James 1.26-27 (CEB)
If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless. True devotion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.
James asks us to think about religion as something beyond an organized system of rituals. He perfectly describes the ideal of religion as an internal yearning, a devotion to God so pure that it compels us to “care for the orphans and widows in their difficulties.”
Our faith—our religion, both corporate and personal—is meant to reform us in the loving, compassionate image of God. Whether we’re students of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, or Buddha, our task is to be so devoted to what they teach about the unity of human being that we don’t merely study them, we become our own unique versions of them.
As Jesus’ brother, James understood this long before Jesus ever had his first pupil.
In our culture, people don’t typically think about religion this personally—as devotion to God. When we talk about religion, most of us refer to religions—the religious systems of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Baháʼí, Jainism, Taoism, Shintoism, Indigenous people’s spirituality, Wicca, even Satanism. These are all religious systems, but they are not religion in the devoted, personal way James—and Jesus–demand.
Ideally, religion is an enthusiastic loyalty to God whose primary concern is the well-being of the downtrodden. As an ideal, religion cannot be contained or defined by any human system and has little to do with churches and synagogues and mosques. However, sincere, devoted, religion has everything to do with an intense, undeniable, personal relationship with the Supreme Consciousness of the Universe who doesn’t care what we call our systems, as long as we believers are genuinely religious.
In reality, religion is disorganized and spontaneous.
Think about the Jesus movement, a ragtag group of blue-collar workers led by a radical rabbi. Or Kundalini’s sudden shock at the poverty outside the castle walls, the beginning of a journey that would transform him into the Buddha. All great civil and religious movements begin with disrupters of the status quo, a few extremely religious people whose belief cannot be shaken by all the fear mongers telling them they’ll never win.
Religion is often ugly, especially when wars are fought over it. But even during those regrettable and disgraceful events, religion does us a favor by revealing the nasty pettiness of humans too invested in the trappings and power of organizations. Faith doesn’t require organizations. It requires us to humbly follow God, who never asks for religions and only asks for us to be religious in our devotion.
Religion is a lifetime of wrestling with your demons and often being left bruised and bloodied in the gutter because of our insatiable devotion to a God who insists we fight the impossible battles, even if we lose.
On a good day, religion exhausts us for God. On a bad day, it refuels us.
Because God doesn’t let go. We might try to run away from our duty to God and each other, but even if we manage to escape for a while, God pulls us back into the fray. There is work to be done in the world, and it can only be accomplished when we devote ourselves to the selfless love exemplified by Jesus. We must give completely of one another if we are to not only survive but also thrive. As a species.
Being religious is hard work. Faithful people often seek places to renew their devotion to God. We need to be nourished and nurtured by Cosmic Love, often, lest we fall into despair or, worse, decide the journey itself is pointless. When faced with an uncaring world unwilling to change, religious people often want to throw in the towel and, like an athlete at the end of their career, buy an island and disappear into the hermitage of their dreams. This is the contamination of the world James writes about. It beats us down until we give up.
To avoid feeling defeated, God invites us into the desert to reconnect and regenerate. We need stillness to confront all the contaminants the world throws at us, and let God work through us to eradicate them.
We should more often enter the desert and give to God everything that’s contaminating us.
If we take a moment to be silent and let God reveal what’s contaminating our faith, our ability to sense God, what do we see? What are we afraid of? What do we desire, find disgusting, attractive, and repellent? Which religious doctrines and dogmas no longer serve us or the common good? Is there a physical habit contaminating our relationship with God?
God does not directly answer these questions for us but reveals truths in quiet spiritual moments. Desert moments. If we don’t make room for those moments, how will we ever, truly, feel religious?
Our goal during Lent—as it should be throughout our religious lives—is to release everything we think we understand about ourselves and our society to God. Let’s strive to become empty vessels, to make room to be filled by the living water of Christ Consciousness, which reforms our hearts and allows us to think from a clearer, more compassionate, God-centered perspective.
Only when we center our thoughts and actions on God and God alone can we call ourselves religious. And only when our religious systems—our churches, mosques, synagogues, and other sacred gathering spaces (both physical and virtual) exist to disrupt the status quo and care for the orphans and widows, do we have any chance of keeping ourselves, much less our world, from contamination.
Amen.
