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“He said therefore to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸ Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. ⁹ Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:7-9)

Last week I proved how the biblical advent of God’s Kingdom was a “going out” from the Religious Industrial Complex. I contrasted the Advent to Big Religion’s marketing strategy of “getting you in” via the nativity scene and Christmas. I invited you to “go out from” the pageantry of corporate church, and to instead follow John the Baptist into your own wilderness of solitude with God where this Kingdom can emerge for you. For most people, this suggestion feels threatening and meets an immediate internal resistance which I would like to discuss.

Big Pharma wants everyone on medication. Big Agriculture wants everyone on grains and sugar. Big Banking wants everyone in debt. Big Politics wants everyone to hate half their country. Big Religion wants everyone to come to church, mosque or temple with their checkbook. Each of these institutional complexes tells a story, uses fear, and promises us something we want.

In the nativity story, kings and religious leaders from other countries pay homage to Jesus, and this is a fitting for the advent of God’s kingdom certainly begins with the birth of the King. What we fail to notice is how our sympathies and emotional gush over this homeless emigrant family are the same psycho-emotional strings used to tie us emotionally to the entire Church Industrial Complex. The Christian religion, by training us in “nativity sensitivity” has concurrently conditioned us to believe the entire religious complex grew out from this manger, conflating God’s Kingdom with institutional religion.

Dissonance. My suggestion last week, to regain a personal Advent experience by way of leaving “the big show” for the solitude of your own desert, is met with emotional dissonance. “Keven, this just doesn’t feel right. I feel guilty. I’m afraid God will be mad or disappointed.” Dissonance sets in as soon as we consider our community of friends and family who will not understand this exodus. We are emotionally constrained to sympathize with the institutional power which has strength in numbers…which obscures the Gospel’s invitation to come out, and condemns leaving as contrary to the work of God. We can no easier leave our non-denominational Christian religious delivery system than a Muslim can leave Islam, a Jew their Judaism, a Mormon their church, the Branch Davidians their David Koresh, NXIVM their Keith Raniere, or Science their David Hawking…and for the exact same reasons.

Religion and faith in God are not the same thing. The big New Testament discovery is that John the Baptist, Jesus and Paul labored to bring a message that ALL PEOPLE are forgiven and put right with God by the sacrificial work of the Christ. The gig is up, religion never saved anyone, and still hasn’t. Religion (which means act of devotion) has a place, in that it provides a structure for people upon which we can discover and grow our faith in God, but our faith isn’t supposed to be placed in our system of faith…yet it is… and that’s why we emotionally resist the invitation to leave.

These feelings are not incidental. Loyalty and fear are built into the system (that’s our clue). After more than a decade working with people in the Gospel’s deconstruction process, I’m confident the defensive feelings stem from confusing a God-thing with the container it came in. We have an emotional attachment to the apparatus…a placebo effect which masks our over-identification… we want to be named by our religion. Our emotional dependence upon being named by (bowing down to) institutional power means we are not free in Christ. We have misunderstood the Gospel of the Kingdom and don’t know who we are in God.

The invitation is to know who we are alone in our desert, not our index within the system. The Gospel calls us out of every institutional power over us, and into God’s Kingdom. The Advent of this Kingdom may first have appeared in a manger, but it arrived in its subversive power as people left their religious city and got “all in” (baptized) as they reconsidered (repent) John’s announcement that the Kingdom of God is immanent. John’s Gospel is not friendly to those under the spell of religion. The “Wrath to come” upon the “brood of vipers” was not God’s wrath, it was religion’s wrath upon the religious.

If we contextualize this to our modern age, John’s Gospel is an invitation out of over-dependence upon the business of religion. The Advent of the Kingdom may have started with the birth of Christ, but like those leaving the ritual at the temple for a baptism in the desert, it doesn’t begin for us until we are free from our emotional dependence upon our systems of faith. John’s prophetic message for us to “come out” still stands, but religion has corrupted the message to “get us in.”

This kind of deconstruction (axe at the root) is necessary even if it seems scary, and be warned, not all deconstruction is the gospel. The Sam Harris’s and other Atheists of the world offer a deconstruction too, but only unto the religion of Atheism, replete with it’s own papal heads, dogma, threatening rhetoric, and hatred of outsiders. Christ following is different. The Kingdom of God is different. Only Christ has shown the way to belong entirely to God, and live in freedom along side but not in or of any institutional power (which all belong to Satan). This is true salvation, to know who we are in God, hidden in Christ, with no superficial labels. Identity is either “freedom in Christ” or “bondage in religion”, there is no third option. The world is not becoming less religious, it’s becoming moreso.

If we want a genuine experience of the Advent of God’s kingdom, we must get over our dissonance. We must stop fearing the “wrath” of the Religious Industrial Complex. John’s call is to discover how unskilled and impotent we are in our faith without being propped up by superficial measures. We must experience the darkness, solitude, isolation and temptations of our desert. Following John’s call, we’ll experience emotional dissonance and discomfort, which are part of the process of subverting religion’s power over us as we transition to the Kingdom. Lean into the axe. May it cut our roots of religion.

Once free…once mature enough to tell the difference between faith and religion…we can join any community of faith we desire, we can serve each community with our gifts. When leadership ceases to be a paid vocation, and becomes a loss of personal power, then this community will be believable again. Called out, with Christ as our head, Religion will transform into the true Body of Christ, and His power will return to us. At last, our mission will not be unto conversion and evacuation, but the restoration and healing of all things in God.

That is the Advent we are waiting for, and it arrives as soon as we wake up.