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Week 2 Sunday

Week 2 Sunday

Why Are We Religious?

Matthew 5:48; Romans 8:19-23 (Weymouth)

There are a hundred and fifty or more various definitions of religion. One says it is “what we do with our solitariness”; another that it is “how we integrate ourselves socially”; another that “the root of religion is fear,” and so on.

The reason that it is so difficult to define is that life is difficult to define. When we define religion in terms of its various manifestations, we get partial, sometimes contradictory definitions. Religion, having many forms, has one root. That root is in the urge after life, fuller life. In everything, from the lowest cell clear up to the highest man, there is an urge toward completion, toward perfection; “all creation, gazing eagerly as if with outstretched neck”(Rom. 8:19 Weymouth). The religious urge is found in that urge for more complete life. It is that urge tuned toward higher, nobler ends. We feel that we cannot be complete unless this urge for life is fastened upon the highest life, God. Religion is the urge for life turned qualitative. It is not satisfied with life apart from quality. The urge for quantitative life reached its crest in the dinosaurs. That failed; it was a road with a dead end. The huge animals died. In human beings, the life urge turns from being merely big to being better. The qualitative and the moral emerge.

We are religious, then, because we cannot help it. We want to live in the highest, fullest sense, and that qualitative expression of life is called religion. So religion is not a cloak we can put on or off; it is identified with life itself. We are all incurably religious. Even the Communists, though repudiating religion, are deeply religious. They want a better social order. They may be right or wrong in the method of getting it, but the very desire for a better social order is religious. For religion is a cry for life.

O God, our Lord, who planted this urge for completion within us? Did you? Then, O my God, this urge is not in vain. You inspired it. You shall satisfy it with yourself. Amen.

Week 2 Monday

The Divine Initiative

John 1:1, 9, 12-13, 16-18

Yesterday we said we are religious because it is the qualitative expression of the life-urge. But this is only half the truth. This upward movement of the spirit of humanity would not of itself account for our religious spirit.

The other side of the truth is that we seem to be pressed upon from above. We do not merely aspire, we are inspired. We feel we are being invaded by the Higher. This pressure from above awakens us, makes us discontented with a divine discontent; makes us pray, sometimes with unwordable longings; makes us revolt, at least inwardly, against things as they are and against what we are. This is the divine initiative—the cosmic Lover wooing creation to God and thus to its own perfection.

Friedrich Von Hugel, the Catholic theologian, speaks of this double movement in religion as the going up of one lift and the coming down of another. Humanity moves toward God and God moves toward humanity. The Old Testament is the human search for God, the New Testament is God’s search for humanity. This is true in general but not entirely true, for there would have been no search for God in the Old Testament and in the various religions had not God inspired and initiated that search. So when people began to seek, they had in a sense already found God. God was in the very search for the Divine —its author and hence its finisher.

Impossible? Too good to be true? Not if we study the nature of life. Life not only wants more life but also wants to impart life. The creative urge is within it. God being the perfect life, would of the very necessities of the divine being, desire to impart, to share, to create. Hence the divine initiative. We are religious because we long and because God loves. God creates, we crave.

My Lord, if this be true, I am not far from you, for you are not far from me. Perhaps this very longing in my bosom is a scent of your being; there my heart grows eager, for I would find you. Amen.

Week 2 Tuesday

In Which Religion Is Defined for Us

John 1:14; 1 John 1:1-4

Yesterday we said that religion resulted from the double movement of our aspirations and God’s inspirations. God’s life impinges upon ours at every point. The result? Something disturbs our clod (our lump of clay); we aspire, we pray, we revolt against what we are.

