An Applicable Religion

Here's the text of a talk I delivered today in church. I usually don't post stuff like this on my website, but it seemed to go over pretty well and several people asked me for a copy. Plus I think it really addresses some concerns in a lot of different religions. It's not an exact transcript of what I said--some of it's still in note form, but you can get the general picture:

An Applicable Religion
by Karl Rees, Jan 18, 2004

My talk today was inspired by a friend of mine, who recently approached me and asked, "Karl, why do I have to go to Elder's Quorum?"

This friend is pretty active in the church, and I knew the question was meant partly to antagonize me , so I just looked at him, as if to say you know the answer.

But he continued. "It's always the Same thing: home teaching. And for that matter church. It's always read your scriptures, Say you, players. I already know all that.

Brothers and sisters. I'd like you to think about that question for a second, and how you would respond to it. As for myself, I think I failed miserably in my response. I told h:m to do it because God has asked him to.

I think that it's a correct answer, but I don't think it was sufficient. I don't believe that there are many times in life when God is going to ask us to do something without making it possible for us to find out why, especially in something that we do so often as go to church.

But there have been times in my life when I could sympathize with my friend-times when I would read the scriptures ...or when I would pray... I would daresay many of you have felt the same way.

I'm not going to tackle this problem comprehensively in my talk today-there are many things that cause us not to find meaning in he things God has asked us to do, and many different things to do and perspectives to take that can resupply meaning. Rather, I'm going to look at just one of the chief causes-at least in my life-of this sentiment.

We have a tendency-a very good tendency-to want to grow. We are constantly looking for ways to progress ourselves. And in church, we often equate progress with learning. But in this desire to grow, we become impatient. We start to expect greater and greater knowledge. Every day we go to church, we expect there to be an epiphany of great magnitude. Every time we pray, we expect God to give us a great revelation.

We feel we are entitled constantly to the sudden, life-changing revelations of Paul and Alma and Joseph Smith, and are frustrated when they do not come.

But this is not the way most of us learn. Learning is a gradual process. In fact, it is the rarity of such events is what makes the conversion of Paul and Alma such compelling stories.

C.S Lewis .... "When the most important things in our life happen, we quite often do not know what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, 'Hullo! I'm growing up.' It is often only when he looks back that he realizes what has happened and recognizes it as what people call 'growing up'. You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to remain wide awake."

Brothers and Sisters, I submit to you that every Sunday, every time we read the scriptures, every time we pray, whether or not we see it, we are growing up, spiritually. It is a gradual process. Not every Sunday will we walk out of sacrament meeting thinking, "oh my gosh, every thing is so much clearer." But the point is, and the reason I think we are all here, is that sometimes we will leave Sacrament meeting thinking exactly that. Something someone says will finally click, and you'll make connections you have never made before. Does that mean that all the other Sundays were a waste? Does that mean that we're only coming to church or reading our scriptures or saying our prayers in hope that one of these days we might actually learn something, and that we'd be better off if we could somehow magically predict which days we were going to learn and only come to church then? No. In fact, it is those other Sundays that make the connections that make the epiphanies, possible.

Sunday School Lessons

You
said he who does not remember
history
is doomed.

So I've tried to remember
you gave me candy when I was good,
when I raised my hand.
I've tried to remember
love is the answer to most of your questions,
you should love your neighbor
so your house won't fall.
I'm trying to remember
John 3:16, for God so loved ...
trying to remember
an ark, the number two, unicorns
trying to remember
a story, Samaritans are good people
remembering

you
found a credit card,
we were walking on a class field trip,
we voted you should buy candy with it,
you said
no, honesty is the best

and when I was at the toy store,
saw a dollar in my father's wallet,
needed a dollar for a pack of baseball cards,
when he was not looking,
when I did not buy a pack of baseball cards,
I remembered that
such is the meaning of history.

In this poem, we have a narrator, who apparently learns from the example of his teacher that stealing is bad. But I submit to you, that one event in and of itself did not make the difference in the child's life. Rather, the stories and lessons that child learned from his teacher culminated in this epiphany-made it possible that when the teacher finally set this example, the student was prepared to understand the implications of it, and learn from it. This is the process that is happening in us. It's like an Earthquake-all that tension builds up, slowly, until finally something gives and the Earth moves.

Having said this, let me backtrack a bit and admit that my friend was right, to an extent. A lot of what we are learning is repetitive. This can be frustrating to many of us, especially if, for example, we feel like we already know a topic better than a teacher.

This impatience for growth that we sometimes feel is not just a matter of us not being able to instantly recognize progress in the gospel. It is often times an inexplicable thirst to keep peeling back the layers of the gospel, to dig deeper and deeper for what we like to call the deep secrets of the kingdom. Maybe we're looking for some new, astounding revelation that we can somehow use to prove once and for all that we're the true religion. Maybe we're looking for some complex doctrine that will in some way justify certain aspects of ourselves with which either we or someone else is uncomfortable. Maybe we hope that by getting deeper and deeper into the details of the gospel, we'll be able to understand the mind of God. Or maybe we just want to know something that somebody else doesn't.

