Service Wrap-up and Some Questions (10-21-12)

After such a great turnout at the Gala on Friday, I'm not surprised that we had a slightly smaller group on Sunday. Small but good! So here's my summary of our Sunday morning discussions:

We went over the Calendar. If you haven't check it yet, please look at the sidebar on the left.

We had our 5 minutes of God time: Glorious Day by Casting Crowns

We discussed our service projects and relative timing:

• Emma and Jessica are planning to have us bake cookies and take them, while caroling, to our shut-ins (in December)
• Olivia and Ali are planning to have us write letters to church members as part of an ongoing project
• Ana and RJ are planning to have us help with the river cleanup in April
• Kiley and Kaitlin are planning to have us help out at an animal rescue in May
• Jo, Jacob, Rob, and Owen are planning a combo pie bake sale/pie-ing project

If you haven't gotten me your plans yet, you should have the basics figured out by this next Sunday. You don't have to have it perfected, but you do need to have an idea and have discussed it with your partner. I'll be emailing each pair to help them think through their specifics.

THEN we finally moved on to our next unit- Basic Questions/Sharing the Faith. And yet again, I have to laugh. I was all prepared to talk about the questions that I got from you over this last week, and then we had different (but really good!) questions that we covered instead. So. What did we talk about in those ten minutes? There were two separate questions: Can you be Christian and another religion? And can you be Christian and meditate?

So can you combine religions? First, let's look at what Christian scripture says about it (though I bet you can guess what the answer will be!). 1 Kings 11 talks about Solomon's many, many wives leading him to combine his devotion to God with other religions of his day. Predictably, God was angry and promised ruin to his kingdom. And Jeremiah 7:21-23 explains God's disgust when worship of Him is combined with worship of another. 1 Corinthians 10:19-22 talks about idol worship alongside Christianity as being worthless to God and harmful to the worshipper. Galatians 1:6-9 puts it yet another (negative) way. And that's just a sampling. To put it succintly, God hates syncretism (which is the fancy word for combining religious faiths).

But why? Well, one reason is probably that cherry-picking your faith denies you the chance to work through the challenges of a faith tradition. Christianity absolutely has some challenging passages to work through- no question about that. But if you ignore them and try to find your answer elsewhere, you're missing out on the inner growth that happens when you stubbornly pick apart a scripture or tradition you disagree with. You're denying God the chance to give you the true answer to your questions (or at the very least, delaying it), and you end up skittering around the surface of multiple religions, rather than having any sort of root to rely on when life once again challenges your understandings. You end up being the proverbial carpenter who built his/her house on the sand- many little grains of religions- and watched it wash away in the storm because of the lack of solid foundation.

But what if you're not satisfied with that explanation?  Our culture loves to tell us that each person has to find their individual truth, and therefore you can and should shop around. But as much as that's a nice sentiment, that's not really what religion does. Each major religion gives its followers a basic frame for understanding the world and their purpose within it. It explains how the world was created, who created it, what the main goal in life is, and what happens after death. For example, Christians believe the world was created by a good and just God, and we seek salvation for our shortcomings through Jesus; if we accept the proffered salvation, our wonderful afterlife is in Heaven. Buddhists, on the other hand, don't want salvation of the soul, since they don't believe in an afterlife or heaven. To them, there is no God, and so God did not create the world (or heaven). Their goal is to achieve nirvana through their own works and understandings, and nirvana/enlightenment can occur while normal life continues. And Hindus believe that everything is continually reincarnated, not only mortals, but their gods and divine realms, too; their end goal is to get out of the system entirely, to cease to exist in any format.

Those are some pretty big differences in belief structure! So to believe that you can combine religions is to more or less disregard the integrity of those religions. In reality, to say that you're a Christian Buddhist probably means that you see some good in both religions, rather than being a follower of both (and let's be honest, there is at least something good in every religion, even though that doesn't make the religion true). And most of the things I've heard Christians love about a different religion is something that's also found within Christianity- it's just that they may not have uncovered it yet. Or they might secretly feel that Christianity is boring and standard and they want to have a more eclectic, sophisticated mix of theology- which really means that they're not looking for truth as much as they're looking at the image they present to others.

So- short answer? No, you can't combine religions. It's not good for you, God doesn't like it, and different religions have different, non-interchangeable goals.


Now, to the second question (Can Christians meditate?) I answered "Yes, with conditions," though some Christians would not agree. We discussed a bit about the labyrinth (see the previous post), and how some Christians believe that if a practice is not listed exactly as such in the bible, it is inappropriate and even evil for Christians to use non-Christian practices. But then we come to meditation, which DOES have some Christian basis (though the term primarily comes up in the Old Testament, rather than the new). Many a scripture talks about meditating on the glory/works/greatness of God, and others talk about meditating on a specific problem or action.

 Just as in many other practices, what makes it right or not right depends on your intention while doing it. If you're meditating to achieve divine transcendence and entrance into Nirvana, then no, that's not compatible with Christianity- that's Buddhism. But if you view your meditation as a stilling of your thoughts and emotions so you can better listen for God, or as silently thinking over God's greatness, then yes! We are called to that as Christians. Quiet prayer is a two-way street, not just us talking at God. We have to listen, too. And just in any other conversation, you have to allow for some blanks between utterances. Without spaces/pauses, thissentencewouldbemuchhardertounderstand. Same thing with our lives. Medititation as prayer is perfectly acceptable. Meditation as a method of achieving nirvana or aligning your chakras? Not so much.

So.... day one of "the questions" is complete. Stay tuned for more, after our weekly break!