Enchanted Community

BLOG 2/9/16. CAN PROUD OLD TRADITIONAL CHURCH INSTITUTIONS BE RECYCLED INTO TRUE AND VITAL COMMUNITIES OF GOD’S NEW CREATION?

Michael Frost, the splendid Australian missions and theology resource has done a study in a book entitled Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement. Frost is no novice, nor is he a detached theoretician. Rather he is a practitioner and sees what such electronic/digital age has done to the human mind and to relationships. When we can sit at a table with friends who are all absorbed with their iPhones, or can see reality only on a television screen, or escape into media recreation and not be attentive to the persons and the neighborhood around them, … then something is terribly out of focus. Or when we can “attend church” and never really know what or who those others are, other than some basic identity … that’s not what God’s recreated community is all about.

The New Testament documents emerge out of a whole other culture. Westerners (such as I) find some of the deep traditions of the middle east fascinating, even desirable, but so very strange to us. I think particularly of hospitality. One’s home was always, evidently, equipped to give lodging to travelers or strangers. It is amusing the way we westerners have totally misread the nativity story of Jesus. Joseph and Mary didn’t get shoved out in the barn when they found no room in the inn. After all, Joseph was of the seed of David. He was royal family. But in those days folk kept their animals in a lower room attached to the house for all kinds of reasons of convenience. And it is likely that Mary and Joseph and Jesus stayed in that house for a good while.

Or take the early days of the church after Pentecost. First of all, there was a massive turning of thousands to faith in Jesus as the Messiah. The crowds were evidently given public teaching into the life and ministry and message of Jesus in some public place (like the temple porch, maybe?). But then in Acts 2:42 comes a jewel of a clue that may be seminal for us. It says: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship (or koinonia a gathering that had an intimacy and intercommunication and responsibility about it), t the breaking of bread and the prayers … they attended the temple together and breaking of bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts …” (Acts 2:42 ff.). It goes on to say that no one considered what he/she owned as their own. They were stewards of what God had given them, and so they shared generously with those in need. That’s incarnation.

Later there is the word of exhortation: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.” (Hebrews 13:2). This was considered a necessary requirement for God’s people and certainly would have been looked for in the church’s leadership. Paul, himself, was frequently the recipient of such hospitality in the pursuit of his missionary journeys. (I certainly have been on my brief missionary journeys.) But Paul let folk get close to him. “Be imitators of me, even as I am of Christ.” That is true disciple-making. Let folk get close. Let them ask questions and see you in your informal best, and off-guard. People need those whom they know well, and with whom they have had koinonia to be their models in the mission of God.

How did we get large, imposing church institutions with very respectable, even believing people, who (to use Frost’s term), are so politely disincarnate? New church communities, missional churches can incarnate this from the get-go, … but venerable old, proud, religious institutions are going to be a huge challenge if they can be recycled at all. Hopefully, God will raise up some really creative ecclesiastical and communal architects to help us imagine something totally new and different. Just a thought …

BLOG 2/7/16. “BLESSED ARE YOU WHO ARE POOR.” DID JESUS SAY THAT?

Politician, advertisers, preachers, (and bloggers such as I) tend to avoid anything that is not going to be positively received by their readers, or listeners. They want to generate as much positive approval as possible. This is why there are some of Jesus’ key teachings that don’t get much attention. For-instance, the gospel of Luke, whose purpose seems to be to give a very accurate record of Jesus’ life and teaching, comes early on to a summary of Jesus’ essential sermon about the realties of his in-breaking Kingdom, or New Creation. It is known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, and is found in Luke 6. Listen to the things he says that are so contradictory to so much of the religious talk floating around these days.

“Blessed are you poor for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, you shall laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice on that day and leap for joy … But woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now for you shall be hungry …” And so it goes.

Did Jesus really say that? He certainly did. In Matthew’s gospel account it comes out slightly differently, but begins with “Blessed are the poor in spirit …” which many translators and commenters have sought to make into some sweet attitude of humility, but that just doesn’t fit. He goes on to say that those who are persecuted and reviled are blessed. The best unpacking of that which I have found is that Luke records Jesus actually preaching to poor people, and Matthew, writing later on, as the apostolic leader of the church, maybe in Syria, which was a bit more economically secure, wants to remind his readers that Jesus wanted them always to remember and identify with the poor, and the hungry, and helpless.

