“You’re going to be tempted many times to count the cost of love and ask yourself whether or not you’re getting your fair share of the pie. The biggest threat to marriage is the desire for fairness. The whole idea of fairness is nonsense; get over it before you stand in front of the altar or you’re through before you start. Give as much as you can and don’t keep score.”

These were words that a friend’s father spoke to him shortly before his wedding. Not only are they observations from a good marriage, they are observations from the heart of life. We hear and talk a lot about fairness but everyone who thinks deeply about life knows that fairness has little to do with anything. It’s not fair that we’re conceived; it’s not fair that we survive to adulthood; it’s not fair that people love us; it’s not fair that we die.

The key to life is justice as scripture uses the word: the will of God for creation. The quest for justice is the effort to treat all of creation – especially human beings – as God wants it treated. Jesus is our model for just living. Often the Hebrew Scriptures offer models of justice but not consistently.

The tale of Abraham cajoling God into sparing an entire city for the sake of a handful of righteous people is a great story. It has humor that we rarely associate with the absolute rule of Abraham’s God but it gives a hint of the justice that Jesus will reveal centuries later. God’s love is never fair; it’s absolute and forever. It’s the kind of love that we would like to give others if we could only conquer our fears and insecurities. It’s the love we pray to imitate.

“Always be nice to a stranger and help him if he needs you because he may be Jesus in disguise,” my grandmother used to say. Her thinking seems quaint now. We bridle at the image of God sneaking around to trap us. Still, there’s an important truth hidden in my grandmother’s caution.

In our search for God, we’re chasing a mirage if we think that we can touch him directly. We find him in the people and world He is creating. Behind my grandmother’s prudence (and that of countless other grandmothers) lies the awareness that life, and indeed, all reality, is a web of interdependent being. Mistreat one part of the web and I mistreat the entire web – including the part that I am. God’s life is found in the web he creates even more than a parent’s life is found in the child he gives life or an artist’s in her painting or music.

In many, if not most, places around us folks generally agree with such a thought. If you ask them how often they consider the welfare of the whole web of life when they make their daily decisions, however, or how much they reflect on that web when they’re looking for an experience of God or check the needs of that web when they’re seeking God’s will for them, the answer is typically, “Rarely.”

Most of us are comfortable with the part of Jesus’ great commandment that tells us to love God above all things. We have a much harder time dealing with the part that tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. That, of course, is the more difficult one because it’s measurable and, so, subject to evaluation. Then again, it’s the one where change for the better occurs – the one that demonstrates that we’ve actually come to love the Creator.

“Religion is really a very simple thing,” a fellow once told me. “Everyone knows what’s right. They just have to do it.”

Except for reducing religion to morality, my friend’s comment is hard to disagree with – on the one hand, that is. As usual, the trouble lies on the other hand. Generally, the hard part of acting justly or ethically lies not in knowing what to do but in having the courage and strength to do it.

Acknowledging that mind-achingly difficult situations certainly arise, day-to-day morality is generally not intellectually crippling.

What can be and often is crippling is the fear that accompanies making what we know is the best moral decision. What’ll it going cost me; what’s the downside? What kind of acceptance will my decision find among my peers? Will my effort to act justly make any difference in the long run?

That brings us back to the above speaker’s assertion about religion’s simplicity. Religion isn’t first and foremost about morality; it is about how we view life: its meaning and its potential. An a-theist believes that there is no knowing, caring source of creation. Creation is radically pointless – it just happens – and human beings, as part of creation, are radically pointless. A theist, on the other hand, believes that there is a knowing, caring Being creating all reality. As a result, all reality, humans included, are known and cared for. Our existence is not pointless, our dreams not futile. Over time, the view of life we choose directs our actions.

My friend was correct when he declared that religion is simple. Either we believe in a knowing, caring Creator or we don’t. When we look at the universe and ourselves, we either see promise and love as the most powerful forces or we see love and promise as illusions we create to assuage our fear of nothingness as ultimate destiny.

Can we prove either position? I don’t know how. It’s choice: a simple choice; a choice made new each day – a choice that determines every other possibility.

“I’m taking my son out of his classroom,” the young mother told me, “his teacher is so negative. She constantly tells the kids what they do wrong but rarely what they do well. My son says that her favorite phrase is, ‘You’re not getting this.’ There’s no encouragement. I’ve talked to several other mothers who are having the same experience. We’re all having our kids switched to another teacher.”

Whatever the whole story was, that mom had every reason to be concerned if she sensed a lack of hope in her son’s school setting. Life is difficult enough, even in the fourth grade, without someone giving the impression that we can’t succeed.

Too often the image of a prophet is that of a person foretelling disaster, too often of a person offering only jeremiads accompanied by threats of disaster. Too many folks think that “speaking truth” means voicing how badly things are going.

