Atheists and Apostles... Believers All

Hilarious stand-up Dane Cook has a comedy routine that I particularly love. ( If you look it up on YouTube, it's not all that "clean"...so beware. :-P)

He speaks of encountering an atheist who sneezes, all over everyone on a public transit,  and when Cook offers a “God bless you”, the ungrateful wretch rejects it, saying “I’m an atheist, you can’t bless me”.

Annoyed, Cook then launches a debate about faith, heaven, and hell. The guy condescendingly scoffs at the religious inferences. Cook, a Catholic, spars with the guy about Purgatory and Heaven -- and then lets the atheist conclude close to this, “Well, when I die, I will become one with the earth and become a beautiful tree, spreading my limbs over grass places and providing shade and shelter for children. You think you’ll be in heaven but you’ll just be dead, like me.” Cook pauses for a minute, and then replies to this effect, “If you go before me, I’ll cut you down, grind you into pulp, and print the Bible on you!”

They're both right. 

The atheist is not far off, just looking at it funny. Yes, he will become one with the earth – but that’s not the end of the story. The Story never ends, because it’s about eternal life.

Perpetuity. That’s what Christianity is really about. 

It’s not about human individuals who have led – or lead -- the Church on their own agenda. 

It’s the story of the Creator God and His eternal quest to gather in the inhabitants of this earth, much like an eternal Noah gathering creatures into the Ark.  By the way, interestingly enough, all pre-Judaic religions had a female goddess.  God “the Father”, the unknown mysterious Creator, could very well be female – but that’s an entirely different blog.

The Bible was recorded by scribes who lettered the stories of the ancients onto vellum for future generations to translate in their own language system. Remember playing “Telephone”, in a circle, as kids? The first kid whispers something into the next kid’s ear, and so on, and so on, and with bated breath the whole circle waits for the last kid, who shouts out something remotely resembling the original statement. 

The basic Truths are: God created the world, gave people free will, let them loose; they sometimes followed and sometimes didn’t so He laid out plans for a Messiah, a Savior. Over 400 prophecies in the Old Testament line out the plans. A pure young girl is chosen to bear the Messiah, throwing off all the millennia of scholars who thought He’d arrive in a blaze of glory and take over the world, like all the other kings. The Baby grows up, works as a carpenter, and waits until the last three years of His earthly life to start spreading The Word – and then dies on a cross without taking anyone with Him to the Kingdom. Before the crucifixion, He leaves instructions to take of the Last Supper until He comes back again to take us Home.

Denominations get hung up on key phrases. Methodists get stuck on grace and grace and grace. The Mormons particularly cling to “ be fruitful and multiply”. Nazarene women wear skirts, tennis shoes, and no make-up as homage to the Levitical “do not adorn yourselves”. Messianic Jews and Adventists worship on Saturday. Baptists won’t let women lead anything -- and the Church of Christ does not let women speak, not even to pray, in the presence of men.   Catholics get hung up on revering Mary, the Mother of God, which in and of itself is perfectly acceptable for the woman who carried the Baby,  unless she starts to supersede God in a person's life ( which she’s not supposed to. But I digress.)

The early Church evolved into the Catholic Church, who unfortunately took the phrase “ one holy and apostolic church” literally to mean that they had reigning power over the earth and could slay people in the name of God. Whoops.  

Luther’s theses tried to redesign the church during the Reformation, so that the sins of the fathers would be sloughed off. John Wesley and John Calvin also re-tooled the Church to fit their version of one holy and apostolic church. Men have blundered in the interpretation of Scripture and the creation of doctrine as they seek the Truth…but it is one church.

It’s ‘one holy and apostolic church’.  One.  Holy.  Apostolic.  

One.  The body of believers.  One. body.  I had cancer and had parts of my body excised…but the rest of it still functions as ordered. All the other billion cells that form the housing of this spirit regenerate, some weekly, and have continued the morphing of zygote Amy to girl Amy to woman Amy to older woman, and so on. They all work together. The ones that started a mutiny have been dispatched. The Church breathes and grows and develops, like a tree, and will continue to grow and breathe and develop until Jesus calls us Home.

Holy. The Church is holy. Church-es are holy places where people go to try and be holier. 

People cannot be holy. They are people, and therefore not part of the Holy Realm. We are mortals idiots who think we KNOW how to be holy by what we DO. We not holy, nope, mmm mm. 

The Church is holy, because Christ. built. the. Church.

Apostolic.  The Catholic Church is led by the successors of the apostles, and the Protestant churches are offshoots of that vine. The successors of the apostles. 

Every bishop has been ordained by someone who was ordained by someone, and so on, into antiquity, by someone who was ordained by those who KNEW the apostles. The Protestant  leaders disagreed and broke ranks with the Catholic church back in the ages when the Catholic church ran amok with power-madness. Yes, the Catholic church has been filled with terrible sinners. What church hasn't -- or isn't? That's why we're there...

Back to the sneezing atheist - who is not a non-believer. He believes in creation, whether or not he admits it, if he believes he will become one with the earth. HA All religions and faiths, and agnosticism, and atheism have common tenets. They either believe in or reject similar deities,  and all of them contain something good. All of them.

Jesus is where all that goodness comes together, the one god, the one deity, the only One who walked among us and lived our silly little life. He's the only one who died for us too. That atheist will never see a tree voluntary give up it's life for him, no matter how wonderful the tree is. 

“Gesundheit!" To your good health, for goodness' sake.