Still, this is one of those key teachings of Jesus that you are not likely to hear in the comfortable First Presbyterian Church, or the prestigious Episcopal cathedral. It is not denied. It is just avoided because it is not what folk want to hear. It is not the kind of ostensible evangelical talk you are likely to hear in the New Hampshire primary in this election season. But one ignores this realistic essence of Jesus’ teaching to one’s own peril. Christ’s people are never called to seek popular approval, but to be faithful in ministering to the hungry, naked, broken, helpless, etc. of our society … and in so doing to be doing it unto him.

The ‘health and wealth’ interpreters of the Christian faith totally miss the essence of Jesus’s radical New Creation calling. So do those looking for comfort-zone Christian communities, and spiritual disciplines that do not transform our daily lives and praxis into those who are the incarnations of his teachings.

Some ‘wag’ once said that there were three things they never discussed in his church: sex, politics, and religion. We can laugh at the contradictions there, but to ingest Jesus’ teachings means that we are attentive to the realities of those around us, to their needs, and to our responsibilities to be the “doers of his word.” And in this current global scene of so much human tragedy, … aesthetic, comfortable, dis-incarnated/excarnate claims to Christian faith needs to go back and digest the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament apostles. Yes, Jesus really said those uncomfortable teachings that do not generate popular approval. Maybe I’ll lose you here … but we need to be reminded. To follow Jesus faithfully has very real costs, and takes real acts of will. Blessings.

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BLOG 2/3/2016. “NOT EVERYONE WHO SAYS TO ME, ‘LORD, LORD …’”

Mercy! There has been such a proliferation of ‘god talk’ in this presidential campaign, along with unconvincing candidates hanging out in churches, … then there is the press corps irresponsibly using the term evangelical as an adjective to describe politically conservative religious folk, alas!

Jesus also had to deal with those in his day who were so proud of their orthodoxy, and so judgmental of the lesser folk, … and he was not too veiled in his warnings. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount he gives one of the most sobering (and a bit enigmatic) words: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father, who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:21-23).

I, personally, think of this passage frequently because in my own spiritual sojourn I had an unforgettable converting moment reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s take on this in The Cost of Discipleship. I was at that time something of a ‘fair-haired boy’ among the ‘evangelical’ set in our Presbyterian denomination. I had all of the credentials: orthodox profession, education at one of the paradigm orthodox ‘evangelical’ seminaries, and a good track record in lots of ways. Bonhoeffer’s words, however, made me realize that I could have all of those credentials and yet not have them flowing out of an existential relationship with Christ dwelling in me, … and could hear him saying: “Depart from me. I never knew you.” At that point after a long period of fasting and self-searching I got real in my relationship so that my human life would be an expression of Jesus Christ living in me by his Word and Spirit, and conforming me to his image. Incarnating that calling to discipleship can get one into trouble, be warned!

Put that in the context of Jesus’ encounters with the religious leaders: priests, Levites, Pharisees, and Sadducees who prided themselves on being the paradigms of Jewishness. So when a proud lawyer sought to put Jesus to the test on what it took to inherit eternal life, Jesus responded with the acceptable summary of the law, i.e., to love God with all of one’s heart, and one’s neighbor as oneself. The guy proudly affirmed that he had always fulfilled these. His credentials were impeccable. Here’s the rub: the lawyer chose to do his lawyer thing and so responded: “OK, but who is my neighbor?” Here’s where his orthodoxy was empty.  So in one of Jesus’ most demanding parables he lays that superficiality naked with the story of the Good Samaritan. It is almost cruel in its exposing of the hypocrisy. So here is a fellow human being who was the victim of violence lying by the side of the road, and who comes by first but a priest, then a Levite, but they are too busy with their religious lives, and not willing to dirty their hands with the poor bleeding guy in the ditch. So who, then, becomes the hero? Answer: a despised Samaritan, an ethnic outsider (let me add mischievously, he could even have been gay!). This person, whom the orthodox priest and Levite would have held in contempt, becomes the hero. This despised half-breed Jewish person was filled with compassion for this ‘neighbor’ and at considerable inconvenience and cost to himself, does what the law requires.

