How To Become A Christian In America

Ex 28:31-35

“And thou shalt make the robe of the ephod all of blue…And beneath upon the hem
of it thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round
about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about: A golden bell
and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe
round about. And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall
be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he
cometh out, that he die not."

Aaron was instructed to tie little golden bells to the hem of his robe so that God would hear and not kill him when he was entering into the holy of holies, the sanctuary of God. This happened once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He wanted the high priest to make this very distinctive noise, so that God would know that it was him, and not a thief or robber.

People can have many reasons for seeking God, and not always the right ones. There are many religious people who are really only thieves and robbers. In our nation, many people are not so much seeking God, as they are seeking those monetary and material benefits they believe they have the right to ‘claim’ and demand from God. This type of seeking comes by many names: ‘name it and claim it’ theology, the prosperity gospel, positive confession. Whatever you want to call it, it has to some degree affected - and infected - just about every church in America. There are a great number of people in the church – perhaps even the vast majority – who are led and motivated by greed and a lust for material things, more than they are guided by faith. Or rather, their faith is really their faith that they can successfully deceive and manipulate God, rather than the sort of faith that comes from God, who gives faith to guide people who are earnestly seeking Him only for Himself.

Jesus said: Joh 10:1 “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” Those who come to God thinking they can manipulate and get what they want out of Him are exactly like thieves and robbers, and God knows who they are. They don’t make the right kind of sound – they are not worshipping, praying or seeking God in the right way, or from the right motives. They’re like people trying to enter into the holy of holies without the required bells attached to their garments, and they will die without ever finding eternal life.

Not that we aren’t all tempted by greed and our culture of materialism. None of us is innocent, and all of us are sinners. But there’s a difference between being tempted by money and material things, and giving in so completely to temptation, to the sickening point where even our faith is completely defined by our greed. People whose primary motive is to use God in order to become more wealthy, prosperous or successful in the world, are just like Satanists or witches or any other demonic cultists, in that they really have no idea of the power inherent in what they’re fooling around with. They have become so clever and manipulative in their own minds, to the point that they have absolutely no clue to how utterly stupid and foolish they’ve become. To actually think they could manipulate the God who knows them better than they know themselves, or that they could manipulate the scriptures or certain spiritual principals to their own material benefit, is like thinking a fly could outwit the spider that’s already tied them up and devoured them in their own foolishness.

We should be more offended than we are, and much more sickened by the manner in which some have led so many people astray. This cancer that keeps eating away at the church, though hardly anybody dares to say anything about it. By the time most people recognize the threat it poses to the body of Christ, the church in America will likely be beyond the point of salvaging, and other Christian churches in third world countries may necessarily need to step into the moral and theological void we’ve created.

If every minister, pastor and priest railed against the pervasive greed and materialism in America every Sunday for the next 20 years, even that would probably not be enough, though it would make a good start. Our churches should be on the front line in fighting directly against the culture of corporate greed, and all the lies, brainwashing, corruption and death that goes along with it. They should be instructing their parishioners in simplicity, humility and the truth, rather than how to get everything they want and more. They should expose murderous wars for profit for the absolute abominations they are, rather than campaigning for the right-wing antichrists that initiate them.

We have Christian churches that are nothing more than shills for the corporate state, whose only real purpose is to keep the American sheeple frantically working and consuming more and more and just as much as they possibly can in order to stimulate the stock market and increase corporate profits. These are not Christian churches – they’re public relations firms serving corporate interests. We have pastors whose only moral function is to sanctify unbridled human greed, and make this deadly idolatry seem wholesome and pleasing to God. These are not Christian churches in any meaningful way, though if there are a few people who still understand the scriptures or what it means to be a Christian, it's in spite of rather than because of what our churches have drilled into them. But that’s the exception, and not the rule itself.

The rule of thumb to becoming a Christian in America is that you must find a way to prove you’re a Christian by something that doesn’t really cost you anything, or require you to give up your obsessively sinful worship of mammon. One way is by looking for people who are the most hated and persecuted, and obsessing over their lifestyle instead, and making that seem like the real issue. By attacking the most vulnerable people where they are themselves most vulnerable, Corporate Christians have focused everyone’s attention on the ‘homosexual lifestyle’, and they've turned their hatred for others into a righteous cause. And by hating homosexuals much more diligently than most people, Corporate Christians also demonstrate that quality that makes them distinctive and different from the heathen culture around them.

To summerize #1 scapegoating gays and lesbians doesn’t cost anything #2 it takes the spotlight off your idolotrous lifestyle, and makes their lifestyle the issue #3 it sets Corporate Christians apart by making their intolerant hatred for their neighbors the thing that is most distinctive about them.