The meeting place of this upward movement and this downward movement is Christ. He is humanity ascending and God descending—the Son of man, the Son of God. Since he is the meeting place of the two sides of religion, he becomes its definition. To the one hundred and fifty definitions we add one more: Christ. This is not a spelled-out, but a lived-out definition. Some things cannot be said, they have to be shown. So it has been shown us what constitutes religion: Christ’s spirit of life. His relationships with God and people, his purity, his love, his mastery over the environments of people and things, his care for the sinful and the underprivileged, his redemptive purposes for us and for society, his overleaping sympathy that wiped out all race and class and bound us into a community, his final willingness to take all our pain, all our defeat, all our sin into his own heart and die for them, and his offer to us of a new way and program of life—the kingdom of God on earth—all this and his sheer victory of spirit amid it all constitutes religion.

Never was there such a definition of religion as Christ gives in his own person. It cleans away all irrelevancies, all magic, all superstition, all controversies about rite and ceremony and superiorities and turns us to the serious business of learning how to live and to live victoriously. When people, therefore, ask me about this rite and that ceremony, this order, that church polity—all marginal—I simply say, I am not interested, for I have seen the Center. This grips me.

O God, we have seen what we ought to be, what we must be, if we are to live. Help us from this day to give ourselves to it with a whole-being devotion until it becomes actual within us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Week 2 Wednesday

The Central Emphasis in the Definition

Matthew 4:23; Luke 17:20-21; 21:27-28

There is one point in this definition of religion that needs emphasis: the kingdom of God on earth. We need to emphasize it, for Jesus did. It was the one thing around which all else revolved. “Jesus traveled throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues. He announced the good news of the kingdom” (Matt. 4:23 CEB). Just what was this kingdom?

In another book I said the kingdom of God is a new order founded on the Fatherly love of God—redemption, justice, and brotherhood, standing at the door of the lower order founded on greed, selfishness, exploitation, unbrotherliness. This higher order breaks into, cleanses, renews, and redeems the lower order, within both the individual will and the collective will.

This is true, but not the full truth. It is an offer from without. It is “at our door.” And yet it is within us—“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 Weymouth). This kingdom has been “prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34). Did Jesus mean that this kingdom has been built within the very foundations of the world and within the very structure of our own mental and moral makeup? Yes, I believe he meant just that. I grant that there is something beyond that—it is “at our doors”—and we shall see what that means later. But it does mean that the kingdom is written, not merely in sacred books, but in the very structure and makeup of the universe and of ourselves and of society. When we study the laws deeply embedded in the universe, in our own mental and moral and physical being, the laws that constitute true sociological living, we discover the laws of the kingdom. Mind you, not fully, but nevertheless, really and actually. This is important, for when we start with this business of victorious living, we are starting with the solid facts of the laws written within our own being, within the structure of society and the universe around us.

Our Lord, we are enveloped with you. Your laws are the laws of our being; your will has been wrought within the texture of things. Help us to discover your kingdom and obey it. Amen.

Week 2 Thursday

The Kingdom Written Within

Jeremiah 31:33; Romans 2:14-16; 2 Corinthians 3:1-8

We saw yesterday that we do not begin with something imposed on life when we are beginning with the kingdom, but with life itself—its laws and its ways of fulfillment.

The moral laws are deeply embedded in the constitution of things—we do not break them, we break ourselves upon them. For instance, many after World War I demanded freedom to do as they liked; they revolted against morality as man-made, they would express themselves as they desired. The result? That generation is sad and disillusioned. It stands abashed and dismayed. At what? At the fact that the thing will not work. “I had thought that faithful marriage was hell, but what have I been living in?” asked a dismayed and disillusioned young woman who had revolted. She found her revolt was not merely against moral codes, but against herself and her own happiness. She was breaking herself upon the laws of the kingdom.

What does the psychologist mean by saying, “To be frank and honest in all relations, but especially in relations with oneself, is the first law of mental hygiene”? Doesn’t that mean that the universe and you and I are built for truth, that the universe won’t back a lie, that all lies sooner or later break themselves upon the facts of things? Since the kingdom stands for absolute truth, and our own mental makeup demands the same thing, then are not the laws of the kingdom written within us?

