Yes, I am very religious!

It happens over and over again. A person, I believe with sincerity, will say “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” I hear these words and have no idea what the speaker has intended to communicate. I strongly suspect that the speaker has no idea either.

By the world’s standards, I am a religious person. When in our own home, we never eat without thanking God and acknowledging God as the giver of all things. I attend a worship service every Sunday. It is my way of saying with my own lips that God is God and that Howard Bess is not. I receive the elements of a Christian communion service with regularity. I love singing a lot of songs in which God is the subject. It is my way to tell God that I want my creator to be a part of my life and that I want to be a functional part of God’s kingdom on earth. I believe most honest observers would admit that Howard Bess is a religious person.

Being religious is not something a person does while withdrawing into the corner of an isolated room. I love the comment of James in chapter one of his letter. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for widows and orphans in their distress.” I think of this word from James when someone proudly proclaims that they are spiritual but not religious.

Separating spirituality from being religious strikes me as the height of hypocrisy. They somehow need to come together. What is the place of “doing” in the religious life? I suspect that doing something meaningful is an essential part of being a whole person, and that becoming whole is what Christian salvation is all about.

I have a circle of friends with whom I have serious religious and social discussions. One of our recurring discussions is about the possible meaning of vocation and its relationship to living the full and meaningful life. The most common use of the word vocation is to refer to a career, trade or occupation. Values and meaning do not seem to be an essential part of any of the word’s uses. My friends together admit that words do not have meanings. They only have uses. Keeping this in mind, we have been looking for a word to describe the deep satisfaction of achievement and accomplishment needed for a full life. Together we have assigned new significance to the word “vocation.”

Vocation in our new understanding is any meaningful task or opportunity to which a healthy person awakens each morning. In our analysis, there are too many people who awaken each morning to a lack of activities which give their life meaning. Some tasks may bring significant compensation. Others may will bring smaller compensations. Still other tasks bring no compensation at all. The ultimate goal of vocation in our new understanding is not compensation. We have intentionally added a significant use to the word vocation. We are asking vocation to speak to values and meanings.

I was introduced to God by family and church. The God that I met through them is an activist God. The God of my faith created all things and remains actively involved with what he created. Everything that grows is evidence of his continuing involvement. While God’s involvement is reflected in the lives and writings of the authors of the Bible literature, God’s greatest involvement in the world was in his gift of himself in Jesus from Nazareth. In Jesus there was a full expression of God’s character through Jesus’ activities. In my own theological formulations, Jesus is and continues to be the vocation of the creative God.

I have made reference to the letter in the Bible that carries the name of James. In the second chapter of his letter, James cuts to the chase. He is blunt:

“If a fellow human being needs a coat, a kind word will not keep him warm. You who want to have spirituality without doing the works of God are dead. Show me your spirituality without good deeds, and I will show you my spirituality by what I do.”

I take special note that Jesus according to the gospels did no public praying. He assigned praying to the privacy of a closet in one’s own home. He was pointedly critical of those who pray in public. The public speeches of Jesus were clearly about politics and economics. His aphorisms (short sayings) were about his followers’ behavior as citizens oi the kingdom of God on earth.

The life of a citizen of kingdom of God need never to be dull or uninteresting. The options found in religious vocation are abundant.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.