Abortion is another issue where you can still prove you are a Christian, even though it's your selfish and materialistic lifestyle that's synonymous with death. Once again, it doesn’t cost you anything to be against a woman’s right to choose. It’s not like you have to give a damn about the kid once it’s born, or pay a penny to ensure it has basic health care, decent food or housing. You can love the fetus and still hate the kid, and vote for more tax cuts for yourself. You can love the fetus and kick its mom off welfare, pay its dad slave wages, or kick both parents clean out of the country. Another win/win proposition.

If you are Christian in America, you can literally thirst for blood and support capital punishment, (and constantly complain that not enough people are being executed). You can continue supporting every religious war and illegal extermination of human beings for monetary profit that comes down the pike, just on general principal. It isn’t about that.

It’s all about looking at a fertilized egg in a petri dish, and imagining that, instead of seeing a cystoblast, what you are actually seeing is a tiny little helpless baby, and its murderer of a mother is plunging the hot dagger of abortion into its defenseless little heart. It’s about spending so much time obsessing about a few organic cells, that your sanity inevitably takes flight and the real world completely fades away, and all the actual living, breathing, thinking and feeling human lives you have taken part in murdering for profit, for cold revenge, or just because you can, they don’t matter. All that matters is the cute little defenseless (and preferably white) baby disguised as a cystoblast, and the pro-life talking point that goes along with it.

What matters for Corporate Christians is finding the most effective way to hide the shameless idolotry of their enthusiastic support of the corporate culture of death, behind a ‘pro-life’ talking point. That’s why embryonic stem cells have to be saved from scientific research, and to hell with all the real people suffering and dying from real diseases. Better these cells should end up in the garbage than help to alleviate the suffering of actual human beings. It’s a brain-dead vegetable that once was Terri Schiavo – that’s what Christians must organize nationally to protect and keep alive at any cost – and to hell with the hundreds of thousands of thinking and feeling men, women and children who’ve been killed since Bush pulled the plug on Iraq. They don’t matter.

All that matters, and what really makes you a pro-life, family values conservative Christian, is your ability to project your uncompromising thirst for death onto others in a way that you call Christian, but which is distinctly demonic - and to hate your (gay and lesbian) neighbors with religious zeal.

The Sound of Sheer Silence

I was going to post something about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but I’ve been so busy with other things, that I thought it might be a good time to post this instead.

The Sound of Sheer Silence

Elijah is considered by some to be the loftiest and most wonderful prophet in the Old Testament. His Hebrew name "Eliyahu" means "My G-d (Eli) is called Yahu." He lived in the 9th century B.C in the Kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. None of the Old Testament prophets is so frequently mentioned in the New Testament as is Elijah, or Elias. Jesus said that John the Baptist was Elijah who had returned; at the transfiguration of Christ, it was Moses and Elijah who appeared and talked to him.

The most notable of Elijah the Prophet’s many deeds was a miricle he perforned on Mt. Carmel. Ahab the King over Israel, and his wife Jezebel, who was also the daughter of the King of Tyre and Sidon, had cut off the priests of God, deprived them of their office and repaced them with the priests of Baal.

So Elijah challenged these 450 priests of Baal, saying that they could choose one of two young bulls, offer it up to their own god, and see if he would come down to consume their offering. They took up his challenge, made their offering, and waited all day, but nothing happened. Then Elijah made his offering of the other bull to the Lord, even puring buckets of water over it, and yet the mighty fire of ther Lord came down and consumed everything. At that point, with the people completely behind him, Elijah brought all the prophets of Baal down to the brook Kishon and killed them.

But when Jezebel found out about it, she vowed to have Elijah killed, and knowing how the mood of the people was fickle, Elajah fled. He lost heart, and fled to Beersheba in Judah, and went out into the wilderness, to rest under a broom tree. Here he poured out his anguish and frustration at having accomplished so much for the Lord, while apparently changing so little. Weary and frustrated, he prayed, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life.”

God understood his disappointment, and believed he was worn out and tired. So the angel of the Lord told him, “the journey is too great for thee”, and gave him some food and water to drink. Fed and refreshed, Elijah found the energy to flee another forty days and nights, to find refuge beyond the desert of Judah, in a cave on Mount Horeb. Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai, is located in the Sinai wilderness/desert. It is the mountain that Moses called holy, where he first saw the burning bush while tending sheep, and where he later received the Ten Commandments while leading the people of Israel.

Here it was that Elija again voiced his frustration, saying “the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

The Lord realized that it was going to take more than just the miracle of food and water to revive and encourage him, and keep him from running away. And make no mistake about it – Elijah was not only running away from Jezebel, who was now far behind in a country far away – he was running away from God, and from his calling as a prophet of God to the nation of Israel.