Again, what does the psychologist mean by, “The right thing is always the healthy thing”? Conversely, one might say that the wrong thing is always the unhealthy thing, meaning thereby that we cannot be healthy, cannot function at our best unless we discover the right and obey it? Is it not true that sin is not only bad, but unhealthy and crippling? That the sinful are the diseased as well as the guilty? This sobers us.

O God, our Lord, the moral law written within makes us tremble like an aspen leaf. But are these laws redemptive? Are you saving us through hard refusals? Teach us. We listen. Amen.

Week 2 Friday

The Kingdom and Life

John 1:4; 11:25; 14:6; 17:3; 20:31

We said yesterday that life will not work in any way except God’s way. When we find the kingdom, we find ourselves.

Jesus said the same thing; he made the kingdom and life synonymous, “It’s better for you to enter into life crippled. . . . It’s better for you to enter God’s kingdom with one eye” (Mark 9:43, 47 CEB). Here he used the terms “God’s kingdom” and “life” interchangeably. To him they were one.

But life to Jesus had to be spelled with a capital “L” to express what he meant. True, it is this life and its laws within ourselves and the universe. But it is more. If that had been all, it would have been naturalism. Not that we thereby damn it when we call it naturalism, for nature, human and nonhuman, is God’s handiwork. But while God wrote the elemental laws of the kingdom within us, God did not stop there. The kingdom is “within us,” but it is also “at our doors.” Something from without is prepared to invade us, to change us, to complete us. When that happens, we too shall have to spell life with a capital “L.” For every fiber of our being will know that this is Life. The two charged electrodes of life, natural and supernatural, will meet; and when they touch, the white light of Life will result.

The kingdom, then, is life-plus. It is the grafting of a higher Life upon the stock of the lower. The stock will still be there; its roots are deep in the soil of the natural, but we will bud and bloom and fruit with new possibilities. The kingdom is the Ought-to-be standing over against the Is—challenging it, judging it, changing it, and offering it Life itself. It is at our doors. And we are the ones to decide whether we shall live life with a small “l” or a capital “L.”

O God, our Lord, we talk of the kingdom. But you are the kingdom. You are at our doors. We put our trembling fingers to the latch and let you in. And when you are in, we know that we have let in Life. Amen.

Week 2 Saturday

Are Religious People Unnatural and Strange?

1 Corinthians 1:21-31; 2:15

They sometimes are, and this makes many honest souls hesitant, for they do not want to be strange or impossible. Many people feel that religion tries to give human nature a bent that it won’t take, that is an imposition on life, something that makes us unnatural and out-of-joint.

A medical student expressed this fear to me when he asked, “Is religion natural?” He feared the unnatural. However, Tertullian, the third-century theologian, said that “the soul is naturally Christian.”

My own experience is that Tertullian was right. When I obey Christ, I feel naturalized, at home, universalized, adjusted. When I disobey him, I feel orphaned, estranged, out-of-joint with myself and the universe. I seem to be made for this man and his kingdom.

It is true that when we obey Christ we have to break with society in many things. That makes us seem strange and unnatural. But may it not be that society, at those points, is strange and unnatural? We call a man strange when he is eccentric—“off the center.” Isn’t society, insanely bent on its own destruction through its selfishness and its clashes and its lusts, eccentric and off the center? A great flywheel off its center shakes itself and the building to pieces. On the center it is a thing of construction and production. The center of life is Christ; when we are adjusted to him, life catches its rhythm, its harmony. When life revolves around something else, it is eccentric, and thus self-destructive and society­-destructive.

Was Christ strange? To the men of his day he was. We now see that his was the only sanity. He moves through those scenes, poised and masterful, at home in the huts of the poor and in the houses of the rich—the one sane one, to whom we must turn or lose our sanity and ourselves.

O God, our Lord, we have become so used to the insanities of life around us that we look on the sane as the insane. Give us clarity of mind and heart, that we may turn from the insanities of selfishness and greed to the sanities of your way. For we know that life will not work in any way save your way in Jesus’ name. Amen.