Are we doing this right?

            Here’s the interesting thing to me about where we’ve come, and I suspect where we’ve messed all this up.

            From the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for us.

             “My prayer is not for the world, but for those you have given me, because they belong to you. All who are mine belong to you, and you have given them to me, so they bring me glory. Now I am departing from the world; they are staying in this world, but I am coming to you. Holy Father, you have given me your name; now protect them by the power of your name so that they will be united just as we are.”

            So (we) will be united…

            Get that?

            Do you think, any of you, that we got that right?

            Look at social media in just the past couple weeks. Still think we got that unity thing right? Oh, I admit that many of the persons on Facebook are not in any way claiming to be Christians, but many, many are. And they ain’t being anywhere close to unified. And they ain’t trying to be unified. And both sides of every argument are darn sure the other side has a box of squirrels in their head.

            I love how those on one side of any of the current cultural arguments reads something by someone on their side of the argument, and I’m certainly referring to either side, and immediately they say, “Must Read,” or “Well-thought-out argument” or any of another things that are short hand for “I’m right. Told you.”

            I read a well-thought-out argument a day or so ago that pointed out that the church had always changed, back to slavery, to women in the pulpit, to on and on and on and on we go. The writer, a must read, said we are led by the Holy Spirit and that is how the early church made changes all the way back to Acts 15.

            Yeah.

            I get that. I’m down with the Jerusalem Conference. I got that in my Bible, too. Paul and his bud Barnabas came from Antioch to report to the First Church of Jerusalem about the fact Gentiles weren’t especially happy about having to convert to the Jewish law to be what was being called Christian, which if you think about it makes about as much since as a Croissant Hot Dog at Sonic.

            After much harping and praying and praying and harping, the Council decided on this:

            “This letter is from the apostles and elders, your brothers in Jerusalem. It is written to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia. Greetings!

            “We understand that some men from here have troubled you and upset you with their teaching, but we did not send them! So we decided, having come to complete agreement, to send you official representatives, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are sending Judas and Silas to confirm what we have decided concerning your question.

            “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these few requirements: You must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. If you do this, you will do well. Farewell.”

            So at its very beginning, AT ITS VERY BEGINNING, the church began to splinter and then seek council on who was right.

            Again, I get that.

            Here’s my question though.

            If both sides think they’re right, but yet say this isn’t a question of the integrity of the scriptures, then why on God’s good green earth do we insist that we can split denominations again and again and again if Jesus prayed, PRAYED, that we be unified.

            For we’re not talking interpretation or translation or Holy Spirit over-rule, we are talking flat out He didn’t pray it, didn’t say it, didn’t mean it, didn’t think it.

            And if that’s the case, pack up the blankets, shut up the cooler, get in the car and let’s leave on the last train out of town.

            I mean, among his last prayer words spoken on earth were for us to be unified as He and His Father were unified, and yet we don’t give a good grief about breaking that all to heck and back because at the very least in part we’re so sure we’re right.

            I include myself in that number, much of the time.

            I strongly suspect Jesus would have rolled his (blue, of course) eyes at social media.

            I’m afraid, however, that that cow has left the barn. Putting Elsie back in there would been very hard at this point. What do we then do?

            We, I suspect, need to reflect, and if we are so inclined to disagree, perhaps name-calling might need to be eliminated. Perhaps we might decide not to have our feet so dug into the ground that our heads wind up in the mud when a strong faith wind blows, and again, I’m talking about all sides of all arguments.

            But in the end, aren’t we better living as Christians together than we could ever be apart? Can’t the things we disagree about, even the validity and integrity of documents that were written in languages most of us don’t read or speak in circumstances we can’t possibly know about at this point since the writers have been dead for about a couple thousand years, be discussed enough that we can agree that Jesus edited it all down to a couple of sentences?

            Oh, don’t remember that?

            Jesus, the greatest newspaper editor of all time, took thousand of pages of Old Testament and reduced it, before Paul wrote like I do (long, long, long), to this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.”

            I guess that would just be too hard to argue about, wouldn’t it?