THE REAL ISSUE

I saw a license plate holder the other day on a car that was passing me. It read: "I am an orthodox Christian." I wondered what it meant. Did the owner of the car mean that he or she was member of the Greek Orthodox Church, for instance, an Eastern Christian, that kind of Orthodox Christian? Or did the driver mean that he or she held the usual -meaning true - and right Christian beliefs? That’s my, to be honest, biased guess, but I really do not know.

What I do know, or at least am convinced about, is that there is no true orthodox Christian. None of us holds all the truth, believes all of the truth, understands all the truth, because we do not know all of the truth. The real and honest truth is we are all heretics, all of us. No one has a complete handle on the truth either. As soon as we think we do, we wander off into error. Faith is not completely and totally explainable or understandable. And as soon as we try to explain the faith, define the truth, we set ourselves up for failure.

Jesus never tried. He told us that he and the Father are one. He never explained what he meant, nor could he, so he did not even try. But sometimes, for whatever reason, we try and we get ourselves into trouble. Jesus told us to love everyone. We don't. And we know we don't. And then to justify ourselves we try to explain why we don't love someone and why it is all right not to. Paul told us, learning from Jesus, that there are no distinctions within the Body of Christ. We make them and we make them based on our perception of our differences.

The problem is not that there are differences. We are all different even as we are all equal in God's sight and should be equal in the sight of one another. We are all sinners in God's sight and should be seen as all sinners in the sight of one another. But, as we know, as any orthodox person will tell us, there is sin and there is The Sin - and we all know what that Sin is these days, don't we? There is truth and there is The Truth. My perception is that those who call themselves orthodox mean that they have a handle on The Sin and The Truth.

The problem, I believe, these days in the church and, I dare to say, in the political world in which we live, purports to be over The Sin to which every other sin pales in comparison. Those who are orthodox know The Truth about The Sin and they are willing to divide the church (and the country) over it, and are doing so, thank you very much. I wonder what God thinks. I wonder what Jesus would say, Jesus, who hung around with the best and the brightest and the worst and the so-called dregs of humanity and never made any distinction between anyone.

The truth of the matter is that the truth is being obscured behind the rhetoric of orthodoxy: “We are the true believers (Republicans, Democrats, etc)”. It always has been and always will be. The truth is that the real issue is not orthodoxy or Gospel truths. The real issue is about power. It always has been and always will be no matter how much anyone protests otherwise. That is THE TRUTH.