Folks generally know exactly how bad things are. Fear of helplessness or of the cost of change keeps them from acknowledging and trying to resolve problems. There are always a few people who thrive on bad situations and maintain and foster them when they can, but generally the foundation of a mess isn’t wickedness or even ignorance, it’s debilitating fear. Announcing that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket may feel like a bracing defiance of that evil but it’s like taking aspirin for a brain tumor. What’s needed is hope. The contribution of a prophet is hope.

It’s not necessary to have the right answer or the perfect solution to problems to offer hope but it is necessary to totally commit oneself to finding those answers and solutions together with the community. That hundred percent commitment is the language of our gospel.

The gospel of hope that Christians offer the world is not practical solutions to life’s problems. It is the experience of God’s promise that life’s potential will come to pass. We prove that not with doctrines and rituals but with putting ourselves on the line for our world – regardless of the cost.

As we grabbed a moment of peace and quiet in a local coffee shop, I asked a friend of mine why he had left the Church. His answer was interesting. “Once I was riding through town with a co-worker who drove through a school zone at the same speed that he had driven the rest of our trip. I mentioned that it was three o’clock. He responded that he had checked and that there weren’t any cops in sight. That’s why I left the Church: too many people watching for the cops instead of the kids.”

Another colleague once observed that the problem with most people isn’t that they aren’t religious enough, it’s that they aren’t human enough.

We Christians speak of faith as though it were frosting spread over life to make it sweet and beautiful – or at least tolerable. Maybe that comes from our view of revelation: we have the impression that God gives us faith directly from some heavenly sanctuary, by-passing the everyday of life. In reality, religion bubbles to the surface from deep within life. As we sense its presence, we ritualize it and speak of God as life’s source and promise.

Back to my friend in the coffee shop. Some folks accept the standard view of faith that our prayer pleases God and our sin offends God and that is the point of both. We miss that prayer makes us more appreciative of life’s beauty and more determined to transform its ugliness. We are not faithful for God, we are faithful to God for ourselves. That is indistinguishable from being faithful to creation and to life – to everyone’s life. The ability to live faithfully is God’s gift to us.

Living faithfully is no more about pleasing God than slowing down through a school zone is about avoiding a ticket. How can we not know that!

Many years ago a recent convert to the Church told me that joining up and receiving the sacraments had given him life-changing peace of mind. “How so,” I asked. “I had a lot of guilt over things I’d done,” he said, “but knowing that God forgives me has taken that away. I know that I’m right with God. My sins and failures are in the past.” We who have a strong sense of God can easily forget the people our failures harm.

On the one hand, we are right with God the instant we decide to cooperate with what God is doing. On the other hand, the harm we’ve caused others lingers long after we’ve had our change of heart. Sorrow and apologies – even sincere ones – leave actual injuries unaffected.

An individualistic notion of sin gives the impression that if God still loves us after our failures, all is well. The problem is that God is trying to give love and justice to everyone. If my actions or inactions have deprived someone of that love and justice, I’ve denied him or her God’s gift. God still loves me (truthfully, he never stopped) but I have thwarted the good God is trying to do and that it takes more than an act of contrition to redress the situation.

One danger of being part of a sacramental Church is that performing our rituals can give the impression that we’ve restored some cosmic balance. A hug and a kiss may reassure neglected, hungry children that we love them, but getting up and fixing supper is the only way to fill their stomachs.

There is something unsettling about the Prophet Nathan’s reassuring King David that he’s right with God after his acknowledgment of guilt for murdering Uriah. Uriah’s wife was still a widow. Uriah’s children were still orphans. David’s people would never trust him as they did before his treachery. Of course God loved David. But God loved Nathan’s widow too. There was a huge problem that cried out to be resolved. All was not right!

A story on the CNN website recently told of evangelical churches banding together to resist recent anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and to work against other states adopting similar laws. Cynics may say that such a move is designed purely to increase Hispanics’ likelihood of joining an evangelical church.

Cynics could also say that U.S. bishops’ activity to encourage immigration reform is designed purely to keep Hispanics Catholic. Both the evangelicals and the Catholic bishops maintain that their motivation arises from a biblically rooted concern for justice. It’s not unlikely that both groups have mixed motives.

In times of uncertainty folks are want to seek out purity – in motives, in beliefs, in commitment, in every aspect of life. We Catholics, as a whole and in our particular subgroups, aren’t feeling all that secure these days. Dip one’s toes in the water of Catholic opinion and it doesn’t take long before the heated rhetoric of purity begins to scald. Catholic liberals look askance at any social justice work of conservatives and Catholic conservatives cast similar glances at liberals expressing doubt that Vatican II was God’s final word on how the Church should work.

It irritates one’s irony-bone to hear a group of Catholics complain bitterly about liberals and conservatives in government refusing to cooperate on obviously good legislation. The same folks can be clueless about the anger of poor folks watching Catholic liturgy warriors squander ecclesiastical time and energy that could put food on their plates and roofs over their kids.

Genesis tells of Abraham, the Hebrew forefather, defending the Canaanite king Melchizedek against outside aggression after which Melchizedek called on his Canaanite gods to bless Abraham in gratitude. Everyone went home happy.

