My brother, Bob, called me yesterday and spent forty-five minutes venting.  I understood exactly what he was fuming about as he went on and on about the crass commercialization of the Christmas season. But during the conversation, several points came up that I felt I had to address. I composed this letter to him:

Hey, I’m just off the phone with you and really wanted to say something to you when you were talking, but that was your time to vent. You were upset and I wanted to respect that and let you have at it. Now it’s my turn.

1. WHERE do you get the idea of God as “the old man sitting behind a desk in heaven with a bad attitude?” Who in the world gave you that idea? The Bible says that God is love, not a cranky old man with a bad attitude. I suppose I should in one sense understand such a description, given that Western Christianity (i.e. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism) have painted such lurid pictures of a vengeful hell and God as the angry and vengeful deity who tosses people in there. This is something I am learning to get over as I go deeper into the Orthodox Catholic faith (remember, I am not and never will be Roman Catholic).

In the teachings of Holy Orthodoxy which I have embraced, the emphasis of that faith is precisely on God’s love for mankind which caused Him to become Incarnate and take to Himself a human nature so that He could cure our nature. All of what we emphasize in the Orthodox faith is not about “not doing this,” or “not doing that” so that you won’t get thrown into hell by an angry God. It is about being changed into His likeness by the healing of our natures. This is why I am not the jerk I was many years ago (although I still do have a lot of jerk left to cure). The Christian faith is about doing what we do to cooperate with God’s grace so that we are changed into beings of love, not doing things out of fear of becoming an eternal barbecue. You apparently have missed this if you meant what you said about God.

Moreover, Jesus described God in a most dramatic manner when He gave the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In the story, the son sins violently and with unspeakable rudeness to His father, yet the father does not sit around the mansion waiting for the kid to return so that he can get even. The father spends every day looking off into the distance, longing for the lost relationship he had, and when he sees his tired and beaten son dragging himself towards home, the father runs to the son to embrace him and welcome him home. We miss the depth of just how meaningful this parable was because we don’t understand in the 20th century that for a Jewish man to scoop up his robe and run to his son was unthinkable in that day. Men just didn’t do that. It would have been a humiliating embarrassment for a man to stoop to doing such a thing.

No, my dear brother, you have a concept of God, but not the one Who was revealed to the men who wrote the Sacred Scriptures. And I was offended when you described my Father in heaven like that. Perhaps you have forgotten just how burned out and almost dead from drugs and the wild life I was at twenty-two and then how God’s love set me free, turned my life around, and slowly is making a good person out of me. Take time to think back and remember just how bad off I was. It wasn’t me who changed my life, it was my Father in heaven through His Son, Jesus Christ, and His unchanging love for me. That is the only attitude God has – love. I don’t think you have learned that yet.

2. You make judgments about people and yet you are guilty of the same thing yourself. Jesus didn’t tell us to take care of animals, he told us to take care of people. You complained to me – and with good reason and insight – about the greed and insensitivity to suffering that we see in the TV ads which implore us to buy more crap than we could ever need in a lifetime. You mentioned how most people fall in line and buy, buy, buy with no concern for the poor and needy, yet what have you done for the poor and needy? Remember that the Lord warned us against judging others precisely because we shall be judged by the same standard that we judged others. So if I am judging a man for being sexually immoral and condemning him for it, yet I have a secret mistress on the side (which you know I do not), then Christ warns at the Judgment Seat, I will be judged by the same standard I have imposed on others.

You speak about being alone on the holidays and how sad it is. Try feeding the poor. Go find a rescue mission and volunteer to ladle out soup to those in need. Make up a plan for finding a way to get clothing to the homeless who are cold and freezing. One smile of gratitude from a poor person and I guarantee you that you will be hooked on helping them out. If you are not willing in some way to extend your life to others to help them, then you really are not in a position to say much about the rest of the world not doing so – even though you are correct in your assessment. The best way to change people is leading by example. The more good we do in big and small ways – from feeding the poor to giving a tired shop clerk a smile and a “Thank You,” the more we impact the world for the good. The world will not be changed by great deeds. It is changed every day by the little acts of charity done to those in need. Give of yourself and you will not be lonely.

3. We talked a little about the many people who self-identify as Christians, yet live lives of radical disobedience to what Jesus taught. In other words, they have a “god” that they have made up in their own minds, a god who does not demand of them that they pick up their cross and follow Him to crucifixion of their will and ego, a death to self that will allow them to freely follow Christ. No, their god never said anything like this: Matthew 6:19-20, for instance (“Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth”), or Luke 6:24-25 (“But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort”) or James 5:1-6 (“Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you”). The god of American “Christianity” is a made-up god who makes no demands on anyone. It is the Capitalist Jesus in the three-piece Brooks Brothers suit who smiles benevolently on every attempt we make to gather more and more and more money and stuff to ourselves.

But how are you different in any way at all from this, for you have made up a god who makes no demands on you either. You know I don’t care for the gratuitous use of the “F-bomb,” yet you carpet-bombed me with it in the anger you were venting in your outrage at the televised greed you saw today. Is that how a follower of Christ (you claim to be one) treats others – with such disrespect for their feelings? Jesus called His followers to be witnesses to His life by imitating Him. Can you for even a moment see our Lord dropping the F-bomb in conversation? Would that be a proper way to follow and imitate Him? You said you didn’t care about Jesus saying “turn the other cheek,” and said that anyone who hit you on the cheek would not only get smacked in the face in return, but kicked several times when down. So you choose to obey only those sayings of Jesus which you like personally, but the rest you feel you can ignore?

