Is God Crying?

It has never made sense to me, people who say they love God hating other people, or at least being seriously prejudiced against them.

When I was little, I remember being really puzzled and hurt as I watched mothers throw rocks at buses that carried black children to previously white schools. I was hurt because I thought mothers as a genre were kind and good and loving. I couldn't imagine my mother ever saying a mean thing to another child, no matter whose child it might be or what nationality he or she might be. Mothers were a different breed.

But these mothers were different. They were mean-looking and mean-sounding. I was confused, and so I asked my mother, "Why are they doing that? Don't they believe in God?"

And when my mother said she was sure they believed in God, I was confused and bothered.

Well, I thought, there must be two gods, because The God that my mother told me about, and The God that I heard about in church said that people who believed in Him had to love everybody, As I understood it, that was one of the requirements for serving Him and showing that you believed in Him.

Or Her, if that's how you reference God.

So, what was this? Surely, I thought, there must be another god and certainly, there must be another Bible, because didn't it say in the Bible that we were supposed to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us?"

My confusion and concern over God-loving and God-believing people being prejudiced to the point of being mean and discriminatory has never abated. As I read history, I could not understand how a person could say he or she believed in God but then be part of the Ku Klux Klan, or participate in lynchings. (If folks didn't participate, they'd bring the family and a picnic lunch to the lynching site and just make a day of it.)

I couldn't understand how a person could say he or she loved God and deny someone a place to live or to get a loan just because he or she didn't like the color, religion or nationality of the person needing help.

In the case of Christianity, the Bible says clearly that we are to imitate the Christ. This Jesus whom we brag about being saved by loved everybody and talked to everybody. All of the Abrahamic religions have at their core an ethic of love, and without love, the basis of all religions withers away.

Maybe that's the problem: we are more concerned with being religious than with doing what the prophets of those religions advocated.

And maybe we do that because we are confused about who's in charge.

Instead of letting God be in charge and doing what God has commanded us to do, we have instead put God in a box and assumed that He (or She) will be all right if we dis what He created.

We pulling God around by the nose, making Him look at how we're choosing to live our lives, and we are believing that He's OK with it.

That's a problem.

But there's an even bigger problem. Either we believe in God, and believe that God made everything, or we don't. If we believe in God, there is an underlying assumption that we respect God and what God has done.

And that respect would include respecting the people God created.

Can we honestly think or believe that some people are not worthy of God and God's love? Can we discriminate against a person who God created and not understand that we are saying that God made some mistakes?

If God is omnipotent, being able to make everything, when given the choice, if He wanted everyone to be the same and look the same, it would have been done?

Apparently, God wanted the variety of people, of religions and traditions. Apparently God is all right with that. The diversity makes the world richer and more interesting.

Either we believe that God is good, omnipotent and all of the other adjectives we ascribe to HIm or we believe God has a deficiency in character that prompted Him to make "the undesirables.

That's Western thinking; for us, things are either black or white, up or down. There is no middle ground.

But maybe since so many of us seem content to discriminate against people who do not look like us, talk like us, eat like us or dress like us we should renounce our Western status, because we cannot believe in and worship the God we say we love with authenticity if we willfully oppress other people.

Now, does that mean we have to like everybody?

No, we can't do that. Half of us, or more, don't even like everyone in our immediate families.

But we are called to love everyone.

In the Christian Bible it says in one of the pastoral epistles that we cannot love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love our brother (or sister) whom we have seen.

What is so threatening about other people that we resort to prejudices that are harmful to them and their lives?

In the Sermon on the Mount found in the book of Matthew, Jesus says that "we have heard it said that you shall not murder ..."

Everyone has heard that.

But Jesus goes further (as he consistently does as he runs down Mosaic law. He adds the word "but."

And he lifts up the deeper meaning of The Law. He says that murder includes having bad thoughts about other people or wishing them harm. He says that contempt for other people is worse than we know.

When we call someone "Raca," which a word implying that a person is without worth, or call someone a fool, which suggests that a person has no morals according to the Law, we assign ourselves in the Valley of Hinnom" which is what the word "hell" is referring to when we see it in the Bible.

The Valley of Hinnom was the place where people had sacrificed and burned their children in honor of the god Molech.

Once the practice was stopped by Josiah, the valley remained the place where people thought of when they thought of complete and disgusting filth.

A fire burned which never went out, there was a cloud which sort of hung over it, and the valley had a horrible worm which thrived in it which was very hard to kill.

And Jesus referred to this place as the place we would be sent if we "murdered" our brothers and sisters through our actions, our words or our thoughts.

That means a lot of us who say we love God have trouble ahead.

I personally think God knew what he was doing when we were created, all of us. If he had wanted a homogeneous world, he would have created it.

The admonition for religious people is to stop being so religious and start reading, knowing and doing what our prophet leaders taught.

Being discriminatory because of our prejudices is not one of those things.

God must be crying.

There have to be a lot of reasons why Jesus said, "Not everyone who says, "Lord, Lord"will enter the kingdom of heaven. Rejecting people whom God made cannot mean we have earned God's favor.