You know, I brought a stack of calendars to church one Sunday because I wanted us to see something. How do we actually make sense of what we’re being told? How do we know what to believe?
And here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: we sift everything through multiple filters. We have scripture—the big red calendar, if you will. That’s the foundation. But then we’ve got tradition layered on top of it, all these patterns that have been passed down. And then we’ve got our own experience, our own reality, and that brings something to the table too.
Now, you hear it on the news. Someone’s convinced God told them to do something horrible. Something that doesn’t fit. And you know what? If you actually sifted it through scripture, through tradition, through the experience of faithful people before you, it wouldn’t hold up. It wouldn’t survive. But see, that’s the thing about filters—they only work if you actually use them. If you actually do the work of sifting instead of just grabbing at the first thing that feels right to you.
And here’s where it gets hard to talk about, because some of the people who get pulled into that kind of thinking—they can’t use reason because their reason isn’t working right. They need help. They need mercy. They need someone to help them sift, because their mind is struggling.
But the rest of us? We’ve got no excuse. We’ve been given these tools. Scripture. Community. Our own lived experience. The question is whether we actually use them before we act.
A reflection by Rev. MaryGean Cope