When Jesus truly is embraced in our own human lives, all that motivated him, all of the love of God for the broken of this world becomes ours. So political ‘god-talk’ is cheap. What we should be looking for are those who are motivated by God’s love of justice and caring, especially for the poor, the naked, the victims of injustice, the strangers, and the helpless of our society (the common good), and who are engaged in the realistic ministries (political or otherwise) to meet those needs. “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”

BLOG 1/31/2016. WELCOME TO WORSHIP … WOW! WHAT IF …?

A couple of times a week I pass a big, handsome Georgian colonial church building with its sign out front which says: “Welcome to Worship,” and that right across the street from another church building which invites: “Join Us for Worship.” I began musing on what it would mean if those responding really, really had an encounter with the God whom they profess to believe and worship (and who has made himself known through the fathers and the prophets, but most perfectly in Jesus Christ). It would never call forth a: ‘Wasn’t that a sweet service?’ response.

Remember that when Moses encountered God in the burning bush it launched him on one of the most humanly impossible, unimaginable, and demanding new directions he never expected.

Later, when he again encountered the transcendent God on Mt. Sinai it was such a traumatic and transforming encounter that his faced glowed such that he had to cover it with a vail before he could communicate with the frightened Israelites at the foot of the mountain.

When Isaiah unexpectedly encountered God in the temple, high and lifted up, what with seraphim circling about, … it reduced Isaiah to a trembling, frightened figure on the ground asking the Lord to depart from him. He was never the same after that. So it was whenever there are accounts of men and women encountering God. It is awesome, overwhelming, totally humbling and calling for contrition, humility, and profound repentance.

Annie Dillard laments: Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful tourists on a package tour of the Absolute? The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. … On the whole, I do not find Christians outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear [fashionable hats] to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers … (Teaching a Stone to Talk. 1982. p. 40).

Yes, the purpose of New Testament worship is unmistakably … not inspiration but transformation. “I appeal to you … to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind … that you may prove what is the will of God…” (Romans 12:1-2). In that same letter, Paul lets us know that the very purpose of our being called to God is in order to conform us to the image of his Son.  God is in the process of creating a New Humanity, so that our encounters with him are for the purpose of refining that process. It is not to make us more orthodox, or to inspire us, but to bring us into harmony with the mind of God, the will of God, and the praxis (or lifestyle) of God’s New Creation people.

The huge deluge of god-talk in the current presidential campaign is frighteningly revealing about how wearing labels of religious interest groups seldom looks at the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus Christ, … seldom seems to assess political platforms with the radical social teachings of Jesus. Authentic worship will overwhelm us with the glory of God and conform us to the radically new and unselfish servant-role of those with the mind of Christ. Christ’s followers are not conforming themselves to the political platforms of the parties, but to the teachings of Christ, and to those (whatever their religion, or lack thereof) running for office whose planks reflect those teachings.

Welcome to Worship! Beware, it could utterly redirect your whole life, and redefine all of your dreams and values and career goals. It is not something to engage in mindlessly.

BLOG 1/27/16. THE CHURCH IS ALWAYS A MYSTERY

In a running dialogue with some young conversation partners (which conversations are recorded in one one of my books: The Church and the Relentless Darkness), they decided that their role in understanding the church was to be both archaeologists and architects, i.e., to retrieve those treasures from the church’s past that are of continuing value today, and to at the same time be seeking to design a church effective as a vehicle for it message and mission for today and tomorrow. These young friends were and are a rare breed. They were willing to look with purposefully critical eyes at the church in terms of what it has been, what it is, and what it should be formed to be to accomplish Christ’s purpose in a totally different emerging post-Christian and aggressively secular culture, … rather than to passively accept or reject whatever expression of the church they have encountered existentially as though that it what the church is all about.

I was reminded of this when I noted the stark absence of response and lack of visitors to my last Blog in which I questioned the role and significance of church buildings, which so easily become idols to Christian communities. It underscores the reality that the church is always a mystery, and its expressions are multi-form, as well as a mystery. It so easily drifts into being something less that intended.

