Convention

“Convention is a dish best served broken.” Is the words I saw written on a website of an actress I follow, Allison Hall's, web page. It got me thinking.

Convention: a rule, method, or practice established by usage; custom

Christians, or more broadly, religious groups in general, have conventions. Actions, thought patterns, and ways of speech they follow as almost a rule whether spoken or otherwise. Like Christians, we always say, “we will be praying for you” when something goes wrong. Now this is all well and good if we actually do pray for the person, but I find myself just saying that out of convention, because it is the right thing to do per say, and forgetting to actually pray an hour later. Thus we just lied to someone to make them feel better and to adhere to convention instead of calling them up or talking to them face to face and right there praying for them.

Throughout the Bible, God breaks the conventions. I mean, he shatters them to pieces. In the time of Abraham, everyone had multiple god's they worship. It says that Rachel and Leah stole their father's household gods because they weren't going to get an inheritance from their father. No one even seems to blink an eye to the fact that they stole something that was a direct affront to God, because it was such a normal thing at the time. People had household gods. Period. When God approached Abraham, then Abram, he declared himself the only god. That there was nothing else to worship. That was against tradition and convention.

He did it again to the Hebrews when they were fleeing Egypt. As is well known, Egypt had tons and tons of gods. Gods were everywhere. There was a god for everything. God said they were not to have any other gods but him. These people's grandparents had been born in Egypt. It was all they knew.

Later with the prophets, God told the prophets to do crazy things, like burn human feces as fuel (the guy had it taken down to cow droppings thank goodness), run around naked, name their kids terrible names, marry a prostitute. Those, I will say, are not even considered conventional today and we are a lot more liberal now than then.

Finally, Jesus went up against the Pharasees, Saducees, and other teachers of the law. Those people practically taught convention as being next to Godliness (cleenliness was a part of that convention so it wasn't left out). Jesus went right out and called them white washed tombs which is about the equivalent as saying they were a bunch of expensive coffins with rotted corpses with bad smells inside. Convention, while it looks nice does no good. It sometimes hurts where we could do a lot of good without it. After all wasn't Paul a Roman to the Romans.

There are quite a few things that are in conversation right now between the church and the regular jo shmoes out there. We preach all these huge deals about them and say that God finds it disgusting and blah blah blah but we forget the first commandment. We first love. The prostitute the coffin like people brought before Jesus, was easily seen as guilty, easily considered punishable by the law of Moses, but Jesus didn't punish her, instead he showed each man his own sin without naming them, and saved a woman's life. He showed her love by forgiving her.

We as Christians, only look at the thing we see as wrong, and we don't look at the human being standing there beautiful, and no less dirty than we once were.

We forget to look at the reasons behind each law. There is. The sexual laws: sexual acts have huge psychological reactions. The eating laws: blood carries terrible diseases, pig, well you don't want to know what happens if it isn't cooked properly, carrion, that should be obvious. All those laws, and conventions, were way before most of the sciences that explained the human brain, chemical imbalances, and germs.

To that thought, and to hopefully end this speal: just like the Israelites back then, God does not explain every detail of his reasoning. He has a reason for everything. That is all we really need to know, that and he is love. Who are we to judge what people do when they are harming no one but themselves (which in the end we all do). We first need to see the human behind the dirt that once layered ourselves. We need to see the beautiful soul that God crafted together in his own likeness and lead them to the father. It is between them and God what they need to change and when they need to change.

After all, the only reason why we are clean is because like a mom bathing a child who can't bathe himself, Christ bathed us. We are useless in it. Oh we may splash around and gurgle but we are completely useless in our own cleanliness.