Easter

So it's Easter. The most important and holy of the Christian holidays. Christmas is the one kids like the most, but Easter is the one that is most revered, for that is the day when Jesus rose from the death that cleaned away the sins of man and allowed for a personal relationship with God the Father. I might go into the pagan ties and the symbolism of secular Easter another time, but today, instead, I am looking at the Christian community.

We begin with one of my favorite Bible verses:

Above all, hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins. Practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another. - 1 Peter 4:8-9.

Most of the chapter is in this vein. The First Epistle of Peter (as it is formally known) is one of the letters to the young church in areas suffering from religious persecution, and so the message focuses repeatedly on the value of bearing that persecution with a heart of love and quiet strength, as many of the Epistles do. They're actually some of my favorite parts of the New Testament, since they give us a glimpse at the early church and can often be lined up with other historical records to give us an idea of when and where they were written from.

Anyway, back to the verse. I have serious issue with the Christian community as it currently exists on a wide scale and have distanced myself from it. I find my community elsewhere and my spiritual health is a private thing that involves very few other people. But I wonder, if the community focused more on verses like these in Peter (and elsewhere) rather than the litany of potential sins that crop up throughout the Bible, how much better of a world could have made and could they still make?

In fact, if we expand this to all religious texts, I am certain there are verses like this, that demand love and kindness to everyone. If followers of those texts focused on applying those verses to the world around them, and saved the expectations for what they see as "Godly" behavior (however it is defined for them) to themselves, perhaps we would find the world of love, charity, and kindness that would exemplify the kind of God I could get behind. And if I could find a community of believers that used this as their center, rather than that which damns them or makes them different from others, I might be able to find a community to be part of.