I don’t know about you, but I am feeling a little blue this Christmas season. The main reason is the lack of social interaction. I miss not being able to see my family and spend time with them, and that makes me feel a little sad and lonely. But you know, it’s funny because if this were any other year I’d probably be feeling stressed out about having to deal with out of town relatives. Normally the holidays are known for an extra added level of stress in dealing with your relatives, friends, and family members. You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about those disagreements and debates you get into with your relatives about politics, social issues, religion, money, and more. 

Peanut Butter and Politics, photo courtesy flickr GT#2

My brest friend from college and I agreed an almost everything, so we thought. We both really liked our math classes, mountain biking, hiking, and definitely had the same sense of humor. So we decided that we would be roommates! Everything was going great until we discovered we had a big difference. It had to do with the “p” word. Peanut Butter. I was die hard Laura Scudder’s oil separates naturally, and he was die hard Skippy partially hydrogenated oil that didn’t separate. How would we get along? But seriously, it wasn’t until after college that we discovered that we did disagree quite significantly on the other “p” word: politics. But we have stayed friends despite this difference.

Religion is definitely one area where there are differences of opinion. One such difference is between prioritizing acts of service or acts of ritual. On the one hand people will say that a truly faithful life is reflected in worship. That is making time to participate  in an organized religious service with prayer, music, word, tradition, rituals, and a sermon. On the other hand are people who argue that a truly religious and faithful life is shown in acts of service throughout the week, that is, in living a life that is holy and upright as God would intend. 

These differences of opinion are reflected in the Gospel reading from Saint John chapter one. The temple priests and Levites have left the temple in Jerusalem and gone out to see what John is up to in the wilderness. The priests and Levites would have emphasized traditions and rituals done in the temple as a core and perhaps primary sign of what it meant to be a faithful Jew. Others were critical of worship in the temple because it had become burdensome and weighed down by unnecessary practices and costs. 

The Pharisees, in fact, emphasized daily practice of following God’s laws rather than just doing religious rituals in the temple. Many of the Pharisees had a reforming spirit in which they attempted to interpret the laws of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, so that ordinary people would be able to follow them and practice their faith. But as a group they were criticized for being at times legalistic and overly worried about monitoring people’s behavior. 

We have the same arguments today. Some people argue that the most important thing is worship and ritual, while others argue that the most important thing is how we live our life. However, the real problem isn’t that there are differences of opinion, it is that there is often an unwillingness today to try to listen to and understand another person’s point of view. The reason why we have such a hard time listening to and appreciating a different point of view is because we are entrapped in works righteousness.

Works righteousness is a deadly and dangerous way of thinking. It holds that a person must by their own efforts make themself into a good and righteous person. It is the illusion that a person by hard w