A moment in our two-faith home
My wife Heather is Episcopalian. I am Jewish. She has been a minister of communion and facilitates the "D.O.C.C." program (Disciples of Christ in Community). I attend Torah Study and am on the board of trustees of my temple. Our two children are being brought up in both faiths, whatever that means (in a future post I can get into it). A couple of weekends ago we went to Palm Sunday services at church, followed by the Purim Carnival at temple.
Let's just say that we have some interesting dinner table conversations.
But at Easter services, the following excerpt appeared in our program...read more.
The quote is from Donald Cogga,Former Archbishop of Canterbury:
One of the most common errors about Christianity is that it
is a recipe for being good, that its primary purpose is to tell people how to
improve themselves as life goes on. That
is a great fallacy. Christianity is
essentially a story—a story of what God has done about our great enemies of sin
and death; of what he, by his Spirit through his Church, is still doing in this
sphere; of the climax toward which he is working and which he will finally
achieve.
This story is centered in the person of Jesus Christ, not so
much in what he taught (though that is of immense importance) as in what he was
and did. Especially clearly is that seen
in the events which we connect with Good Friday and Easter Day. Here the drama of his life reached its
climax. The forces of anti-God, of sin,
of self-interest, of fear and hate, did their worst. They did to death Jesus, the Christ of
God. And the godless laughed and said
that was the end of Jesus of Nazareth, the end of his dreams about the
But they had forgotten about God. The fool said: “there is no God.” He still does. But is doesn’t’ make any difference to the
fact. He is. He reigns. He acts.
So he did on the first Easter Day. He
raised Jesus. He vindicated the
right. He broke the power of death.
This is the Christian faith in its essence. You may not like it. You may ignore it. You may deny it. But this is it.
The thing is...this description of Christianity gets to the heart of why it--and all religions--has been so central to the history of western civilization. Human beings are hard wired to understand our world through narrative. Metaphor, analogy, abstraction, a fantastic tale of adventure are mother's milk to us.
Judaism has its stories, too. And LOTS of them from the Creation to Adam to the patriarchs to Moses to Joshua and on to the Prophets. So does Islam. So does Buddhism. The Greeks and Romans had a few. And there's the Indian epic, the Maharabata.
Explaining the mysteries of why the world works in the way that it does is the job of more that the scientist; it's the job of the poet, the bard, the novelist and the scribes who put down these holy books on parchment and lamb skins thousands of years ago.
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