I’m starting today with a pop quiz. You will be graded; but it’s multiple choice, and only one question. Which one of the following is not a religion?

C. Nintendo or Play Station.

Consider the options and grade your own answer.

(A) If you dress in green and gold, sit in a special chair in the family room, go through precise rituals before every game and yell chants and invocations at your TV for three hours every Sunday. And if you do it to preserve your good mood and improve general happiness in the region around you … you’re practicing a religion. So [buzz], wrong answer.

(B) If you eat high fiber sawdust for breakfast every morning, and evangelize to anyone who half-listens that oats are the secret to long life … Sorry. No credit. You’ve got another religion.

(C) If you stay up all night staring at a flickering light, your mind in a trance, adrenaline flowing, thumbs clicking buttons in pursuit of an all-time high score. Feel invincible power surging in you. Glory land may beckon. But you just flunked the quiz.

 “Religion” (as I’m using the word this morning) can be defined as doing whatever is necessary to curry favor with the gods, and otherwise ensure that you make yourself worthy and deserving of their attention. Simply put: the goal (or “end”) of religion is to bargain and barter with whoever controls our destiny, so that they cut us some slack. [Adapted from Will Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Vol. 31, No. 4, p. 30, who got it from Robert Capon, Health, Money and Love, p. 27ff.]

Such “gods” need not be limited to those who throw thunderbolts from Mt. Olympus, or sit enthroned in the heavens, or look like George Burns in a 1970s-era movie. Gods may can take the form of any person or any thing we trust to grant us meaning and self-worth – whether a video game, bowl of grain or a last-second goal-line stand.

So, if the first three answers to the quiz are wrong, why is “D” right? Haven’t we always assumed that Christian faith is a religion; and a good one at that?

What makes it different is that it’s not something we do to earn God’s favor.

We don’t come to church to please or to appease God. (At least we shouldn’t!) We don’t engage in mission to balance the books between our sins and good deeds. Nor do we read the Bible or pray so God forgets and forgives the other stuff we’ve done lately.

Rather, we do all that and more in grateful response for what God has done. We live confidently before God, by faith and through faith, not afraid of a cosmic “or else!” that’s waiting to smack us. And we dedicate ourselves not to provoking God’s reluctant favor, but saying thanks for grace and favor freely provided through Christ.

Christian faith is not about striving to save ourselves, as “religion” tries to do. Faith lives in the moment, trusting and growing ever more secure in the assurance that God’s love never falters or fails. It doesn’t have to be bought. Or earned. Just enjoyed.

(So, when someone tells you, “I’m spiritual, I’m just not religious” as an excuse for not being part of a church, you can tell them, “At my church, we’re not religious either.” They’ll look at you funny. And you’ll just grin. They won’t get the point. But you will. They’ll say, “I mean, I’m not into organized religion,” and you’ll say, “Fine! At Wauwatosa Pres, we’re as disorganized as they come!”)

If “religion” is about “getting right” with God, Christian faith is no religion.

Jesus already got us “right” through his life, death and resurrection. He came to the world so that all may have life and have it abundantly. He came to teach and show the good news of God’s love for us all.

The letter to the Hebrews clarifies the distinction between “religious” behavior and Christian faith. It says, “every priest stands day after day … offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins.”

That’s what Judaism had become in that era. It gave job security to priests, maybe. They never lacked for work. “Day after day … again and again.” But like a friend of mine says: “If something isn’t working, do it more. It still won’t work.”

What’s it like to do a job that is endlessly repetitive? You tell me. Physically, what happens? [Carpal Tunnel …] And what happens mentally? [Boredom …] And spiritually, what’s the toll it takes? [It may not kill you; you’ll only wish you were dead.]

In contrast to the day after day, over and over rut, Hebrews says, “when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down …” Sat down at the right hand of God.

The priests were on their feet. Jesus sat down. Do you hear the comparison Hebrews is making? Day after day, again and again, they made atonement for sin But Jesus made a single sacrifice, once, for all time.

