The Other Side of the Sermon

<p><em>The Other Side of the Sermon</em></p> arose from years of blindly following a faith that turned out to be inadequate for the challenges and opportunities of the real world. One event-the death of my wife at forty-three and the difficulties that followed-opened my eyes and set me to a search for answers.</p> <p>And I found them. They had been there all along but I had never heard them from a pulpit or in a Sunday school class or read them in any religious publication. The answers were practical. They were not the touchy-feely sweetness and light that give goose bumps to the gullible; they were tough workable necessary tools for living.</p><p>Christ the supreme pragmatic did not intend that his followers be fools-or fooled. Yet I had been both. Confronting admitting and reversing that took time. Three years of writing exposed my fallacious faith and more than twenty years of practicing those writings have left me with one regret: that I could not have read the book instead of writing it.</p> <p>We think of religion as a collection of dos and don'ts-rules by which we justify our behavior to ourselves to others and perhaps even to God. Preachers tell us what we must do and what we must not do. And yet Christ told his audiences what they did not have to do and of the discretionary that allowed interpretation.</p><p>Freedom from the have-tos and the release to enjoy the whatever-you-want-tos produced a contented guilt-free existence in which I could ignore tradition; disregard the opinions of others; and serve worship and live in freedom.</p><p>I met the practical Christ I had never known. If in these pages you meet him too twenty-five years will have been well-spent.</p>