Us vs them?

Yes, this really is a question.  In most of the western religious world,  this is the unfortunate mentality. Evangelical America seems to believe that we as Christians are at war with the world.  But this really is not the case. That battle was already fought, that way was already won.  Jesus Christ is already king.
What is the situation then? What is our responsibility? It's love. Love is our responsibility.  The power of evil is already shattered.  We do not have to submit to the pathetic baubles and trinkets of sin.
If we could simply see all men as created in the image of God.....

Swimming in mediocrity

Over the past many years, there have a been a handful of Hollywood movies where the main characters are born into an artificial environment and then, for some reason are thrust back into reality.  The movie then focuses on their coming to terms with what is actually reality, as opposed to what they thought was reality.
This is us. Being born in to the 21st century culture of the USA, we are swimming in mediocrity and do not even realize it.  We, our parents, our grandparents and possibly our great grandparents have been immersed in, surrounded by and having fully imbibed, modern culture, that we know no different.  But there is something different.
There are pockets of faith in which some few people live.  I just watched a video of an eight year old girl, a survivor of the Coptic bus shooting in Egypt.  A bus load of Coptic Christians was recently surrounded by four truckloads of Muslim terrorists.  The terrorists proceeded to try to force these Christians to denounce their faith and declare Allah as God and Mohammed as his prophet.  They refused and were immediately shot.  The little girl survived and told the story of how no one on the bus renounced their faith, how they had been faithful and subsequently died as martyrs.
I have to wonder how many Christians in America would do the same.  How many of us, when we go silent in the face of mockery against God, against his clergy, and against his church, would dare to pronounce faith in Jesus Christ in the face of an automatic weapon?
We are swimming in mediocrity, comfort and ease and we know no different.  I often think (and really try to take to heart) that living in the face of danger and demands for faith is better, even when that demand may require our martyrdom.

Swimming

Why is it that we, as Americans, think that we should define modesty for the rest of the world?  Just today, I read a news article about an advertising agency in Saudi Arabia edited a swimming pool ad. The picture showed a family sitting in a pool together.  But after editing, it was a father,  two children and a beach ball.  The mother, in typical American swim wear, was edited out.
The public outcry was immediate and loud.  People laughed at the backwardness, people yelled about discrimination and people mocked. But why? Is a call for public modesty a bad thing?  Why does the west, with its gutter mentality, think that everyone else should join them? 100 years ago, we in America would censor that advertisement as well.  But now, in our depravity,  don't see the problem.
Oh how far we have fallen.

Emulation

Within Eastern Orthodoxy, we believe that there is one path to God, that is, salvation through Jesus Christ alone.  It is the work that Jesus accomplished that brought man out from under the power of death.  It is now our responsibility to use the tools, provided by the church, to attain theosis.  God became man so that man can become God, not in the ontological sense, but in the union sense.  As part of the body of Christ, we come into close, intimate communion/union with God.
With that in mind, we see two possibilities.  There is the monastic path and the lay path.  Both are the same, in that, both are striving after holiness, through love for God and love for neighbor.  One thing that really jumped out at me this morning, as I sat musing while drinking coffee, was the monastic example.
The monastics are those who have devoted their lives to a singular focus on purifying their souls and seeking after God.  The layperson is the one who has (acceptably) chosen to take on the responsibilities of spouse, children and finances.  But we lay people can and should look to the model of the monastic for our own efforts toward holiness.  One thing that is very distinctive of the Orthodox monastic is their insistence upon work.  The monastic is not one who simply does nothing but pray and depend upon others for their livelihood.  No, the monastic, while he is praying, is working with his hands and supporting himself.  We laypeople could take notice and emulate them.
In whatever vocation we have, we can pray.  The Orthodox church has, for centuries, strongly encouraged the "Jesus Prayer", "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  This prayer contains it all, recognition of who Jesus is, who we are and our need of God. 
So the question then is, "Who are we emulating?"  Do we look to the world, the successful businessmen, the entertainers, or the athletes for a model of our lives? 
Who forms our lives?

Sin

Every person, every community, every situation has its sins.  This somewhat falls into the “grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” category.  We can live in a particular context and seeing the sin therein be disgruntled and desire after something else.  Seeing the sin and being grieved by it, is a good response. But in doing so, we must realize that all situations and persons after afflicted by sin.  We cannot escape it.  While it is true that some sins are more or less grievous than others (on both a personal level and a corporate level), the sin is still there and is still problematic.

Wisdom requires that we respond rightly to the sin that is in us and surrounds us.  There is something very right about fleeing from the potential influence of sin.  But we should never use the sin of others (either individuals or community) to justify our own sin.

Again, it’s about love for God and love for neighbor.  Our response to sin must be motivated by love.

Interpreting experience

Any experience we experience must be interpreted.  What we perceive and how we define these things are understood within a framework.  The religious, social, economic,  and historic culture in which we live will control how we understand any experience.
This is especially true of mystical experience. Without even going into the details of the experience, the fact of the experience actually taking place is interpreted differently by differing worldviews.  If someone is an atheist, a mystical experience involving a bright light at the end of a tunnel, will be interpreted as a mis-firing of the brain and flooding of chemicals into that brain.  Whereas a Buddhist may interpret this as a preparation for "the clear mind", or a Christian may see this as a transition from this temporal life into eternity with God.

Why am I thinking about this?  It has occurred to me that the use of experience as a tool for "proving" the validity of ones faith is not effective.  The same way that using particular texts from the Bible is not effective either, as differing minds will interpret texts (or even their applicability) in differing ways.  

When Jesus worked through his ministry, his instruction was very clear, "love God and love neighbor".  If we make this the focal point of our efforts in this life, we cannot go wrong.  We don't need to go door to door, we don't need to stand on street corners seeking to convince those passing by (of whatever) and we don't need to engage in intellectual debates and arguments to prove the other guy wrong.  We need to genuinely love other people.  And that means, in large part, to not judge them, condemn them or denigrate them when their current lifestyle is not up to the standard that we think it ought to be.  

We can argue and craft proofs all day long, but if someone does not see our love, we are nothing.  

Goals and the price

I walked past my dining room table and happened to glance down at one of my childrens' "Calvin and Hobbes" books lying open, face up.  I read the comic and therein, Calvin was complaining, out loud that he really did not want to go to school, that he would rather go anywhere else or do anything else than go to school.  His father responded with, "How about you go get a full time job and I'll go to school instead.  Then you can work every day until evening and then come home to a whiny kid."  And that made me think.  Everyone seems to have this built in, without even thinking, mentality of going to school, getting a job and living out the American dream.
My thought is about goals and the price we are willing to pay to achieve them.  Why do we put such a high price on having stuff, when none of it really satisfies, long term.  We all work so hard to get an education, we try to earn lots of money, but are we happy or satisfied?  To aim for anything is so contrary, so unusual, so (almost) unAmerican, no one ever thinks outside of the box.
It comes down to not really thinking for ourselves about what it will take to make us happy, to achieve love of God and love of neighbor and be prepared for eternity.  Those things seem to fall into a secondary, tertiary (or lower) position.  We get to them, if we have the time and energy after work and play.
But what if we hit the reset button and aimed for something more valuable and eternal?