I’ve been reading Philip Yancey’s book “Where The Light Fell”. In it Yancey quotes GK Chesterton: "The worst moment for the atheist is when they feel a profound sense of gratitude and have no one to thank.”
I love this quote because it helps me understand a "good" religion’s grand purpose: to point to something or someone “greater than”. Unfortunately and too often religion has fallen so short of this goal. We have been guilty of small mindedness; of shrinking down God’s grand design into something we can champion so that we can control and use it for our gain.
Truly great religion, religion at its best, does the opposite…it draws everything and everyone to a “something or someone bigger ”.
I was talking about this with our Minister of Music and Worship Arts, Will Rand, and he shared with me that he remembered a time when he thought music was God. Music was the one thing that rose above all else, it was that “something greater”. But then he met Jorge Lockwood (Jorge is co-founder and conductor-in-residence of Cántico Nuevo (New Song), a worship and arts ecumenical project in New York City). Will remembers a workshop Jorge gave where he shared some of the ways music has been used to bring more hatred into the world. How music has been used in wartime to help ramp up a nationalistic fervor that created genocide in Germany during WW 2. And it was then that Will realized there had to be something greater than music…a something or someone “bigger” that draws us and gifts like music into a process that makes all of us rise into something better than what we were and are. In the end, that is a “good" religion’s and "good" music's ultimate goal!
I thank Will and Jorge for that incredible insight!
We need something greater to strive for! And we are at our best when we are both humbled by that “greater something or someone”, and drawn towards a greater purpose.
Our country, for instance, is at its best when we are striving to uphold all the greater principals of democracy, and not when we blindly uphold a parochial nationalism that’s all about us vs. them. Christianity is at its best when we realize that we are not the answer factory spewing out what is right or wrong, but instead seeking out the right questions that might draw us into something greater!
And the key to all this? Good religion has to have, built into it, a good measure of humility! It must, at all times, have respect for “the something or someone greater”...what I call "God, as our creator". To put it in the language of Christianity, we must have, at all times, a good understanding of our “creatureliness”. We are not the creator, but one of the created!
Folks, this proper relationship is vital to our survival as a human race! We don’t do well when we trick ourselves into believing that we are “the greater”! There is a certain measure of humility that all of us need in order to thrive! To let that someone or something greater draw us up into becoming something more than who we are right now…that is honestly one of the greatest things we can ever do.
So this Thanksgiving don’t just eat turkey…take time to bow before our good, benevolent God and give humble, honest thanks! I truly believe it is in that posture that we are at our best!
Your friend and pastor, so humbly grateful for each of you, Brook
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