The Post Christian Era - The Kingdom of God

I am convinced that we are on the crest of, and in fact some of us are already living in, a Post-Christian era. Count me in on that. I don't see it as a bad thing at all, and we need to get the rest of the responsible Christian world to see the truth in that. The biggest part of the reason we need to move beyond Christianity is that the institution has perverted the diversity that existed in early Christianity into something so narrow that I don't think Jesus would even recognize it. You see, Jesus never talked about salvation - despite the fact that the great majority of Christians today believe their religion is all about. What he did talk about was the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, interchangeable terms, neither of which have anything to do with what we today call salvation, an both of which start right here and now.

The Kingdom of God means that the day when we can afford, as a world community, to allow institutions to control our thoughts is long past. The day when any responsible human being is well served by being spoon fed doctrine and dogma - political or religious - is long past. The day when any responsible human being can sit by in quiet, uncritical assent when someone tells them they must do something they know is wrong because it is "the will of God" is also long past. Ditto with the day when any person with more than a borderline IQ is willing to believe that any single system of belief could possibly not only hold ALL the truth about God but also be the only system of belief that does so. Is there really any thinking person who cannot see that religions, while no doubt inspired by God, are creations of humankind?

Of course, if any fundamentalists should read this they will by now have logged off in an angry huff - and I am absolutely fine with that. In fact, it's better that way, because anyone who still buys into a fundamentalist brand of any faith isn't ready to think for themselves anyway. They are the people who still believe that everyone else is going to hell, that God wants us to kill people of other faiths, that God wrote their particular holy book, that the Homeland Security Administration is a good thing, and a host of other nonsense that they have been spoon fed and swallowed whole because they are either too stupid, too lazy, or too irresponsible (or some combination of those three) to critically examine this issues.

Why am I officially identifying as Post-Christian? I do so because the God I find in the Hebrew scriptures assigned responsibility for the created order to humankind. The Kingdom of God requires that we take that responsibility seriously. When I look all around me I see governments and multi-national corporations hell bent on destroying that creation through pollution, governmental failure to regulate business and the financial industry, and the multi-national military industrial complex's constant effort to blow the creation to bits. What I don't see is a Christian body making a serious attempt to speak out about this for fear of irritating their major contributors - who, by the way, work for the same aforementioned financial, corporate and military industrial complexes. Christianity isn't alone in its tendency to play act in response to serious moral problems, but since it is the tradition in which I was raised it is the one about which I can speak with the most authority.

I am Post-Christian because I see every last Christian denomination standing by in silence as the American government propagandizes the American public into believing that "our American way of life" is in danger (we should be so lucky) and that we have to kill innocent human beings and engage in imperialist conquest to preserve our idolatrous way of life. It's idolatrous because we have so strayed from the teachings of Jesus that what we really worship is wealth and materialism, and we don't give a damn aqbout who we have to run over to get it. If I am involved in any way of life that requires the death of anyone to preserve it, then it's not worth preserving. The tragedy if it all is that our "way of life" doesn't require any of this nonsense, and the Kingdom of God actually prohibits it.

I am Post-Christian because I see every Christian denomination failing to speak out against a government that has more than enough money to fight a fictitious "war on terrorism" on two fronts but can't seem to find a way to fund health care for every citizen and education for every child. That's called greed, and it's a sin, and while individuals within denominations speak out against it the powers that be within Christianity remain mute. Why? I can only assume because they don't believe in the God they say they do and that they are just as greedy as everybody else. If we really wanted to end terrorism, we would feed the world and ask nothing in return - and it would be cheaper than war. The Kingdom of God is a place where hunger, disease, lack of health care, and war are unacceptable - no mater the cost.

I'm Post-Christian because I no longer find the energy necessary to explain to people that the religious right does not speak for every Christian, that it does not follow the teachings of Jesus, and that the last thing it wants is the Kingdom of God. I also can no longer pretend to believe that I believe that any one religion has God in a corner, has exclusive or exhaustive possession of God, or that God gives the tiniest little damn about which religion anybody belongs to. Nor do I believe that staking out positions and then setting out to defend them does anything to bring about the kingdom of God.

Institutional Christianity is not a little bit like the Titanic. They run around rearranging deck chairs and ignoring the gaping hole in the side of Christianity. Attendance at worship continues to decrease overall, and yet every Sunday the organ or the worship band play the prelude and the show goes on. Those of us in leadership positions, if we're honest, can't really come up with an adequate reason to explain why we worship. Only those who believe in a very small god indeed believe that we do so to appease an angry god or an ego maniac god. We used to say that we worship because human beings need to, but clearly that isn't the case for everyone.

What we do need to to build community, and build it quickly. We need to grow spiritually, and that means we need to engage in prayer, contemplative and meditative, so that we might transform our hearts and our minds to be open to the leading of the Spirit. We need to grow in Wisdom and Communion with God, and we need to find new forms to do so. We need to get back in touch with the breadth and the depth of what Jesus taught. We need to talk about the things of this life - love and relationships of all kinds; illness, loss, and death; about working for peace and an end to all violence; about ending poverty and hunger; and most of all we need to abandon the false notion that anything about spirituality doesn't apply to life right here and right now. To be sure, spirituality does speak to us about what happens after we die - but it also, and much more importantly, speaks to us about life.

You can just call me a follower of Jesus. If you must call me Christian, be sure you put a Post- in front of it.