Strange Brew

Religion has become weird.  It has always been strange; the quest for God or gods.  Religion has always been at least marginally concerned with the transcendent.  When I say weird though, I'm not talking about mystical or otherworldly, for those things are merely inevitable side effects of searching for the holy and the eternal.  What I mean by weird is disjointed and confusing, I would almost say schizophrenic, but that would be insulting to some fairly wonderful and interesting schizophrenics I have known.
If you follow the world of religion, as I do, you are subjected daily to a wide range of opinions, rants, and rhetoric.  The interweb gives one a wonderful resource for experiencing the weirdness of modern religion, you can read fairly thoughtful commentary on the life of faith from so many perspectives, but what you're likely to draw out of the whole experience is not clarity, far from it.  You will find that sorting through the mess is far from easy.  You will probably be astonished by how bound and conflicted people can be about sex, and politics.  You will read racist, misogynist and otherwise bigoted opinions from people who claim to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  You can find people who would like very much to kill you in the name of Allah.  You can find people who proclaim that we should use nuclear weapons in the name of Zion, and those are just the big three.
You can encounter all sorts of strange, inbred perversions of the major world faiths up in the hollers and in the backwaters off the major streams.  What you probably have to look fairly intently for is the truth, or some semblance of it.  You find a terrible number of people who take themselves awfully seriously.
But here's why I stick with this strange brew:
Yesterday, the kids of GSPC decorated the Christmas tree in the sanctuary (yes, we have a tree in the sanctuary, and yes, I know it's a pagan symbol that was co-opted by Christianity).  We decorated it with Chrismons (monograms of Christ), little white and gold symbols in the shapes of crosses, doves, crowns, Greek letters, and even a butterfly (a symbol of resurrection, and yes I know it's technically a metamorphosis).
The process was frenetic to the point of chaos.  We were "talking" about what each symbol meant, but mostly kids were just jumping at the chance to put the symbols on the tree.  They were using their imaginations, they were thinking, and most importantly, they were having fun.  Some of what I was telling them may have sunk in, some of it may not.  I don't really think I care very much, because in that moment the kingdom of heaven was there.  Hanging a white and gold triangle on your tree doesn't mean you really understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but I'm pretty sure God: Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer was pretty amused by the utter glee with which it went up
I guess I know it can't all be children's sermons, there are lots of grown up type things that we need to sort through as we grow in faith, but once in a while I think we grown ups ought to try and have that much fun in worship.  That's not too weird is it?