I hesitate to tell you this, because when you find out what I want to talk about, you are liable to punch the button on your radio, click a button in your browser, and head off into other pursuits. I have given this a lot of thought and study, and I have come to the conclusion that, sooner or later, one way or another, we are all going to die. See, I knew you would want to buzz off, but stay with me a minute.

I take my vitamins in hope of getting rid of some of the creaks, and I follow my doctor’s instructions. But every once in a while, I stop and laugh at myself because I know I am fighting a losing battle. The battle is worth fighting, because we have a lot of work to do, but I know, and you know, that in the end, we all die.

A man known to us as the Apostle Paul faced up to the same questions of mortality and suffering for different reasons (He faced death in more ways than we ever will.) and he used an interesting metaphor for the human body: a tent.

Many years ago, before I learned better about arguing religion, I was engaged in a discussion focused on people who never even heard the name of Jesus anytime in their lives. How could it be right for God to torture these people forever? Tell me he is just going to leave them dead and we have one picture. Tell me he has arranged for their eternal torment and we have another altogether.

And then, there are the children. Are all these people, including countless children, who had never had a chance to be saved going to burn for all eternity?

Perhaps you say, Well, I believe that God will make a way. Well, then you and I would be in agreement. But I think it would be strange indeed if in all the pages of the Bible, we couldn’t find so much as a hint as to what that way is.

Funny things happen to us whenever we try to organize ourselves. I guess it is just in the way we are made. Even cows do it. When they start back from the field at milking time they follow a regular path, and I’m told they line up in order. And chickens must do it do, otherwise where does the expression pecking order come from?

And so it is with churches. We all have our pecking order, but sometimes the whole thing gets out of hand. We say we love order, and we put together hierarchies with pecking orders from archbishop to bishop to priest to minister to deacon.

There is even an effort to find these hierarchies in the Bible—or rather to name them after biblical terms. The fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a case in point.

What does it mean to follow God? Paul called on the Ephesian Christians to: Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children.

This is a high calling. As a child will imitate the mother or the father, so we are to imitate God. But how can we do this? God is in heaven and we are on earth.

In Ephesians 5, Paul provides us with a starting point—the imitation of Christ—and more.

All of us have special people in our lives. These are people who give us great happiness—people who we love to be with. People we can talk to anytime and into the small hours of the night.

Even pastors of churches who have been through many cities have people who are very special to them and who they long to see again. Think about that. What is it that makes people special to one another? I am not talking about romantic love. We all understand that. What is it that makes the deep friendship?

There was a relationship like this between Paul and the saints at Philippi, a Greek city many miles north of Corinth. There has to be a reason for this kind of special relationship. It doesn’t happen everywhere and all the time. What was different about Philippi?

I have given this a lot of thought, and I have finally figured out what’s wrong with Christianity. It’s people. There is not a thing wrong with the Christian faith. After all, what could be better than a religion brought in person by the Son of God?

And think of all the wonderful teachings of Jesus, of love for God and neighbor, of gentleness and kindness and goodness. The problem with this is that Jesus left this marvelous religion in the hands of people, and that’s where things tend to go wrong.

We might like to think that Christians in the first century were better people than we are, but it just isn’t so. Nor are we any better than they were. In Philippians 2, we find Paul addressing some of these same problems.

Many pastors and preachers see nothing wrong with the fact that today’s church doesn’t believe exactly the same thing as the primitive Christian church believed and taught. They place no small amount of weight upon what succeeding generations of theologians believed and taught.

After all, those were learned men, and the primitive Christians were, well, primitive. They were fishermen, tax collectors, tent makers. What did they know about theology?

The problem is, these fishermen, tax collectors, and tent makers are the people who have told us what Jesus taught them. A really interesting case in point is what the First Christians believed and taught about death and the afterlife.

There is a difference between religion and faith. That may be a little hard to explain, but I think it is fair to say that a lot of people have a religion who have very little in the way of faith. Their religion is more a matter of ideas, arguments, positions, creeds, dogmas, and the like than it is about the heart. Churches can easily become the religious equivalent of political parties. They may be conservative or they may be liberal, and theological discussions can involve as much spin as any political discussion. Churches’ creeds can be just as political as any party platform, and heretics are merely people who are out to change the platform.

In fact, political parties are disturbingly like religions and churches are disturbingly like political parties. But faith—real faith—has to be something entirely different from that. For one thing, the first prerequisite of real faith is honesty, and honesty is not possible without her sister, humility. When you think about it, unrelenting honesty leads naturally to humility. These twin sisters are conspicuous by their absence from most religious discourse. It is a lot like politics—without humility and honesty, you don’t get faith; you get religion.

Unfortunately, most of what you encounter in this world is religion rather than faith. It is a creed, a dogma, a set of doctrines carefully crafted to explain God and the Bible. The problem is that every dogmatic position has its inconsistencies and contradictions which have to be maintained, and they are too often maintained at the cost of simple honesty. It is, after all, a lot like politics. When I thought about this, my thoughts went to a marvelous statement by one of the Old Testament prophets. He said this:

He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?