You are doing exactly what the rest of the world is doing – making up an imaginary god for yourself, one with whom you are comfortable. The men who walked with, talked with, and listened to Jesus wrote down what He said. They declared Him to be God. They reported on His miracles. And they faithfully passed down these truths to the next generation, who in turn, faithfully passed those truths to the next. The Holy Orthodox Church – the faith of the Blessed Trinity – has faithfully preserved these truths through two millennia, often at a cost of great suffering and martyrdom. The Church is filled with the saints who died rather than change one iota of the truths which Jesus gave to the Apostles.

That faith is not Gnosticism with its denial of Christ as the God-man and denial of the personal God who exists in Trinity. This truth was at the heart of the first six centuries of the arguments, debates, and councils of the Christian faith. Many men came along and made up various ideas about Jesus the Christ, such as He was not God in the flesh, He only “appeared to have a human body,” He did not have a real human nature, etc. And in each case, the answer was the same – “This is not what the Apostles taught and what was handed down to us by the Fathers.”

Every false idea about God, every heresy, every strange and bizarre religion, was started by a single man thinking he was smarter than the Apostles and smarter than the Church which kept and taught what the Apostles taught. This is why there are so many religions in the world – because somewhere one man thought he “found something” and then went out and started his own religion because he just knew that he had found the truth that had been hidden for hundreds of years.. Many of these men claim to have had an “experience” (such as Joseph Smith having the angel Moroni hand him the golden tablets) just as you claim to have had an experience. But when anyone’s experience violates what the Apostles taught, then I have to reject that experience.

What the Apostles taught is only found in the Holy Orthodox faith. Even Roman Catholicism, which has a lot of truth in it, has nonetheless strayed from what they once taught with their strange and dreadful Medieval ideas of a God who throws human beings into eternal fire and then enjoys the sight of their suffering (St. Thomas Aquinas taught this horrific idea of God).

I want you to know that I pray for you, as well as my children and grandchildren, every morning. I was an atrocious example of a Christian for a long time and it grieves me to know that I had such a poor influence upon you and them. What is sad for me is that my family is not open to discussion with me now. But that is my own fault for being such a poor excuse for a Christian. Danny Marrow and that whole Fundamentalist clique of Bob Jones style Bible-thumpers made me a very self-righteous and self-centered person who felt that he knew everything and that everyone should listen to him. Orthodoxy teaches us to be humble. This is what I am striving to learn now, but the damage to my family, much to my sorrow, has already been done. I am going to own this for the rest of my life – all the bad, all the hurt, all the sorrow I caused to my family.

So I have said my piece, just as you said yours. I have had a hard time writing this letter to you because I do not want to offend you, but when you described my loving heavenly Father in the manner in which you did – I got pretty upset and I felt had to respond. That is not God. The God I am striving to know better and better allowed Himself to be tortured and killed in the most gruesome manner possible in order that all human beings would have the opportunity to be healed of their sin-sickness and become one in union with Him in love. The teaching of the Fathers is this: “God became man so that man might become a god.” (St. Athanasius) This is far, far more than the idea in some religions that we just go back to some sort of union with an impersonal energy. We are made to love and to experience love. I regret that I am learning that truth so late in life, after, as I said before, all the damage has been done and cannot be undone. May God have mercy on me for all the hurt I did to people.

If you are mad at me now – I will just have to live with that, but I love you too much to not respond to you when I feel I have been given a proper opportunity. And I love my Father in heaven too much not to respond when He is insulted as He was when you painted Him as “a cranky old man with a bad attitude.” That is not God. He is not like our father. He is love, He is personal, and He loves you, even if you don’t feel or understand it in a personal way.

I hope someday you find Him to be the love you are searching for in the deepest parts of your heart.

With affection,

Your brother always,

Ed

Of course, pretty much as I expected, he rejected it all. His first response to me was a little terse and pointed, basically telling me that I should “keep your religion to yourself.” This is understandable, for which of us likes to be told that we are wrong. I certainly didn’t when I was a Bob Jones Fundamentalist. Fundamentalism was right, I was right, and by God, it was my duty to get you “saved” by pounding the Bible into your thick skull. I know I annoyed a lot of people as I  “witnessed for Jesus,” often in very aggressive and rude ways. You have to remember that Fundamentalist preachers are guys who think that a funeral is a perfect place for evangelism and asking people to bow their heads and “accept Jaaaaayzuz,” even in the middle of their deep grief.

So I really don’t blame him for telling me to mind my own business.  But I’ve been wanting to say what I said for quite a while and when Bob insulted our loving heavenly Father, it actually really bothered me to the point I felt that now was the time.

And in the end, in a second shorter Email, he said he loves me.  We’ll move on from here. no need to repeat what I said. He apologized for using the “F-bombs” and he knows what I think now and that is enough.  One thing I have learned in my life – God does the saving of people, not me.

It is good that I remember that always.