lot our belief systems are kind of like an AI generated image: Based on some real and important documents, filtered through a muddle of interpretation, and then blended with awkward contemporary settings and ideas. [ie, "Jesus teaches in the desert," above, where the desert looks pretty realistic except for the monkeys, but Jesus is dressed as a youth pastor and the followers include a game-ready football player, and I can't explain the orange ball]
If we are to be honest, Christians aren't connected by beliefs so much as they are by common questions and a general sense that the answers are related to Jesus.
The big breaking point-- that is, the difference between people I feel I share a common bond of faith with and those I don't-- really has to do with just two things. The first is that there is a God, and it isn't ourselves. People who are there share a common humility, in that there is something greater than us; a lot opens up from that simple belief, including the bare fact that there is much we will never understand, because we are not God. The second is that Jesus's teachings contain great truths. It doesn't matter to me so much if someone believes this or that about Jesus's status, but that they really care about what he taught-- because if they do, we can have a great conversation with this deep well of complications in common.