As far as the book of Hebrews is concerned, Christ’s sacrifice brought about the “end” of religion – the end of trying to win God’s acceptance. It was handled then and there.

As a result, we now face God from a completely different perspective. According to Hebrews, not having to cajole God into loving us means we are able to approach God “with a true heart” and “full assurance.”   

It means we can “hold fast to [our] confession of faith” too, “without wavering,” knowing that the one who promised “is faithful.”

And, instead of provoking God we can “provoke one another to love and good deeds” – as our glad response for grace already given.

I hasten to add here, that the Judaism being practiced by those priests in New Testament times is not indicative of the way Judaism was intended.

The Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) is full of reminders that God does not depend on sacrifices from us to determine our fate.

Our first reading, for instance, from Psalm 40, declares it in no uncertain terms: “Sacrifice and offering you do not desire [O God] … Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.”

Oh, sure, other psalms, and proverbs, and other passages of scripture stress “getting right” with God, earning God’s favor.

That’s true, sadly, of Christianity too. There are people in all walks of life who want to turn faith into an ironclad list of dos and don’ts that we determine.

But when all is left up to us like that, God is forced to the margins, or left entirely out of the equation. And we become masters of God, able to make God do whatever we want. And, really, what kind of God is that?

It certainly is not the kind of God I’ve met through years of reading my Bible! That God is in charge, graciously and lovingly, always willing to do “far more than we ask or expect.”

Christian faith, like traditional (and contemporary) Judaism, isn’t about earning our place in the pantheon of heaven, but about hearing and replying to what God is doing. Faith starts with by affirming that God created the world and saw that it was good … that out of all the nations, God chose Abraham and Sarah to be a source of blessing for all the others … that when Israel was in bondage, God heard their cry and delivered them to a land full of promise … and when they strayed, God spoke to them through the prophets, correcting them and calling them back to the covenant life.

Not as a cause, but because of all that, Hosea (chapter 6) proclaims, “God has torn, and God will heal us … God will revive us … and we will be raised up.”

It’s not sacrifice or burnt offering (the stuff of religion) that makes it happen that way, only God’s steadfast love for us.

If the “end” (or goal) of religion is to earn God’s love, Jesus’s death and resurrection put an end to it …

And gave us a new “end” or goal for our faith. Namely …

·        To come before God with a true heart and full assurance of faith;

·        To hold fast to [our] confession of hope

·        To provoke one another to love and good deeds; and

·        To meet together, encouraging one another with signs of God’s grace.

A strange incident happened to me one day when I was in seminary. I was waiting to cross the street between campus and my apartment after class. A pickup truck rolled up to the red light. As the light was about to turn green, the driver rolled down his window and shouted at me – taunted really – “Are you saved? When were you saved?”

Then, with a great big laugh, like he had all the answers, he revved his engine, and peeled rubber through the intersection. He raised the question. But he didn’t stick around for the answer.

It could have been unnerving for me. I’ve never forgotten it, so maybe it was.  It would’ve been worse, though, if I thought it was up to me alone to give my life meaning.

Instead I thought back to a night on my college campus a few years before – a bleak, dark night, when the weight of the world was on my shoulders. At a particular moment standing in a particular place with no one else around, I felt the weight lift and a lightness come; and I knew I was all right. I knew then beyond doubt that someone else is in the world to carry the weight and bear the light for me. I don’t have to go it alone. I don’t have to “be saved” by my own effort, even if I could.

At almost the same moment, back on the seminary street corner, with the smell tire rubber burning my nostrils, I thought as well about 33 A.D. … and a gnarly wooden cross on a hill … and an unsealed tomb, where strangers in white greeted visitors with the words, “Do not be afraid.”

Both of those scenes – one from my life and one from the life of the world – would have been my answer to the truck driver, if he stuck around to listen. My hunch is he was in way too much of a hurry, trying to gain a life for himself.

Even so, I don’t pity or worry about the guy. And I don’t regret our brief encounter. I know Christ’s “single sacrifice” for all time enfolds him too. The end of religion … and the beginning of Life.