On the seventh of this month I shall be going away to St Deiniol's Library in North Wales for a study week.  I know I shall be assured of a stimulating time, for the course I shall be attending is led by John Shelby Spong, one the most controversial figures in the church of recent times.  He was for many years Bishop of Newark, in the Episcopal Church of the United States (the Church of England's transatlantic cousin), and in a series of books, articles, lectures and sermons he has propounded a radical and controversial version of the Christian faith.

But even if I hadn't known this about him, the title of the week alone might have tempted me.  For it's called Jesus for the non-religious.  At first sight, this might seem to many people odd, even rather self-contradictory.  Surely religion - from the Christian perspective of course - is all about Jesus?  For Christians, isn't ‘being religious' precisely about believing in Jesus and trying to follow his example?  And if so, then isn't Jesus more interested in ‘religious' people rather than the ‘non-religious'?  Isn't the point of the Church to turn non-religious people into religious ones? 

Well, no, actually.  Think of the Gospels.  Who are the people who really make Jesus impatient, angry?  Who are the ones with whom he is always coming into conflict?  Who are the ones who engineer his arrest and execution?  The non-religious ones?  The sinners, unbelievers, undesirables?  No.  It is the scribes and the Pharisees, the doctors of the Law and the priests.  In short, it is the religious people of his day.

For Jesus, more often than not, religion seems not to have been a pathway to God, but an obstacle on that pathway.  And Jesus' message was - at least in part - a message of liberation from religion.  So it's rather an irony of history that such an organised and complex religion as Christianity has developed in his memory and honour.

For our religion isn't exempt.  Christianity and the Church can likewise become an obstacle to relationship with God rather than a route towards it.  This was what the German reformer Martin Luther discovered some five hundred years ago.  He was an Augustinian monk, and practised a demanding religious discipline.  But far from bringing him to a closer sense of the presence and love of God, this drove him further from it.  His liberation from religion came when he realised that nothing we can do can put us in a right relationship with God; it is entirely God's doing. 

Another Martin, Martin Buber, was a prominent Jewish thinker and writer of the 20^th century.  He once said "Nothing so masks the face of God as religion".  And another monk, Harry Williams, an Anglican priest who in the 1960s and 70s wrote extensively and perceptively about the relationship between modern psychology and Christianity while also exercising a wonderful pastoral ministry, once wrote "In order to love God I often had to hate religion".

Those of us who are involved in and committed to the church and to Christianity, whether as clergy or as laity, have to take all this very seriously indeed.  How far do our own church structures, theological beliefs, and liturgical practices help us - and others - really to encounter God, and how far do they actually distract us and others from such encounter? 

So, I look forward to hearing what Bishop Spong has to say on Jesus for the non-religious.  I'll let you know when I get back.