Was there complete agreement between the two men about how kingdoms should be run, about how land should be divided, about whose God was supreme? Not ever. But one king had been saved from defeat and another king had been blessed by a rival. Thousands of ordinary citizens slept more soundly that night. There were mixed motives lying everywhere that evening but peace had been strengthened.

When most of us learn about the Holy Trinity, our response is, Okay; if you say so. Many of us don’t move much past that. Numberless statements of popes, bishops and theologians not withstanding, the mathematics and internal makeup of God simply don’t grab our imaginations. It’s not that we’re impious; the language of a Trinitarian God simply appears too abstract to benefit our faith. That same language presents greater possibility, however, if we shift the focus from what it says about God in himself to what it says about how God relates to us.

God plays three distinct, essential roles in our lives:
God gives us existence;
God removes our fears of death;
God offers us a fulfilling future.

When God offers us a deeper understanding of himself, it’s for our sakes, not to heighten his stature. The understanding we’ve developed of the Holy Trinity – and it’s not that great – isn’t meant to astonish us with God’s complexity or mysteriousness, it’s intended to point out how reliably God is committed to human life, how totally intertwined he is in every aspect of who we are and who we will become.

We can’t hope to imagine God who is totally different from any being we’ve ever encountered. The best statements we can make about God must begin God is kind of like . . . .

On the other hand, Jesus revealed everything we can and need to know about our Creator. God isn’t out there somewhere. God is intimately involved with our every breath and more committed to our welfare than we are. This is the point the language of Trinity tries to make.

Religious authoritarianism (an abuse of authority) makes it difficult to remember that a doctrine isn’t a test of our obedience or a medal of allegiance. It’s the best understanding of life and God that we’ve developed couched in the most adequate terms we know. Doctrines are not perfect. Nonetheless, we miss valuable aids to living if we refuse to pray over them and subject them to our best intelligence. Take the Trinity for example.

I was three when my younger brother was born. For three years I’d been my mother’s, grandmother’s and aunt’s special little boy. Then one day I walked into the bedroom where my mother slept beside my brother’s crib and heard her call him her special little boy. I was about to learn some life-changing lessons.

Religious people sometimes have a difficult time with the idea that, though they’re special to God, they’re no more special than members of any other religion – or people with no religion. Like children they’re afraid that if someone else is special, they aren’t. They feel the need to prove over and over that their religion is best and thus, they’re God’s favorites. Of course, the dark truth behind this exercise is the belief that the special ones have first claim on God’s attention and gifts with the right to commandeer them should that claim be questioned. The whole idea would be merely childish were it not for this veiled (or not so veiled) assumption.

A mother’s assurance: I love you all the same but each one in a different way is never emotionally satisfying to a child. At some level it boils down to who gets to sit on mom’s lap and who gets the first cookie. In the world of religion it’s who gets to claim God is on our side; God told us His mind and you must think as we think; God wants us in control, not you.

It was a dangerous thing for the bishops at the Second Vatican Council to acknowledge God’s Spirit at work in all religions and all people who try to make life better. They made it impossible for Catholics to back away from a conversation with other religions. We can not justify refusing to honor and learn from their experience of God.

Discovering others’ specialness is the beginning of a life-long journey to humility and community. It ends the illusion of control over one’s parent – or one’s God. It shines a light on the mystery of love – human and divine. It’s a painful, wonderful lesson that takes a lifetime.

John wrote his letter to the Christians in Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) to assure them of Jesus’ rescue from the hardships they were enduring under Rome’s emperors. Some of these folks faced social and economic ostracism; others, situations much more lethal.

Rome didn’t much care for Jews who insisted on a single God. Rome claimed divinity for its Caesars. Most Romans thought Jew’s refusal to burn a bit of incense before the emperor’s likeness quirky at best and, more likely, crazy. The risk for refusing such a petty tribute was too great. It was un-Roman, not to mention impractical, not to go along to get along.

Christians, seen by most as merely heretical Jews, were viewed as not only nuts like all Jews but trouble-makers as well since they caused tension, even open hostility, within the Jewish community. The empire simply couldn’t abide civil unrest in its provinces. It was bad for business; bad for Rome.

John encouraged his brother and sister Christians to stay faithful to Christ assuring them that Rome would end up on the ash heap of history while they would live in eternal glory.
All this sounds quaint two thousand years later. Rome is still around though it hardly bestrides the world in grandeur. America, for the moment anyway, is the big bestrider. And we Christians dominate her religious landscape. It’s been a long time since anyone had her business confiscated or was tossed to angry lions for following Jesus. When some of us were in college, there was a popular poster that read: If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to prosecute you? Is today’s world in such harmony with Christ’s Spirit that Christianity blends in smoothly? Has the Christian way gained such ascendance in modern life that no one dares bother those who travel it?

Are people simply too sophisticated today to harasses or persecute anybody thus allowing even Christians free rein to live as they choose?

What’s going on here? Why do we have it so cushy compared to those who began it all?