And No Religion Too

By Edward Goble

And No Religion, Too is a group of essays about life in the Kingdom of God. Some of the stories are about faith and simplicity, about the sacramental experience with the risen Christ that seems to war against the rational, rigid, unbudging mandates of actual church life in the West.

Some of the writing is about the Western church itself, the fragmented but beautiful, self-guided but sincere, expression of the Body of Christ passed down to us from the Reformers, who, I've always thought, didn't 'reform' nearly enough.

As I was writing ANRT, musing about John Lennon and the haunting lyrics of Imagine, writing stories about dog kennels and The Green Mile, I was thinking hard about my walk with Christ for some thirty-plus years and wondering how, with the best of intentions, we'd gotten so far removed from that amazing, Spirit-filled, expression of kingdom life we read about in the Gospel.

I began to consider that maybe the Reformation, as good as it was, was not the proper starting point for a heart that was crying out for relationship with the risen Lord and community with His Body.

I began to read the old stuff. There for a while if it was written after about 800 AD I wasn't interested. I read the church fathers, the real ones, the guys that were handed the reigns from the very Apostles. Bishops, priests, monks and holy people who wrote about the very things my heart was longing for. What I found was a wealth of literature and faith that I didn’t even know existed. Works written long before Rome split from Orthodox Constantinople, ultimately winding up with the papacy, and centuries before the Reformers rocked that paradigm.

And No Religion, Too, is the tip of the iceberg for me. It was baby-step number one. My journey since 2007 when this book was finished has been different than I would have ever imagined. It has taken my wife and I, and our youngest daughter, down a path that led east. To Greece, Russia, Constantinople, to the ancient faith of the Orthodox church. And the more I study the more amazed and humbled I become.

I'm not there yet. Who is? right? But if you choose to read ANRT, maybe it will trigger your journey, I don't know. Maybe it will resonate in your heart another way or just make you mad.

The things that I felt strongly about in 2007, many of them anyway, aren't even on my radar anymore. I would have written it completely different if I'd penned it in 2015, but I guess that's the beauty of walking with Jesus; we change, but He never does. He just keeps drawing us into a deeper walk with Him and, if we're open to His Spirit, He'll keep breaking, and changing, and molding us into His image. I can feel that happening to me, and I see it taking place in my wife and youngest daughter.

God bless you, friend. May your journey lead to the end of yourself and the blessed peace of Christ.

Ed Goble, March, 2015

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Goble
• Release date: Jan 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465875600

Edward Goble

Edward Goble is a creative generalist who is at once a designer, artist, musician, author, cook, and anything else that sparks creative imagination. Chiefly, though, he would describe himself as a follower of Jesus, focused on observing the goodness and beauty of God in everyday life.Among Ed's books, is the inspiring "The Bible Devotional", an easy-to-read, refreshing addition to contemporary devotional books. Each book of the Bible is featured individually in Ed's conversational, story-telling style that will make you feel as if you are just sitting with a friend talking about Jesus."Ed is an amazing storyteller who has absolute faciltiy of words, both spoken and written, as well as the visual arts that require no words." Dean Arvidson, HarperCollins Christian Publishers

Book preview

AND NO RELIGION, TOO

Thoughts on Faith and Church

By Edward Goble

AND NO RELIGION, TOO

Copyright © 2008 by Edward Goble

ISBN: 143826254X

EAN-13: 9781438262543

Revised 1/17/2014

Cover & Interior Design by Bluegrass Creative

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from:

The Holy Bible, New King James Version © 1984 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Other Scripture quotations are from:

Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT) © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV) © 1973, 1984 by International Bible Society, used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without prior written permission.

For information:

Edward Goble

P.O. Box 442,

Campbellsville, KY 42719

edgoble.com

Contents

Chapter One – The Funny Side of God

Chapter Two – On Being Right

Chapter Three – If You build It, They Will Come

Chapter Four – The Seduction of Christianity

Chapter Five – And No Religion, Too

Chapter Six – Thoughts on Living Free

Chapter Seven – After Their Kind

Chapter Eight – Don’t Take the Pole

Chapter Nine – Those Daring Young Men (and Women)

Chapter Ten – Progeny

Epilogue

Chapter One – The Funny Side of God

I was married five days before my twentieth birthday and ordained about three weeks later. So I guess I’ve been an official husband about twenty days longer than I’ve been an official minister. Usually I don’t think I’ve done a very good job with either title, but thirty years later I’m kind of over worrying about it. Looking back, I have often wondered what those Elders might have been thinking as they knelt beside me and extended their hands of covering and blessing at my ordination. If I had been praying over me I would have been asking God to give the kid a clue, not a church. I barely knew God and what I learned during my brief stint at Bible college was that I didn’t think like many of the people I’d been thrown in with. Most of what I knew about God I learned from my mother when none of the family went to church and my clearest memories are of mom standing over a steamy iron, working through endless baskets of wrinkled shirts, dutifully pressing every piece, hanging them from makeshift clotheslines in the living room for people I didn’t know. She would iron for hours watching her stories and singing gospel hymns in a sweet country twang that reminded you of Tammy Wynette. When she sat down to rest with a glass of iced tea, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a dishtowel and humming What a Friend We Have in Jesus, she’d close her eyes and smile and you could see Jesus all over her. I knew early on that God was real, His love dripped from my mother like rain from a slicker.

