Spiritual Hiccups - Religious Certainty

In a new N. Graham Standish book I'm reading he talks about conflict in churches over worship.  As he discussed why worship and worship styles often leads to conflict, he said something about Baby Boomers tending to be ideological and thus prone to conflict.  Some researchers say that we Boomers tend to be narcissistic and have a very strong sense of our values being right, which of course means that others' values are wrong.

I don't know if this helps explain the deepening partisan divide in our country or not, but it may well contribute to it.  And the same sort of divisions are apparent in churches and denominations.  Of course Boomers are not the only ones who arrogantly conclude that their take on things has to be the correct one.  We all have values that we presume to be valid that will cause us to react against things that challenge those values.

The same was true of the Jewish leaders described in today's reading in Acts.  There is an unfortunate tendency to view the opponents of Jesus and his followers as cartoon villains rather than a mix of people with varying motives.  Some of them were only interested in preserving the status quo, but others were people of deep faith who were doing what they felt certain was the right thing to do.

Acts reports an interesting word of warning spoken by one of these Jewish authorities, a certain Gamaliel.  Gamaliel warned the other authorities against executing the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement saying, "Keep away from these men and  let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human  origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able  to overthrow them - in that case you may even be found fighting  against God!"

I wonder how often we religious folks, acting out of our religious convictions, end up fighting against God.  If only every religious (and political) group had a few Gamaliels around to remind us of this.

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