This is not a new issue for the people of God. Within a generation or two after David initiated the idea of building a temple on Mount Zion, it was already becoming a substitute for faithfulness to Israel’s calling to be a light to the nations, and a holy nation living according to the unique design given it at Mt. Sinai. Jeremiah chided Israel for trusting in the deceptive words: “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,” rather than amending their ways, executing justice, not oppressing sojourners, widows, etc. Jeremiah 7:1 ff.). Israel was not called to worship the temple, but the temple and Israel’s rites of worship were given to keep Israel focused on its holy calling. At Israel’s establishment at the foot of Mount Sinai, it was provided mobile meeting place with God, and given the regular liturgies scheduled to keep it focused. Their calling to be a pilgrim people and a light to the nations dimmed into obscurity once they had become secure as a nation, and with the temple in Jerusalem. The temple had become a stumbling-block.

When Jesus came on the scene, his encounters with the temple and those who were the “temple guard,” i.e., priests, etc. were always to remind them of how they had forgotten their calling. He cast out the money-changers on one occasion. On another he prophetically told them that their temple was to be destroyed, but that he was the new dwelling place of God, the true temple. When Stephen, after Pentecost, told his Jewish persecutors that God did not dwell in temples made with hands, he was executed. The new dwelling place of God was wherever the people of God in Christ gathered. This was usually in homes, or public places, sometimes in the clandestine secrecy of the catacombs beneath the city of Rome, … many venues.

But archaeologically, all through the darkest chapters of its history, the church was also developing those symbols and disciplines that are still rich in enabling God’s people gathered to stay focused on their message and its mission. Yes, the people of God do need meeting places, and they do need disciplines, and these have and do take many forms. The church, just as we individuals, does sin and fall short of God’s glory, … but that doesn’t give us liberty to be indifferent about our integrity as communities of God’s New Creation in Christ. This is an ongoing struggle. God’s people are his dwelling-place when they are gathered together, and when they are scattered into the multiple scenes of their other six days. Stay tuned …

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BLOG 1/24/16. “SELL YOUR CHURCH BUILDING AND WE’LL SEE …”

I think it was missiologist Howard Snyder, a few years ago, in his significant book: The Problem of Wineskins who suggested that if you really want to know how healthy your church is that you should sell your church building and you would see. I teasingly told him that he could get killed proposing something like that. For so many, many ostensible churches they exist to have these elaborate meeting places, which in turn become idols for them. They have invested huge dollars for erecting such remarkable architectural monuments, with something like a Field of Dreams illusion, that if you have a significant church edifice that people will naturally be attracted to it. They do this with a totally false understanding of what the church is to be by the calling of God.

I, for one, do not really see any way around some inevitable confrontation with this issue. Church folk become idolatrous about their church buildings even when such buildings become so expensive to maintain that they become an ‘albatross’ around the neck of what are usually diminishing and ageing congregations reminiscing about their golden years of yore.

And there is no easy answer to such. I’ve been there. I was pastor of a congregation that inhabited such a handsome gothic sanctuary, which had been constructed early in the 20^th century in what was at that time a substantial and genteel middle-class neighborhood, but in the intervening years had declined into a marginal neighborhood, and those who had been the comfortable persons of means who could maintain such, had died, or grown old or moved away, and the  once lovely building had become the target of some urban vandals, and was much in need of expensive renovation of its heating and air-conditioning systems … and was altogether out of date in so many ways.

A new generation were finding life in the congregation, and it was their meeting place, but they were not interested in investing large sums necessary to bring it up to code. What to  do? A prominent architect was assigned the task of discerning a solution, but after doing a study of the building and a time-space-use of it, proposed to us that what it would cost to refurbish it could not be justified as good stewardship, and that his suggestion was that we demolish it and arrange to replace it with a high-rise residential structure with space reserved on its lower floors for our church meetings. It could be self-amortizing, and useful seven days a week, and was easily accessible by public transportation. He would be happy to design an upgrade for the church and make money off of us, but he didn’t think that would be good Christian stewardship.

When presented to our church leadership, they all knew that what he had proposed was inescapably true, but none were willing to destroy the building which had become essentially an idol to so many. And so the building continued to deteriorate with occasional patch-up temporary solutions, delaying the inevitable day..

This identity of church buildings as essential to the church is a hangover from the Christendom era with its dependence upon ‘sanctuaries’ and ‘clergy’ both of which are something of a subversion of Christianity. But now in this emerging post-Christian and increasingly secular culture, and with a vast number of such once elegant but now decaying buildings, the issue looms huge … and in many ways intractable.

