What Do You Want Your Religion/Your Faith/God to Do For You?

We are going to wander around a bit to get to the point (I know, I know, what's new about that?!), so hang in there with me.

I just finished reading Steven Levitt's and Stephen Dubnar's book Superfreakonomics, and enjoyed having my thinking provoked by it as much or even more than their earlier book, Freakonomics. In a fascinating discussion of the omnipresent conversations about climate change/global warming, they cite an article by a classically educated journalist who, among other things, became the mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

"Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." (Boris Johnson, " We've Lost Our Fear of Hellfire, But Put Climate Change in Its Place, The Telegraph, 2006)

And then I revisited the "pre-reading" handout about "The Myth of Redemptive Violence" for our next Faith Journey gathering (January 26th, 6:30 PM, Room 1 -- if you haven't joined us, or haven't joined us for a while, why don't you?) that starts by citing something that Walter Brueggemann says in our Living the Questions videos:

"We are going to deal theologically with the problem of violence forever because it is intrinsic to our inheritance. The question for God for all of us who follow this God is is whether we can resist that stuff that is intrinsically present in our existence."

So all of that got me thinking about the question "What do I want my religion/my faith/ God to do for me?

Do I have an inherited, intrinsic need to be reminded of my imperfection? Do I want to be reminded how I do not measure up (the whole guilt and self-loathing thing?) Do I really yearn for an never-known and only barely imagined pre-existent perfect world from which, through no real fault of my own, I have fallen? Do I want God to reinforce the notion that I am somehow chosen because all those others are somehow so obviously not chosen? Do I want God to bless me and mine and by blessing me and mine, give me leave to not worry about you and yours, or more correctly, to not worry about them and theirs?

Or...

Do I want to be reminded from time to time that I am inherently, intrinsically self-interested, and so is my culture, and do I want to be reminded and invited and empowered to recognize God as the one who continually calls me away from that "intrinsically present inheritance" and toward the power and promise of love? Do I want to remember and revisit and recommit to the model for that kind of movement that Jesus continually, and sometimes surprisingly, offers? Do I want to be comforted and strengthened for the journey from intrinsic, inherent (and all too often violent?)self-interest to redemptive agape?

Hmmm.