Anth is often asked why we've gone the direction we have as a community.
Why don't we pray very often in church anymore?
Why don't we use music to create an emotional atmosphere?
Why don't we always use bible verses in our talks?
Unfortunately the church has become an institution for many, and the apparent safety of its confining walls have become a prison, robbing us of our freedom.
The movie, The Shawshank Redemption, offers a brilliant parable of how we can each break free from the walls we've been living behind.
"Get busy living or get busy dying."
It took Andy 20 years to escape from the walls he'd been imprisoned by and getting free was no easy task and meant taking a route he'd rather not have taken.
"Sometimes you have to crawl through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness to find freedom."
Many of us actually prefer to stay within the relative comfort and safety of our prison walls than step into the uncertainties of freedom because freedom requires each of us to step into the unknown.
“If it is proposed that the Christian God punishes, unless his anger is appeased by a ritual sacrifice, and that he rewards those who do good, and punishes those who do bad, that God would have to be classified as pagan as he would be no different to any god, in any culture, at anytime in the whole of history. If there is any value or virtue in the Christian God, it is precisely because none of the above is true about ‘him’. That makes ‘him’ the ungodlike God.”
In 3 of the gospels, a story is told of how Jesus turned over the tables in the temple courts, angered by the trading going on in "the house of God." Buying and selling is still a problem in many churches, not in selling books, coffee or snacks, but in trading our giving for "God's blessing" or our confession for a priest's absolution. As Shane Hipps' book title so eloquently put it, we can be guilty of "selling water by the river" and convincing people that access to the divine can only be found within our walls and by adhering to our ways.
When Red is finally freed from Shawshank, he struggles to live as a free man, after all, for decades he's had to ask to be able to perform the most natural daily functions and now he's pissing without permission!
"We would do well to learn that we always create a problem when our analysis of the parts replaces the synthesis of the whole."
Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption carry the spirit of the quest as outlined here from the movie, Eat, Pray, Love.
"I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you, or so I've come to believe.”
DID CHRISTIANITY MAKE AN IDOL OF JESUS????
THE BIBLE TALKS ABOUT JESUS BEING -
THE DOOR
THE LIGHT
THE WAY
THE TRUTH
and introduces us by Jesus own words to God as Father.
These things have been major factors in the ‘why’ of who we are.
In the final clip from The Shawshank Redemption, Andy wrote to his friend Red...
"You've come this far, maybe you're willing to go a little further."
We hope you are too!
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