“THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS DNA” Part IV
John the Baptist said there is one thing God cannot do if we are to remain freely human. He cannot force us to repent, to think higher and better thoughts, and to change our ways. He cannot force the militarists within all people to give up their war mongering and their primitive belief that might makes right. They have to repent, change their thinking and behavior.
God cannot force the tax collectors, the “Internal Revenue Services” of all peoples by whatever name, to understand that the power to tax is the power to kill and destroy. God cannot force the greed merchants of all cultures and classes to see that the accumulation of power, fame and things is not the supreme goal of life. In their freedom, people must repent.
God cannot force the fornicators, the adulterers, the philanderers and sex merchants and sex marketers of all culture and classes and peoples to see that human sexuality is a sacred gift to be kept in union with the soul and sense of self. A unified body and soul make the human being whole. But human beings have to decide to make it so.
Religious DNA is normal, says John the Baptist. No one has an exclusive claim on it. It is a divine gift given from the beginning. Or as Jeffrey Kluger put it in his Time Magazine article, “If human beings were indeed divinely assembled, why wouldn’t our list of parts include a genetic chip that would enable us to contemplate our maker?” (op. cit. P.68) When critics say, “God is an artifact of the brain,” Lindon Eaves, a psychiatrist and behavioral genetics expert replies, “of course, concepts of God reside in the brain. They certainly don’t reside in the toe.” (ibid)
Nevertheless, John the Baptist offers no comfort to those who take pride in an exclusive genetic religious pedigree. Nor does he offer comfort to those who would hide behind curious doctrines of predestination or divine election as a chosen people or as a people damned for the greater glory of God.
Nor does John offer comfort to those who claim they are biologically predetermined to be the way they are and can do nothing about it. John would say, if you can transcend yourself enough to make that claim, you can transcend yourself enough to change yourself, that is, to repent, to open up to new realities, to allow yourself and the church and society to be made new.
The prophets from Moses to Joshua to Amos to Isaiah to Jeremiah to John to Jesus were all wrong if we are genetically predetermined by an exclusive, genetically selective God gene. For these prophets say to us again and again, choose this day, decide, repent, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow, bring forth the fruits of righteousness.
And in this New Year we hear and recognize their call, for from the beginning, we all were given the God gene, the religious DNA. That is why we have been incorrigibly religious. But now John would have us repent, open up to decide for faith, hope and love and be incorrigibly righteous to prepare our hearts and minds for the coming King and Kingdom.
Let it be so.
