How easy we make our own God!

It has always been an article of faith for me that God is most present in the things that are opposite of what I think.  Because I believe that we have an incredible ability to make God into our own image. That we tend to claim God's actions in the things that happen as we hope they would, and to ignore the things that do not go as we would like them to.

There are lots of examples of this creating God in our own likeness. There is the prosperity Gospel where God is made into a large Warren Buffet who wants everybody to be rich and happy. There is that false assumption as well that riches make you happy.  There is the political God who is a great American patriot.  There is the nice liberal God who wants to have everybody get along with everybody and does not seem to have anything that constitutes sin.

So those things that go against what I think, what I want, what I think God would be doing, suggest to me the presence of another force, another power, another personality who has another agenda.  It is what happens when I read the Old Testament and see there a God who is much more violent, much more partisan, much more righteous than a God I would like to see.  Who wants to try to be friends with a God who expects his Servant king to slaughter whole towns?

There are those who want to claim that the New Testament and Jesus makes that Old Testament God obsolete. But still the New Testament God is a God who expects his son to be willing to die. The New Testament God is God who makes his own son suffer on the Cross and does nothing to help him.
It is very enlightening when we start to look at the God who is our opponent first, the one who moves against us, the one who puts up road blocks first as the nature and personality of God.  It would certainly result in a whole different direction in faith for a lot of us.

She asked me.

The Charlotte Judge had just voided the state amendment one that had banned same sex marriages and defined marriage rights as limited to heterosexual couples. We were at the start of a Session meeting, and right out of blue the woman asked me in a loud voice, "What do you think of the Judges action in overturning the same sex ban?"

My first reaction was to wonder why she had asked me that so loud in the session meeting. We could have discussed this quietly after the meeting.  This is a small rural county and this is a small rural church which has been very kind and affirming to me, and so I was not sure where they might be on this issue.

But I do have an opinion on that subject and so I took a deep breath and said, "For me this has always been a human rights issue. Do we give all people the same legal rights of society?  It seems to me that we do not consider the sinfulness of the human being as a matter in granting most rights.  We allow sinful adulterers to marry. We allow sinful greedy people to marry. We allow sinful gluttons to marry. We allow sinful robbers to marry.  Why should the sinful of homosexuals be a reason for not allowing them to marry? (I am not one of those who believes the homosexuality is a sin, but I prefer to argue on the rights issue rather than morality.)

Why should heterosexual couples be allowing to have family insurance and homosexual partners not be able to cover their partner in company offered insurance?  Why should heterosexual partners be able to visit in ICU's and homosexual partners not be welcomed?  Why should partners who die without will not be afforded the same division of property that is given to others?  There are so many legal benefits that heterosexual married couples get, that homosexual couple are not permitted to get because they are not permitted to be joined by the state law in marriage.  Remember marriage ceremonies may be two parts: one is religious blessings and the other is a state contract.  Marriages by the Justice of the Peace is simply a state contract and has no religious blessing upon it at all.

The woman and the others around the table nodded and agreed and seemed to find that my answer matched their thinking as well. I thought to myself I had been a little guilty of not expecting the best from other Christians.

Side Bar:
Pat Robertson has been quoted as saying that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was the sin of homosexuality.  As I read the story it is the sin of violation of hospitality.  The people want to have sex with the stranger who is under the protection of Lot.  They wanted to violate the code of hospitality. The fact that Lot would offer his daughters shows how precious Lot thought the need to protect his company.  The story says that the guests were "angels" which does not give their sex. The city folks do call them men and do say that they want to have sex with them, but the great evil that was being contemplated was the violation of the code of hospitality.