I used to think religion tasted horrible,
but now I know I was just eating the fake stuff.
A couple of buddies and I decided to lose a little weight this year. These are guys who will give you lots of trouble if you don’t follow through, and there’s no way I wanted to be the last guy dropping pounds, so I changed a few of my habits.
On the first morning, I stood in front of the refrigerator with the door wide open like my teenage boys do, as though they are watching a movie—a very cold and expensive movie. I reached for a bagel and some Philadelphia cream cheese in the familiar silver-wrapped package. This is not the breakfast choice of a love-handle-shedding champion, but I spread it a little thinner than usual and thought maybe I’d lose a few ounces anyway.
Our family friend Ashley was staying at our house and must have bought the low-fat cream cheese this time, I thought as I cut a chunk out of the wrapper and spread it like a veneer on the bagel. I took a bite and it tasted terrible. I honestly couldn’t believe anybody ate this low-fat junk. I thought, Maybe if I put more of the fake cream cheese on my bagel it might taste a little more like the real thing. So I cut a bigger chunk out of the bar and spread it on thick. I took another bite, but no difference. It actually tasted worse.
I took the second half of the bagel and decided I’d go no-nonsense on it too. What the heck. If this stuff is half the calories, I can use twice as much, I reasoned. I cut another couple of big chunks out of the cream cheese, leaving just enough so I could put it back in the refrigerator with dignity. There was no salvaging this healthy substitute. Every bite was as awful as the last.
Sweet Maria came into the kitchen as I finished force-feeding myself this lackluster breakfast.
“Hey,” I said, “will you please tell Ashley not to get this low-fat junk anymore? It’s horrible.”
“Sure, I guess,” she said with a quizzical look on her face.
Then she walked over to the near-empty package, inspected it, and started belly-laughing.
“What?” I said, confused.
In a satisfying tone, the kind that revels in moments like this, she explained that I had just eaten nearly a whole bar of Crisco lard.
Around the house, we call that being “head-faked.” It’s a sports term, I guess, but we say it when we thought things were one way but we got duped and it turns out that they are entirely different. Unfortunately, it happens to me in life all the time, and in faith too. It’s the stuff that masquerades as the real thing but it’s not. The perplexing thing is, instead of putting the fake stuff down, our reaction is usually to put more fake stuff on or decide the fake stuff, while not that good, is good enough.
If you ask a thousand people who don’t want anything to do with religion why that is, they’ll tell you all the reasons they don’t like it, but I doubt they’d be describing the real stuff. They’ll describe a guy or a gal on a television show who told them if they gave money, they’d get rich. They’ll talk about the big hairdo or outrageous makeup of some televangelist and the absurd things they said and did. They’ll talk about someone who was religious but broke their hearts or their promise, or lied and got caught or went to jail, or who cried a lot on camera but it looked like they were faking it. Or they’ll talk about someone who told them that God hated who they were or how they acted or who they married or couldn’t forgive what they’d done. It’s a sad situation, honestly. The only way they can keep from being head-faked anymore is for somebody to give them a taste of the real thing. And what’s great is that we each have a shot at being that person.
In the Bible there’s a guy named Timothy who gets a letter from another guy named Paul. Paul is like an older brother to Timothy. In the letter, Paul tells him to watch out for people who act holy but don’t get their holiness from Jesus but from the stuff they’ve done, which is pure delusion. Paul called this kind of religious devotion a form of godlessness, meaning it’s the exact opposite of what it’s pretending to be. He was telling Timothy to watch out for people who fake it with their faith. In other words, some religion looks like it’s wrapped in the right package, but it’s actually Crisco.
There are a couple of examples in the Bible of folks who were faking it. Jesus usually used lawyers and religious people as examples for what He didn’t like, and that hits pretty close to home for me. One religious guy named Sceva had seven sons. They were talking about Jesus, but it turns out that they were full of Crisco and one of the bad guys they met called them on it. He said, “I know who Jesus is, and I know who Paul is . . . but who are you?”
Like Sceva’s sons, it seems like a lot of people who say they know Jesus have all the right words and all the right moves, but what they don’t have is sincerity and authenticity. They talk a big game and use a bunch of twenty-pound words to describe an otherwise simple idea about faith. But in reality, they never really do anything. It’s like a guy with a cowboy hat, one duck, one cow, and a tractor calling himself a rancher. We don’t want to be all hat and no cattle when it comes to faith.
The Bible story about Sceva’s sons ends with them getting their butts kicked. Not my words, the Bible’s. God doesn’t like it when people fake it. It’s the same as identity theft in a way, only the fakers are stealing God’s identity and using it to make people feel bad or force them to change who they are to fit into a particular religious community. You can usually tell when someone is doing this because, just like Sceva’s sons, they use Jesus’ name a lot, but it doesn’t seem that they have any of the power Jesus said would come with knowing Him. That power is easy to spot because it usually comes in the form of grace and acceptance, as well as sincere love and respect. It’s the kind of power that actually does things rather than just talking about them.
More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself saying or doing things, calculating how it will make me sound or look to others. For example, I say that I don’t have the time to do something when what I really lack is compassion. Jesus is asking me and the rest of the people in the world to stop faking it. He wants us to fight the temptation to merely have the right wrapper and instead be exactly who He made us to be and who we are right where we are.
None of us want to make God look bad. But in the end, being fake makes God look worse. It makes people think He tastes like Crisco.
Not only that, but when we meet people who have been fed the fake stuff about who God is and what He’s about, it’s not surprising that they have a little indigestion. So we can either spend our time talking about wrappers or we can show them what God is really made of. We can show them that God is full of love and is the source of hope and every creative idea. People don’t want to be told that their experiences were wrong or that their wrapper or someone else’s wrapper is made of the wrong stuff. Instead, we get to be the ones to show them real love from a real God.
I’m more careful about what I grab now when I go to the refrigerator. I’m a little afraid that I’ll end up with another bagel full of lard, or perhaps worse. But if it does happen again, I’m not going to fake it or take another bite, and I won’t put it back in the wrapper for the next person. I’m going to put it down, walk away slowly, and grab something that’s better for me. Maybe an apple, although people have had problems in the past with those too.