Good morning. I want to talk for a minute about the role of religion. We all have. Most of us have grown up in a religion, and we turn to that religion for something that we are told from the very beginning. This is very important. This is a very important part of your life.

You should be engaged with some religion. And yet I see so often a misunderstanding of what the real role of religion is. The core role of religion is to put you in touch with an intimate relationship with the divine. Bottom line. Absolutely. And yet the church can often drift away from that and get more bogged down in telling people how to act, how to live in a way that pleases God and therefore opens one to the presence of God.

It’s like religion can be a kind of discipline that you go through in order to reach God. And that is not the role of religion. The role of religion is to keep you grounded in a story. And the story is scripture, salvation history. That’s the core of what a church is about. It’s there to awaken you to the truth that is hidden in those beautiful stories.

And when you see those stories for what they are, they’re obviously about a relationship between divinity and humanity. That’s the whole salvation story. But the weakness of the church, the part that gets in the way, is when it chooses to not so much awaken you to this mysterious process of falling in love with God, allowing God to enter into you, but to control behavior. So it moves away from, let’s say, the dogma, the theology that we find in salvation history, and moves over to the area of morality and then feels most, I think, effective from the pulpit, let’s say, to judge people and to tell them to stop sinning. And that’s not really the core role of the church, because the God that loves you sees your heart and knows when you make decisions who you are and why you do it and how free you were and how aware you were of its dangers, all of that. And yet, if you give that over to the church or to your religion, I’m afraid you can’t find the same kind of compassion, understanding, forgiveness, acceptance that’s in the heart of the God that you know.

So it’s knowing God is the core of religion. Guiding you in that journey of finding intimacy with God is the work of the church. You’re the one with God inside your heart that makes the decisions about what’s right and wrong. Not that you don’t need some overall guidance, but in terms of really the core difficult decisions you make on a daily basis, that’s between you and God. And religion, thank God, is there to keep you grounded in that relationship. It’s a beautiful gift.

And to lose it is to lose something wonderful. We need religion, healthy religion. We don’t need moral judge or judgment.