Recently ISIS destroyed a fourteen century old monastery in the Middle East, which is tragic in a historic sense but unless the building was itself ‘the church’ it did not diminish the Christian church. In my neighborhood a once thriving Baptist church diminished and was sold to a developer and is now a neighborhood of condominiums. But elsewhere, nearby, vibrant communities of Christian faith are flourishing in storefronts, school buildings, and around dinner tables.

What do you do with elegant old church buildings? Their days might be numbered.

BLOG 1/20/16. BEYOND FAUX EVANGELICALS … TO FAUX ‘CHURCHES’

The significant response to my last blog (which questioned the validity of politicians hijacking the designation of evangelical) means that I must have struck a chord somewhere. But it doesn’t end there. Let me appropriate again my gadfly identity and raise the previous question: Can the many religious institutions that operate under the guise of being communities of true Christian faith, or ‘churches’ … really justify the use of that designation? Yes, I know that to try to answer that question runs right away into all of the complexities and ambiguities that are present in the vast mosaic that is ‘the church,’ but it is a question that should be pursued relentlessly by those who are the leadership of any colony of believers who pertain to be the church.

Consider that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, … that Jesus came announcing that in himself God’s kingdom / New Creation was being inaugurated, that in himself God was fulfilling the prophetic promise to make all things new. Then, consider that the manifestation of that New Creation would be a whole New Humanity that would be the present display of the divine nature living out that calling which incarnate that New Creation. The primary New Testament teacher, the apostle Paul, says as much when he states that it is the divine intent and purpose of God to call a people who would be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29 in loc.). It is God’s intention, through Christ, and right in the midst of real life, in the midst of the real world, “of love, sleep, shopping, sex, sex, sickness, work, travel, politics, babies, death, music and art, mountains and oceans, food and drink, etc.” (N. T. Wright)… there are to be those colonies of men and women who incarnate that divine purpose.

Jesus first, then Paul, include all of that under the rubric of the discipline of disciple-making, or forming men and women into that divine image. So what does that divine image look like? That’s not really all that difficult to spell out. It looks like what God had been revealing about his design from his earliest revelations to his people, seen first in the Torah and the Ten Commandments, and then in the prophets, and most perfectly in Jesus Christ. One New Testament writer begins his letter by saying that the God who in former times made himself known to the fathers and the prophets, but has in the recent days spoken to us by his Son …He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature …” (Hebrews 1:1ff.).

So if that is true, and if God calls those who make up his church to be conformed to the image of his Son, then the church should be made up of men and women who are “the glory of God” right in in the midst of all the stuff that constitutes their present context, whether ordered and pleasant, or destructive and tragic. Right? And when that calling is right on the front-burner of every colony of God’s New Humanity, which would be those authentically called the church, then it can claim that designation of church with humility and missional design.

Yet, as we have observed, the church has a proclivity to drift away from that consciousness … and yet still call itself the church, even when that identification has long-since lost any integrity. The church becomes, then, those merely human institutions that fulfill some human need for religion, but are hardly the church. In this week when we are celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. one needs to remember that when Time Magazine made him the man of the year, they commented that King was so unique and effective because he appealed to the church where they were the most vulnerable and expected it the least: “He appealed to their Biblical conscience” as his justification for his controversial assault on racial injustice. King remembered that it was the God who prompted the prophecy which said: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The church is called to be transformational, but its ongoing battle is to keep from being conformed to the dominant social order, so that the light in it becomes darkness. This is the endless but essential task of the church to remember its calling.

BLOG 1/17/16. FAUX ‘EVANGELICALS’: POLITICIANS AND CHURCHES

In this political season in the United States, when the news sources are filled with more than we want to know about the presidential primaries, … it is inconceivable to me how many of the candidates are soliciting what the media calls the evangelical vote, and presenting themselves as in harmony with their ostensible evangelical voters, while as the same both these ostensible evangelical churches and politicians seem so totally oblivious to the teachings and commands of Jesus. Let me intentionally get into politics here and explain a few things about Jesus and the roots of the concept of evangelical.

