March 8, 2010

Hebrews 10

[Sorry this is late, my internet went down last night.]

These Hebrews chapters are really requiring a lot of work. Unfortunately, today was not a great day for my advanced mental processing, so I hope that I can do some kind of justice to this chapter and its complex arguments about the old law and the new.

Luckily my parents were lawyers.

I sometimes feel like I'm just seeing what I want to see in these passages, generally a bit but more on the ones where I read it as an endorsement of my feelings on, for example, gay marriage. Because, to use a tactic from yesterday, isn't the New Covenant about doing away with all those restrictions that kept people from God? Because we have something so beautiful now, and our job has gone from keeping a thousand archane laws to: "Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Fellowship in faith and hope, encouraging each other and working together to make the world a better place. It's more worthwhile for us and the world, and it's a more beautiful belief system and life style.

Do we really want to go back to: "Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses" and "a fearful prospect of judgment"?

Christians should always be liberals. Not democrats - we should be far too radical for any political party. We should be the ones who are always blazing the trail for full equality and peace and loving everyone in our society - finding a place for everyone who comes to our shores as our brothers and sisters in Christ, standing up to fight desperately for every human life without violence, accepting and loving anyone marginalized without qualification. Isn't that what Christians do?

"But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved."

All those rules and barriers being put up - the "Christian right" should have nothing to do with that. That is precisely the stuff that Jesus came down to Earth to get rid of. I suppose I'm a member of the "Christian left" so I can't entirely say that and have it mean anything to anyone who identifies with the Christian right, but Christians and especially Catholics should know so much better than to weave rings around groups of people to keep them from acceptance in the community and the love of God through fellowship with the Church. Instead "let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together."

The thing of it is, of the people I know, even the most conservative Christian is ready and willing to accept someone different when actually confronted with one in the flesh. A transsexual sounds scarier to our way of life than the girl down the block whom we now need to remember to refer to as "he." And I don’t think any of them have ever met an illegal immigrant they’d force back across the border – or one they wouldn’t, in the end, have helped to cross it. You'd think it would be the other way around, and I think sometimes it is for liberals who don't actually grow up around non-W.A.S.P.s (poor or otherwise). But Christians, even those who lean to the far right, can be wonderful about accepting people on an individual basis. That's how I know they are true Christians, by their love.

It's the opposite problem that politicians have, I think. They "love the gays" but don't want them to have the things that straight people do. The marriage rites, the blessing of state and church coming together. Just a Civil Union (here not being the place for my "separate but equal" argument).

It's better than most people, in honesty, do: to look at the person and the soul of a sister or brother in Christ, to see Jesus in the body of someone whose actions or origins you do not understand - who seems frightening and foreign. If only our politics reflected it. If only we could apply the things true Christians do so beautifully on an individual basis to the aggregate.

Then again, maybe they do and will, one member of the Church who dares to be who she or he truly is at a time.