All people saw the religious activity as an escape from this world… a refuge of sorts if you may… Christianity is not this.  Christianity is diving into the suffering of this world and dragging people out of it…  We don’t live to obtain the world, but to share with it what we know to be true.  In eastern religion the priests became the sole holders of power, they were the educated ones and they kept those who were not educated in their darkness, for a people in chaos will look for a savior to lead them…  This is the role the priest played, we first see it in the documentation of the Egyptians, and then in India as the priests there began to experience it in Buddhism.  Sadly it did not stop there.  We see that throughout our own history as a Church we have felt the same effects, Jesus came to correct the Pharisees.  They had gotten to a play where they held the power and dictated it out as warranted in order to keep the power in their hands among the masses.  Yes Rome ruled, but even Pilate paid his share of respect to this religious elect.  No wonder it was such a ridicule for Jesus to teach that the leaders should be suffering servants, in the context of the other Pharisees Jesus was pretty much turning them in for all their dark political power-hoarding secrets…  Paul later was to be liberated from this imaginative slavery and released into the ways of Christ; drawn out from the very inner sect of these politically empowered power whoreders.  Even more sad day this idea of priests continued to hold power not only in the Jewish Church, but then into the Body of Christ.  Much went right in the Church, but after the fall of the Roman empire, through the conquest of Church (by the way of men such as Constantine) and the onset of the Dark Ages, much of the intellect that the populous held was lost, and the Church already having achieved political dominance sadly again seized this gap in reason and kept the laity at bay… Until yet another rebel was able to use his imagination to break through; Luther did so and led the populous back to being able to feed themselves, and with that power of the priestly elect was broken again.  Still it raises up every now and then in certain sects, and I am not claiming that Luther’s radical breakthrough was the last, yet due to the printing press and Luther’s diligence the populous has always been able to stay in touch.. No wonder people consider the printing press the greatest invention of all time… I radically played a part in dismantling, practically permanently the gap between the elite and the populous… The playing field was level, the door to unrestricted self-feeding of both the Word and knowledge was open, no longer were there any barriers that aloud for an elite to mask truth, there was always a back door… Yet we have gone to far, we must back up and return to Christ.  The reason that we went so long (up to the press) was to demonstrate that this mentality has always been (as long as it was aloud), except for the brief moment of Christ and the untainted seasons of the Church.  The Church is the exception to the rule of political power.  The Bible I heavily political, it is true though that most would rather not acknowledge that, but it still remains that it is.  You could claim though that it is more in address to power and the effects of politics if that makes you feel better, I don’t mind.  Anyhow, Jesus’ first shall be last and vise versa really was pretty blunt to the eyes of the religious elect of the day, he told them to care and share and not whored all the power for themselves.  He told them to serve those who they were, in a sense, ‘ruling’ over.  No wonder He wasn’t liked…  We are called to close the gap, not establish it.  This is why we stand out as a light, because, just like Daniel 6:4, we need to foster lives that people can search (when they expect us to be hypocritical gap lovers, who want all the power) and yet find no charge or fault…  People expect the elect of religion to be corrupt gap hungry power savages who keep their congregations out in the dark… and who hold all the power, but were not, at our root were not, why do you think the masses were drawn to this new way, it was community, it was a level playing field, it was truth, and “truth needs no defender, it speaks for itself” (From someone I read, I forgot who, but I don’t claim it as my quote).