So the Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” So he went out, and “there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence (or the still, small voice of God).”

After hearing the voice of God, Elijah could only wrap his face in his garment and weep. But he was strengthened by the revelation of God, and restored in his faith, so that he continued to serve the Lord for a number of additional years. He even prophesied and lived to see the ignoble end of King Ahab and his Queen, Jezebel; and the life he was once so afraid of losing at her hand, he never lost at all, since he was taken up to God alive in a whirlwind

The Lord taught Elijah something that we also need to learn and understand. We all need to find that still, small voice of God, behind all the noise going on in the world.

The presence of God is a fearful thing. Nobody has ever seen God at any time, inasmuch as his glory is too great to comprehend. Though the will of God is manifested in hurricanes, terrible earthquakes and in blazing fires, such as preceded God’s revelation to Elijah, these are not God in Himself. They merely give evidence to the fact that God is near to us.

Think of every terrible and beautiful sound on earth, as if they were only a frame outlining the awesome truth and beauty of God’s sheer silence. Every great and wonderful sound you have ever heard, as well as every aggravating noise, every beautiful and inspiring melody, as well as every frightening sound - a clap of thunder, or the sound of children laughing and playing in the sun, or the sound of men and women weeping and morning in anguish over the loss of a loved one – all of these and what they represent are like frames thrown up for a moment in time, and made to measure God’s will, and to outline the awesome beauty of God’s still, small voice.

Everything that we can hear, see or touch, are merely a passing reflection of the beauty, love and awesome strength of God’s eternal presence in our life. They frame and reflect the beauty that is God’s, like a frame around a picture, and they derive their strength, beauty and meaning from His. Sometimes well and in a way that seems pleasing to us, though sometimes fearfully in things that seem to threaten us. But whether the presence of God comes to us by way of the soft and comforting hand of a breeze, or by the roar of a terrible hurricane – they all indicate the presence of the Lord, though they are not the Lord in Himself.

Even the words of scripture are not really God in Himself, or the literal words of God, which is blasphemy; nor could they ever begin to measure everything that God would ever have to say to us, since that is measured as much by the speaking breeze, the talking trees, or the comforting kiss of a loved one, as by Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The holy words of scripture serve only to direct and focus our attention more completely upon that holy silence that exists in the blank spaces between the chapters, between the sentences, between the words, and in-between the letters in the words. God is that silent and everlasting bank page, that holds all the chapters, sentences, words and letters of the Bible together, making it one thing that sounds like the voice of God.

The silence that is God is not simply an absence of sound or noise – sound and noise and all the beauty of life and things are a reflection of God’s abiding presence. It’s not that we can stop all the noise and –presto- that’s God. It’s that we discover God amidst all the noise and sounds and colors of life. He is found, not in the sounds themselves, but in the spaces between the sounds – in the emptiness and sheer silence that holds everything together, making it One.

God is in the silence and empty spaces between all the notes of a beautiful song, which hold the song together, making it whole, complete and beautiful, rather than merely a disconnected series of empty, isolated and discordant notes. God is in the way a poet says the most that he can ever say by saying the very least, and allowing the silence he’s aiming at to speak the truth for him. The most beautiful art, poetry, songs and singers are those who point most determined and faithfully at the unspoken silence that is the truth and beauty of God.

As people living in the 21st Century, we live our lives feeling cut off from God’s healing power and influence, because we don’t understand that God is closer to us that our own skin, and nearer than our own thoughts. We have used noise to destroy the silence in our lives, and as human beings we are always running away from the God who is always near to us. We do this because we don’t want to hear or listen to the truth about ourselves; or like Elijah, we don’t want to listen to what the Lord is telling us, or what he wants us to do. We’re afraid of being alone with ourselves – that is, of being alone with God, and seeing our life as God sees it, and doing our duty as God knows it to be.

For that reason, we live our lives geared up and armed to the hilt, in order to ward off the convicting silence, as we arm ourselves with cell phones, e-pods and walkmen, and with radios, televisions and CD players, so that no matter where we are, we can keep running further into some urban wilderness, and away from the still small voice of God.

This is all the more the case with all the noise going on in our head. Even in our consciousness, we desperately run away from the quiet all the time, as we occupy our minds in a never-ending succession of compulsive thoughts, fears, lusts and desires. We fill-up and overflow our minds with so many empty concerns, so that we can never hear, or be convicted by the sound of sheer silence. The more all this noise consumes us, and is consumed by us, the more we keep running away from God, from each other, and from the unity in silence that could bring us all together. The more isolated and alone we eventually become in all the noise we’ve created for ourselves. But perhaps God has brought us to a place in our life where, like Elijah, we either must find the still small voice of God, or continue to be driven by all our fears, even deeper into the wilderness.