But this is the wrong approach to take to the gospel. Growth is not just about new knowledge. Though deep doctrine itself is not an evil, often times our thirst for secrets and hidden knowledge can be a distraction from the truths that matter most; an expression more of doubt in the truth we already know, than of wanting to know more about truth.

C.S. Lewis ... "There have been men...who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. ... You see it in smaller matters. Did you ever know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the most subtle of all the snares."

You see, many of the details that we get so worked up about are unimportant. Think about the poem I just read to you. We laughed because the young narrator of the poem juxtaposed all sorts of details about the stories he learned in primary. But in the end, this didn't matter. He was still was able to understand the point of the stories and apply them to his life-God honestly could care less about whether or not we know exactly when Adam first appeared on the Earth, or exactly where in the America's the Book of Mormon took place. Part of the reason why it is so rare we come out of church thinking, "I learned something new," is that our religion, at least the important parts, is an extraordinarily simple thing. It's not something that takes 100 years of church and firesides and scripture reading to learn. It can be summed up in six one-hour discussions.

In fact, James sums it up in a verse of scripture, James 1:27

(James 1:27)

27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

It is more important that we constantly remind ourselves of our "pure religion" than we get distracted looking deeper and deeper at an infinity that our finite minds will never quite make sense of. Our epiphanies, more often than not, should be of things we already knew, but are just relearning in a way more applicable to our current problems and predicaments.

In fact, that is the keyword to my talk today: applicable. We grow, we "learn" the most in the application of the gospel. When James talks about "faith without works being dead," he is not just saying that our works prove our faith. He is saying that without works, our faith has no application, no relevance to our lives, and therefore will die. We cannot keep growing through knowledge and belief alone. What good is it to know something, and not apply it to our lives? The pure religion James describes is not knowledge of doctrine, but the application of it: "to visit the fatherless and widows in their afflictions, ... to keep ourselves unspotted from the world."

Let's look closer at this statement from James. What does he mean? Is he saying that the only way to truly practice our religion is to visit orphans and widows? No, this is just a metaphor--fatherless means those who have lost their sense of origin--those who have trouble remembering that they are children of a Heavenly Father. By widows Paul means those who have lost their system of support, whether it be monetary, physical, or spiritual. Those who need us to step in and temporarily become their system of support.

There comes a point in our lives when our greatest challenge is no longer learning, but doing. Indeed, what a great challenge this is, for as James says.

(James 4:17)

17 Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.

I think very few of us, can honestly say that our personal religion has moved from knowledge to this level of application. Do you know what this scripture means? If we know of something good and we're not doing it, we are not properly applying the gospel of Jesus Christ. Do we honestly stop to think before we do something if we are doing the greatest good possible? It is a very difficult thing to do.

This transformation from learner to doer is much more significant than we realize. It affects more than just us as individuals. Our hope as a people, for a more perfect world, a Zion, is contingent upon it. What is it about our religion that defines us as a people, as Zion? It's not the stories we tell. It's not our songs, our narratives, our personal histories. These are cultural. These are things you'd find in any religion. It's not even what these stories teach us, because honestly, you're going to find the same underlying principles in most any religion. The difference-the thing that makes us Zion-is how we react to those principles. It's not that we know what to do, it's that we actually do it.

Too often we find ourselves waiting to serve our fellow man, waiting to create this Zion, thinking, well someday I'm going to take all these things I've been told to do and apply them to my life. Maybe not today, but tomorrow or the next day. Maybe when Christ comes and everybody else is doing it. But nothing is going to happen to force us to become better followers of Christ, not even, I would suggest, his second coming. We must make the decision now to be proactive about our religion... to bring Zion to Earth instead of waiting for it to magically happen.

Let me close with a brief discussion of this pure and simple gospel. I'll start with another quote CS Lewis

"When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested' ... concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one ... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between [a man and woman]. ... We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'."

This is indeed a great love. We can learn a lot about what we should do from this love. His love is so great, that, as we read from, Moses 1:39:

39 For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

That is why we come to church. To do God's word, not just to learn it. To serve and be served. To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life not of ourselves, but of mankind. Yes, there's still things to learn once in a while. But that's just something that must happen in order for us to better do God's word. Brother or sister next to you. Do you truly love him or her? Do you know what help he or she needs. Do you mourn with he or she when they mourn? Do you offer comfort in their need of comfort? Do you even know his or her name? What about your neighbors? What about your classmates? Do you love them, and by love I mean not the disinterested love that we're supposed to have for everyone in the world, but the love that requires you to know if they're the metaphorically fatherless, or widowed, or afflicted. Love So great, that you can't help but serve them.

Brothers and sisters, I implore you, if you have not done so already, to not just read you scriptures and go to church, but to use these opportunities to do good to make ours an applicable religion. Pray for the love required to go out and serve your fellow man; but don't only pray, waiting for some miraculous transformation, go out and do. In my calling.... I know that this is what God wants us to do. I know this is what will bring us more joy in life than any other thing.

Posted January 18, 2004 (08:22 PM) | Comments (1)