Would you lie with me?

Relationships are the most important things in existence. I am talking about marriage, family, friendships and communities. Sure there are a lot of things that get revolved around these relationships. Things like the finances, or the living situations, the work, the church, the stuff. There is so much stuff.

In the song “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol, it conveys this idea, that the most important thing in the world, right now, is us. We get so hung up on everything else. All of these other things are simply distractions from us.

Things are necessary in a life, don’t get me wrong. Without a job us (we) may have to live in the street. Without a church there would be no focused attention on God and community and love, but without us there would be no church. God knows this as well. 

I am convinced that Jesus came to earth to tell us about us. In the Sermon on the Mount the very first thing that Jesus talks about is the fact that EVERYONE is us. Everyone counts -- the poor, the persecuted, the rejected ones of the religious system -- everyone is us. There is no them.

We are all us. Jesus came and said once and for all, all of you are Blessed, all of you count, all of you are part of us. (Matthew 5:1-11) He stood up for all of the people that were previously left out – the them of their day.

Not only that, but he spent the next several hundred words painting a picture of how we go about including them with us. Next he talks about how we have got to stop concealing our love, our joy, our excitement about each other. We have got to let our light shine before others. We can no longer hold back – hide behind the silence of our religious code – turn our backs to the injustice of exclusivity.

"In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:16)

Then he redefines words like “adultery”, “murder”, “divorce”, “retribution”, all in an effort to promote the singular idea that we are to care more about others than we do ourselves. He redefines the laws of the land supposedly given to them by God, but interpreted through the filter of the religious scholars of their day, but with no filter.

Jesus comes as a God-man to speak a message of us to a world expecting something completely different. See, the entire story of God is like that, as discovered in the Bible. From the very beginning God gave up Adam and Eve to each other. He told them to stay away from the bad fruit for upon eating it they would surely die, and together they conspired to disobey God.

So what does God do? He kills them right? Of course not. He turns them lose and gives them a full life together. Because ultimately it was not about obedience, not about the rules, not about sacrifice. It was about us.(Gen 3:21)

Later on in the Old Testament, the Hebrew people listened to God enough to determine that they were to be a Holy nation, but what they failed to hear God say was “so that you may be a blessing to ALL nations.” (Gen 18:18, 22:18, 26:4 Ps 72:17, Gal 3:8)

From the beginning our religion was corrupted with exclusivity, separatism, and nationalism. So much so that the only way that God felt he could once and for all get through to the world was to come here himself, become one of us, and then speak the words of God for all to hear.

 Those words are: "ALL of this -- ALL of it, is about us. Nothing else matters." The Israelites thought sacrifice was more important than blessing nations and built an entire system of sacrifice to appease the God (they thought they knew) based on their experience with other Gods before Yahweh. However they failed to see the value of us.

God sends Abraham to the mountain to “kill” his only son Isaac in an effort to teach Abraham to stand up for his only son and reject the way of other Gods even in the face of God himself, and what does Abraham do? Without even questioning God, He tries to kill his own son to appease the God (he thought he knew), to the point that God has to send an angel to stop him. (Gen 22:11-12) The story is in Genesis Chapter 22. Here is verse 1:

"Some time later God tested Abraham."

One has to honestly ask what God was testing Abraham for. Was he testing Abraham for obedience, sacrifice? Or was he testing Abraham to see if he understood him as a loving compassionate God that values us above sacrifice and obedience? After Abraham seems to fail this test of listening, you don’t see very many more conversations between him and God in the Bible.

It’s as if God realizes that Abraham does not get it, nor will he ever. In fact the discussion itself begins with just God and Abraham, but ends with Abraham and an angel (that God presumably sent). God seemed to not even want to address Abraham after this.

Yes, he passed the obedience test, but he failed the even bigger test of us. This is a simple truth, but it can be life changing once you grab a hold of it. What if nothing else in the world were important but you and your significant other right now at this very moment? What if that friendship that is dangling by a thread for whatever stupid reason, is the most important thing ever and you are about to let it go?

What if it’s not about how you play the music, what you preach on Sunday, what your attendance is like, whether or not the kids love it? What if the value of church is the people? What if the politics and the social issues and the cultural issues, and the categorizations, and labels and divisions, and the party platforms, beliefs and religion and all the other STUFF -- what if they are all just a distraction -- a big game -- things to take our minds off of us?

If I lay here. If I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world? Forget what we’re told, before we get too old. Show me a garden that’s bursting into life.