Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

James 1:27

When the tsunami struck in 2004, the response from the Christian world was immediate and decisive, as it always is. Well-led and well-organized disaster relief teams were on the ground before the politicians could even decide on a budget. When Katrina hit New Orleans, churches sent people by the thousands to help, and these same disaster relief teams were feeding people as soon as the wind died down. Christians are well-organized and ready to help the world because it’s our mandate; it’s what we’re here to do.

So why don’t we get any respect?

Laying the Blame

Well, a lot of people blame the early church. When arguing against God, atheists love to go back several centuries and point out atrocities perpetrated in the distant past by men of the cloth. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, it’s a pretty long list. But is that really why your neighbour or co-worker chuckles when you tell him you’re a Christian? Can the heinous acts of 12^th century bishops really reach through the ages and malign our modern reputation? Does the atheist movement have so much power that it's undermining an establishment over two thousand years in the making?

Or are we doing it to ourselves? If we were to ask our non-Christian friends what the term “Christian” means to them, what are some of the words we’d hear? They don’t need to go back eight hundred years when they can just use convenient words like “judgmental,” “antiquated,” or “narrow-minded.”

Religion is This

I think that what our neighbours see is a bunch of prudes locked behind stained glass windows, waiting for holy fire to rain down upon anybody who is not one of us and therefore wicked. What they see is a superiority complex on two legs, an us-versus-them tirade or good old-fashioned Bible thumping that’s just dying to be unleashed. It’s unfortunate that so often our neighbours are correct. There’s not a passage in the Bible where Jesus tells us that our purpose on this earth is to despise liberals, homosexuals, or even atheists, and yet pulpits around the world decry these individuals every Sunday.

It’s so much easier to hook believers by analyzing a person rather than an act, by applying a “destined for damnation” label to an individual rather than preaching on a type of activity and going to the trouble of explaining why it is abhorrent to God. After all, if a person is the enemy and destined for Hell, we can forget about that person and concentrate on heaping love upon our own Christian brothers and sisters.

Pure Religion is This

But God’s love doesn’t distinguish between a believer and a crack addict; why does ours? Conditional love is not Biblical. It’s against everything Jesus taught, and it’s wrong. We are the conduit for God’s love on earth, and our purpose is to deliver that love wherever it’s needed, free of charge and with no questions asked.

James tells us that our religion should be pure and undefiled in the sight of God. He says that we need to keep ourselves unstained by the world, and Jesus himself tells us we are separate from that world. But we can’t stop there because our mandate, our very purpose, is to work within the world and to bring its people to truth by our deeds and by our hearts. Separate but involved. Unstained but also removing stains. And when it comes to removing those stains, no amount of door-knocking, pamphlet-dropping or righteous indignation can compare to a life lived in demonstration of God’s love for every single human being.

By Our Hearts

James speaks of widows and orphans. There are widows in our world today, and it’s not just wives whose husbands have been lost to tragedy. We have widows today who have lost their husbands to work, to distraction, to marriages which “just didn’t work out.” Twenty years ago I could drive by a woman pushing a baby carriage and smile at the thought of her just starting out with a new family. Today I see a woman pushing a stroller and wonder if her baby has enough food, clothes, warmth.

A daddy.

Three Little Girls

It’s hard. I’ve been through divorce, and I thank God that there were no children in that first marriage. My current wife, the woman to whom I know I was truly led, is also the veteran of a previous marriage, except that she came out of it with three little girls. Neither of us followed Jesus back then, so we did what any wise and worldly person would do about what we considered unhealthy relationships. It’s not that we were bad or sinful people, it’s that we were worldly people, and to us divorce was an effective option. Paperwork.

I look at my three precious stepdaughters, whom I love with complete and total abandon and into whom I try to instill strong values and great humour, and I wonder where they would be without a father, surrogate or otherwise. I wonder where they would be if we didn’t also love their biological father as the complex, hilarious and supportive human being that he is.

It’s a Love Thing

I wonder, and then I think of the kids who aren’t so lucky, children who don’t have a daddy. I think of all the moms out there with these beautiful children and nobody to help love and nurture them. God has created such potential in these kids, and it tears me up that they may never see that potential because their moms have no choice but to spend so much of their time just trying to keep the lights on and the furnace running. And I wonder what I can do.

It’s not a charity thing, it’s a love thing, because that’s where real charity starts. Can we bring ourselves to just love these struggling moms? Can we look at them without judging their situations, without pitying them, and just love them as God loves them? As welcome and necessary and Biblical as it is, James doesn’t say to just fire off a cheque. He says to visit them, to know them.

To love them.

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