BLOG 2/5/14: COMMUNITIES OF CARING, MEANING, AND HOPE

CHURCH: COMMUNITIES OF CARING, MEANING, AND HOPE

 

I’m writing this, sitting here in a coffee shop amidst high achieving urban adults, laptops everywhere, and no telling how much amazing information is being processed in just this one location. But I am also sitting here thinking about the death, a few days ago, of Philip Seymour Hoffman … and feeling quite sad (even though I am not a theatre person). Here was a guy who was obviously a giant in the field of acting. He was on top of his craft. And yet … he evidently was minus some of the most crucial pieces of true humanity: meaning, caring others, … and especially, hope. We humans need a center, an authority, a creative source, a guiding line, and a final goal. Otherwise we are lost in the boundless, bottomless sea of chance.

 

It is so sad, tragic. A generation ago Walker Percy wrote a novel: Lost In the Cosmos, and with his own inimitable skill as a writer, and with a penchant for psychology, wrote of this very lostness and hopelessness.

 

We are not created to live in isolation, but in caring communities, and these communities are to be suffused with meaning and hope. So I am back to my alternative narrative about the church. Folk, such as Hoffman, don’t need sterile communities of impersonal (and often stagnant) ‘religion’. And Christ’s church is not called to be a confederation of religious strangers.

 

Let me focus on the dimension of hope. One of the saddest descriptions in scripture is that of those who are strangers to God (and I am assuming that perhaps Hoffman was one of such folk), and so “having no hope and without God in the world.” I can only assume that Philip Seymour Johnson was without hope—and perhaps without those with whom he was intimate enough to share his hopelessness. Drugs became an alternative to his emptiness, and resulted in his death.

 

It provokes in me again how very urgent becomes our calling individually and communally as Christ’s church to be a demonstration of hope … a warm, caring, and contagious demonstration of what that hope creates in us humans. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Through the centuries and through all kinds of nightmarish periods, it is this great hope that has been a hallmark of the true church. I’ve seen this happen on a small scale when suicidal folk were brought into contact with God’s people who radiated this hope and joy and caring because of Christ, and had their lives transformed.

 

I am quite certain that among all of these high achieving, information-age, apparently successful folk sitting around me—not to mention the unmotivated and economically deprived and meaningless folk so prevalent in our urban scenes—that there are a lot of Philip Hoffman’s counterparts. God, please make me sensitive to such.

 

Why am I saying all of this? Because if the ostensible ‘Christian community’ is only a somewhat mindless and depersonalized confederation of religious strangers performing its rites, and not a true community of caring and freedom, of mutual confession and forgiveness, of profound discussions on the meaning and hope given us in Christ … especially, the great hope that we share in Christ … then the church becomes part of the problem, and certainly not a community of hope to all of the ‘Philip Seymour Hoffmans’ out there whom no one suspects of being in such despair.

 

Yes, any alternative narrative of the church must include its sweet aroma of faith, love, and hope. It must be a living, breathing incarnation and demonstration of this new life in Christ.

 

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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