Sabbath Messages | Sabbath Message: March 20, 2004
Good Sabbath
March 20, 2004"Sabbath we welcome thee, come my beloved with chorus of praise."
The truth shall set you free, but what is the truth? The Da Vinci Code, has made its author a very wealthy individual--the blessing of riches from the book--interpreting certain miracles which are the guidepost of the most popular religion in the United States. In multimedia we have learned that digital imagery can create true-to-life miracles; "Forest Gump" brought dead celebrities to "life" so that Gump could interact with them ; Jurassic Park brought prehistoric animals back to "life". The ancients used to look at clouds and sun and stars to imagine their "gods". We have no films on yesterday, just books and tablets that imagine our truths. What is the truth; what our eyes see, what our ears hear, our perceptions, our rationalizations, our blind faiths, our modern books?
Dear God, will you please help us
To recognize truth
To help us define it
To allow our senses to discern it
To let our brain separate it from popularity and lies.
We need Your assistance--
For we believe You to be the One truth
on which we can depend.
You are,
aren't You?!
Yet gods are inventions of primitive people and religion has made war part of conversion of the "heathen". There were no more cruel people than those explorers who came from the old world to convert the new world. When the Hebrews laughed with relief when the Egyptian soldiers drowned in the Red Sea, God warned them not to be happy when those He had also created were destroyed, yet His book commanded the destruction of so many non-believers. When Moslems came into being, their Prophet swung the sword with passion and no compassion. Which god is God? Will we ever find the truth and will it make us happy or will the shock be too much to believe?
"To escape from evil we must be made, as far as possible, like God; and this resemblance consists of becoming just, and holy and wise." (Plato)
"If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him" (Voltaire) (and did we?)
We hunger for truth, don't we? We thirst for what is real, I think. Are imagination and faith the ingredients for truth, or does it bend with each people, each culture, each generation. Gibson's "Passion" bathes interpretation in blood and torture. Watching the gore and torture, so many viewers became believers as if they were there, actually witnessing the event.
Do we love our gods more when they bleed, and does God bleed or just weep when He sees how people interpret truth years after the events in which they happened. Just listen to today's electioneering and tell me what is the truth, while we are experiencing it. Religion is our election of how we will practice kindness to each other! In what do you have to believe to believe that?
"Faith is the pencil of the soul that pictures heavenly things." (T.Burbridge)
Is faith an original human invention or could only deities have invented that passionate search for the ultimate "truth"? Do we need to know what is true to have faith? No, just look at how each of the myriad religions interprets their own versions to comprehend that there are no absolutes, including "the truth". Ultimately "truth" is what we need it to be so that we can be comfortable enough to have faith in something. We define it, we interpret it, we have faith in it until our search exceeds its boundaries. And that is the moment when faith destroys justice and history repeats "let the killing begin, for we are just and they are the devils."
I believe that God's message is that we should be kind to each other, to have compassion, to search for justice--the pathway to truth. Without justice there is chaos and injustice and human cruelty at its worse. Justice is not politic; it is not free enterprise; it simply is to treat others as we would have them treat us--how simple this truth remains. It is the simple truth, not simplistic. It is the beauty of human nature as it rises from the muck of daily living.
"Let falsehood be a stranger to thy lips." (Havard)
"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
(James Baldwin)
So, my dear friends, follow your heart as it learns to contain soul, so that your soaring soul can lift humanity to God's face and spirit, this Sabbath.
sandy
