Faith in the Balance

“We could do a podcast…” Scott suggested and my earliest thought was, please, God, no. But that prayer got answered as you see: we don’t always get to choose.

When the calling comes you can only answer —or wait for it to pass. And it will pass. The spirit moves on. Leaves you alone, at last.
So, while I could yet hear it, I had to respond to the cry —voiceless voices raised from within the religious tradition that shaped both Scott and me from our very births, 26 days apart (I’m older by just that much) in the mid 1960s.

I felt alarm from those within that church, or churches like it, who came to their religion for the message of love and who now felt surrounded by messaging of a different kind.
Who might look at their spouses, even their children and see anger, fear and hatred for others.
I had to reach out, to point back, to refresh the message that loving God means loving people —who will never seem worthy.

Scott and I came up in tradition which goes back almost two-and-a-half centuries and traces its roots far farther, to the first century church, the Apostles —the very words of Christ, printed in red. As young people, we knew the Bible backwards and forwards, from Genesis to Maps.
We understood all the conditions under which women must keep silent, and how insidiously sex leads to dancing!

The people of this fellowship were like a big, extended family —they shared familial traits: a deep love of and longing for God...
And a disputatious, uncompromising spirit. A stiff-necked people if ever there was one.
So Protestant they rejected Protestantism in favor of an ancient, primitive Christianity envisioned as a Restoration, a movement backwards through time, to the source.

To Speak where the Bible Speaks and Keep Silent where the Bible is Silent

A sentiment expressed nowhere in scripture became the unofficial motto for a movement begun among gentlemen in coonskin caps and which came down from that time to the modern world only very slightly changed.

We, Scott and I, are decedents of Elders and ministers of a Gospel which all of us strove mightily to interpret. It was never just a matter of contemplating, but of spreading the Good News:

That we approach God in loving others.

And maybe this still applies, do you think?
Is it not yet told?

If the message you're getting from your pulpits, your teachers, your own reading of the scriptures tells you something different, I urge you to throw it in the balance with the message of love, and see how much it weighs.

~Mark Baldridge