In the introductory books of the New Testament in which the career and teachings of Jesus are spelled out, who he was/is, and what he did and taught, … are designated as: the gospel of the kingdom of God, (or the gospel of God’s New Creation). Jesus came preaching the gospel saying that God’s appointed time had arrived and the kingdom of God was at hand. So, first off then, we need to get a grip on the word gospel since it is the English translators’ choice to translate the common Greek word: evangel (or something like euangelion) which means: a thrilling announcement—something of monumental importance, politically, socially, communally, militarily, etc. and suffused with joy and hope. It was the word used of anything that would thrill those who heard it. Got it?

So Jesus came announcing that the New Creation, which God had been promising for centuries was now being inaugurated in and by himself. That was the thrilling news, the gospel. God had promised that he would make all things new, that a New Age would come into this age, and all of the alienation from God and the brokenness would be transformed by God’s anointed anointed one, the Messiah. Jesus declared that he was that Messiah, he was that Christ, that he had come to inaugurate a creation which was reconciled to God, by who he himself was and what he would accomplish by his life, death on the cross, and resurrection. He would inaugurate that kingdom/New Creation, which would, in turn, ultimately heal the brokenness and darkness of this whole present creation.

Here’s where my pique with these faux evangelical politicians and (ostensible) churches comes in. Jesus launched his public ministry with a declaration that Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah was fulfilled in himself, and that prophecy was aout: good news to the poor, liberty to the captives (frequently prisoners of debt), opening of the eyes of the blind, liberty to those who were oppressed (most often economically which resulted in working in intolerable conditions), and the fulfillment of the ‘jubilee year’ which is a whole study in itself, when everything was redistributed. That’s his opening teaching. It has healing/health care, and economic justice written all over it.

Near the end of his earthly ministry he says that at the end of time, all humankind would be judged by how they provided for the economic needs of the poor, the hungry, and the naked … how they took strangers in (translate: immigrants), how they provided for the economically oppressed, because those are the very persons he identifies with himself. That’s the evangel, that’s the thrilling news as it is communicated in one’s response to the needs of the human community. Those are the criteria for the authenticity of faith in Jesus.

But if that’s not sufficient, consider that in one of the only one-on-one confrontations with an individual recorded in the life of Jesus, is that episode in which Jesus calls out a guy named Zacchaeus, (who might be described as something of a first century executive of Goldman-Sachs) who had made a personal fortune off of the misfortune of others. After spending a long conversation in his mansion, Zacchaeus and Jesus re-emerge to the crowd of Jesus’ followers and Zacchaeus’ testimony has nothing to do with any personal spiritual experience, or forgiveness of sins, only … “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” Jesus response? “Today salvation has come to this house.” Conclusion: any church or politician or agenda that does not deal with economic justice, health care, and conditions that enable a healthy human community is faux evangelical.

BLOG 1/13/16. THE CHURCH: VERY ‘THIS WORLDLY’

The church, which Jesus Christ calls out to be his embodiment in the world, has got to be, by its very nature, radically this worldly. The mistaken (and very subverting) notion that the church gathered for worship is to build for itself sanctuaries as if to escape from this world, is a bit of a contradiction. The Lord, whom we worship, is Jesus: God made flesh, … or as Eugene Peterson has so graphically expressed it: “The Word (Jesus) became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” Christ’s church is called to be transformational in the here and now, in our own neighborhoods.

Church gatherings for worship that are looked upon as some kind of an escape from our own incarnation as the body of Christ “in the neighborhood” totally miss the point of the church, and of its gatherings for true worship. Such gatherings are never to be escapes into stained glass and into some spiritual never-never-land. Nor are they to be sanctuaries in which we escape (as an old Sabbath hymn states it): “Rapt awhile from earth away, …” Quite the opposite. The church gathers together in worship, on one hand to process the week just past, and then more importantly as a veritable staging area for its ‘this worldly’ mission as the present incarnation of Jesus Christ in the homes, offices, neighborhoods, workplaces, classrooms, trade routes, farm fields, waiting lines (that are so common in so many venues), coffee shops, recreation areas, corporate centers, … wherever, in the week that lies before it.