I was probably only nine or ten when the church parade came down the street and disrupted our game of football. Lance, Larry, Tavo, and I moved grudgingly to the side of the street to avoid being run over by the church bus that was decorated like a Mexican pinata and being driven by a clown. We impatiently tolerated the parade while other children around the neighborhood burst from their homes, jumping, pointing, and spazzing about. One of the clowns, or it may have been the guy on stilts, handed us each an invitation to their church on the upcoming Sunday. It was decorated with drawings of balloons and streamers and promised us a grand time if we would be standing out on the curb on Sunday morning to be picked up by the church bus. I recall my parents thinking it was a great idea for me to be out of their hair for a few hours. Mom made me put on clean jeans and a button-up shirt and there I stood, waiting for the pinata bus on Sunday morning when the grass was still wet with dew and you could hear the birds mocking you from the power lines.

The bus had been raped of its charm. It looked like the after picture at the Rose Parade. Someone had hurriedly stripped it of decorations and tried to restore its former ugliness for Sunday morning rounds. The contrast was not lost on the three fourth-graders who cautiously boarded with hopes of a good time. We convinced ourselves that they must have erected an actual Big Top on the church grounds and were all there, even now, planning the Show of Shows, probably feeding the wild animals and putting on stilts. It turned out to be a very entertaining morning, not in the way I imagined, or would have preferred, but memorable, like watching the Crocodile Hunter pick up a venomous snake by the tail, like you’re in the presence of craziness. Memorable like that.

We were shown seats somewhere in the middle of the auditorium, a big, cool place that smelled of old wood, even older people and Welch’s grape juice. Portraying the life of Christ, the sun shown through stained glass windows. There was a window with a nativity scene. It had a bright yellow star lighting up the deep blue night sky over a rickety carport-type shelter like the one I’d seen on my aunt’s mantle at Christmas. There were animals standing around, and a few people, and a box of straw holding a glowing baby Jesus. Another window showed a grown up Jesus surrounded by kids with one little guy sitting on his lap, reaching up as if to tug at Jesus’ beard. Jesus was smiling and not trying to slap his hand. Another showed Jesus hanging on a cross against an ominous charcoal sky with shadowy people standing around with their heads down. Finally, there was a window with yellow and orange glass that magnified the sunlight so you could hardly look at it for more than a minute. If you would squint your eyes and filter the brightness, you could see an empty cave and an angel sitting on a rock. Underneath it said: He is Risen! I’d never seen Bible stories depicted in colored glass. It was beautiful, but when combined with the organ music that I equated with Count Dracula and the odd scent of grape juice, a little spooky.

I don’t remember much about the actual church service; there are just surreal snapshots in my mind that replay as if recorded on a disk. The guys and I were sitting there with our senses on high alert. There were no clowns, no circus, and no animals. There were other kids, but it didn’t look like they were dressed for fun. In the row in front of us was a woman with orange hair. It was twisted and wadded in a vertical column that caused it to look a little like that building over in Italy that isn’t quite straight. When everyone stood to sing, she and the other women in her row began to shake and sway as if they were having a private earthquake. It made you kind of dizzy to look at them. At some point during the music, some of the brightly dressed women started wailing and making strange Oh-Jesus noises. They would push out of their rows and scurry to the front of the sanctuary, falling ungracefully on the altar steps. The preacher would just smile and walk by them, putting a hand on their shoulders as they lay there. I think he was checking for a pulse.

All the sudden the woman with orange hair started convulsing and then, without giving her stack of hair fair warning, she spilled onto the aisle between the wooden pews like a plate of Jello. She laid there right next to where we were standing. I didn’t know whether to help her or climb on the pew so whatever got her wouldn’t be able to get me. She lay slumped in a heap invisible to all but the three of us boys, who, wide-eyed, tried to maintain bladder control. Then, like a fighter trying to get to his feet before the ten-count, she stood, gathering herself. She raised her arms high overhead and above the singing and shouts of Glory Be, started speaking a gibberish that sounded like the natives on the documentaries we’d watched in Social Studies. She jabbered about as if in a trance. I thought she lost her marbles right in front of God and everyone. Then, suddenly, she fell silent and calmly returned to her seat, shining with sweat, her leaning tower of hair more askew than before. We stared up at her wondering if she knew our language or if she was even from our planet.

My mom explained to me later that the woman with the orange hair was probably speaking with tongues, a visual which made perfect sense to my young mind. I wondered how many tongues she had. Mom