Last week I was walking through the Chicago Midway Airport when I spotted a young man sporting what appeared to be a hand made t-shirt.  It had a cross drawn on it with a circle around it and a line through it (like the no-parking signs).  Beneath it he had written: ‘Bad Religion’.

My initial reaction was one of outrage and hurt.  How could he say that about the Faith that I so desperately love?  How dare he say that!

But as I fumed, my thoughts shifted.  I began considering why he wore that shirt.  Surely he knew that it would raise a reaction. As I deliberated, I concluded that he must have been wounded in some way by this thing that we call Christianity.  And as I relfected, I realized that he was right, Christianity has become a ‘bad religion’.

That it has become a religion at all was never our Lord’s intent.  There were already plenty of codes and rules for moral living even in his day.  In fact, most of what Jesus stood against was just that sort of thinking, that man could reach God by somehow being better than others.  And so James writes, ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’ (James 1:27).  Not a system of rules to prove our holiness, but rather a heart of service, demonstrating that same love Jesus had for the prostitute and the thief and even those who placed him on the very cross that apparently this young man so disliked.  This religious spirit was just the very thing that Jesus had come to set us free from.

I suddenly found myself wanting to turn around and find him again and tell him ‘You’re right, Christianity is a bad religion.  Your right, the cross, our religious symbols, means nothing without the man that hung on that cross.  Let me tell you about him, not about religion.’

What has happened? When did we become the Pharisees?  Maybe this boy was angry, maybe he was a Satan worshipper, or maybe this boy was an angel, just wondering if anyone would even recognize the truth of a hand written T-shirt.

To the King,

David