more on transformation

Commenting recently on a blog talking about how the church restricts God, I wrote, "The way of Jesus is the way for us all... suffering, death, resurrection. The sad thing is that there are few who know how to get to that place. Our self righteousness prohibits us. We are taught to avoid suffering. "Suffering is bad." "Suffering hurts."

Then today in my email I get this taken from Richard Rohr's Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction:

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). Wow! If Jesus said this, he was surely not expecting the religion of niceness, of pretty words and feel-good experiences that we have become. He knew that Big Truth always divides before it can unite a few at a deeper level. I think most of the thousands of sermons I've heard in my life have been about “being nice” in one way or another. That's how domesticated the gospel has become--as if Jesus were a Divine Miss Manners, and the Church existed to maintain proper social order and class. Yet many are entirely content at that level, and Church has not usually been a passionate search for God. The word nice isn't found anywhere in the Bible, to my knowledge.

"There's nothing more dangerous to true religious thinking than conventional thinking, easy conformity, being like everybody else in our social group. There's no depth or power at that level. Mass consciousness is never going to be ready for anything that asks them to “die” or that does not make them feel secure and superior. So we have settled largely for civil religion and cultural Christianity. It's so much more comforting to be nice and “moral” at a small level--than to be faithful to Big Truth—which cuts us all open like a sword."

I'm not sure the church can restrict God, but I do think the church, for the most part, sees itself as responsible for "right relationship with God" by keeping moral codes and principles through discipline. This approach does not work. At least not from a heart level. Our self righteous ways will never put us in right standing with God. Performance and conformity are futile. We will eventually wear ourselves out trying to be good enough or by trying to attain some position or perform deeds that are pleasing to God. These actions eventually lead to suffering. Coming to the end of ourselves happens only when we have suffered enough. Then comes death. And, in due time, resurrection and re-creation.