But, alas, somewhere many centuries ago, the idea of the church building for itself ‘sanctuaries’ where the followers of Christ gathered to essentially dwell for a few hours in some pleasant spiritual setting of (what one called) twilight and unreality, became something of the norm, and so—especially in the western world—the landscape is littered with handsome ‘church sanctuaries’ replete with all of the accoutrements of great architecture, stained-glass windows, priests and choirs and liturgies … but that do not equip God’s people for incarnational, salt and light living in the midst of the often intractable realities of one’s 24/7 presence. There s an old ditty that goes: “They do it every Sunday. They’ll be over it on Monday. It’s only a habit they’ve acquired.”

This unreality, however, has taken its toll. As our culture has moved ineluctably into a post-Christian culture, in which the church is no longer a dominant influence, there has emerged a new secular generation which has been totally un-influenced or hardly even touched by those venerable old church institutions. Those venerable old institutions are not going to pass away easily .. they are too entrenched in the older generations, but that older generation is passing off the scene. A new and culturally aware generation is needed. So…at the same time, out of a secular culture, a new and emerging generation of Christ’s followers require a more engaged concept of the church and its gatherings that is not an escape from this world, but is dynamically formed by the mission of God in which, in Jesus Christ, the world to come has ‘backed into’, or invaded this world—the Age to Come has become incarnate in this age. God’s people are called to ‘incarnate’ his divine nature in the here and now. The gatherings of this new generation become (as I noted above) staging areas for the mission of the week, in which they are formed and re-evangelized and equipped for the mission of the coming week … by the skillful teaching of the word of God / the gospel of Jesus Christ, by their participation in its tangible expression in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, by their mutual prayers, praise, and confession, and by their renewed commitment to the mission of God and to each other. … And such gatherings can take place in all kinds of creative venues and unlikely settings. But they are not an escape from their calling to be the incarnation of God in the here and now. They are intentional.

The post-Christian era, what with all of its pervasive secularization, is upon us, and there is no escape from it. But Jesus never called upon us to escape, but to become the incarnation of his New Creation right in the midst of the cultural darkness and its loss of any center. Stand by …

BLOG 1/10/16. THE CHURCH: A COLONY OF “MOST MISERABLE OFFENDERS”

One needs a hearty sense of humor to engage in Christ’s church.  In my last blog (1/6/16) I spelled out my own algorithm of the four essential and very clear characteristics for those colonies of God’s New Creation in Christ, which we designate as the church. I noted that the church is a people ‘called out’ by Jesus Christ: 1) to be those absolutely persuaded and passionate adoring about who Jesus is, what he has done, and what he has taught us we are to be and do, i.e. a Christ-o-centric community; 2) a community/colony which demonstrates in its lifestyle/praxis what that New Creation looks like in behavior; 3) a community/colony which demonstrates God’s New Creation in Christ in its reconciling, loving relationships with each other and with one’s neighbors—even enemies, i.e. “By this shall men know that you are my disciples in that you love one another;” and 4) it is that community/colony that the “missionary arm of the Holy Trinity,” i.e. that people who are contagious with  Christ’s mission to make the message of God’s redeeming love for his world to be known into the corners of the human community—a community in which all are engaged in this passion of Christ to show his love to this present world.

I’ll stand by all of those evidences of the church’s authenticity. I think they are unimpeachable necessities, and when any one of them is absent, somehow the community is less than it is intended to be. It is never perfect, but always n formation—provisionally God’s New Creation. But this is where the sense of humor is necessary. Those four components sound good and Biblical, … but then you encounter the real, existential communities that call themselves the church, … and right away you are faced with the crazy, diverse, often bewildering array of personalities that are so very human. It is one thing to spell out what Christ’s intent/purpose is  for the church, his sine qua non characteristics, … but something quite other when one comes to inhabit one of these communities. One finds both those wonderful individual expressions of these characteristics, gifted persons, caring, warm exemplary folk … but one also finds all of those fractured, or chronically depressed, or self-important, or petty ‘church-i-fied’ folk seeking to impress others with their religiosity, hyper-spiritual, demanding, small-minded… ‘you name it’ kind of folk often in the same colony.

The wonderful thing is that the first confession that one makes when coming into Christ’s family is that we are real sinners, … real sinners, real needy guilty, broken people. We sing: “Come ye sinners, poor and wretched … come to Jesus.” The apostle writes that if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. That confession is so liberating. And here is where I love the Anglican prayer of confession that states it so colorfully, and disarmingly: “We have done those things we ought not to have done and left undone those things we ought to have done. There is no health in us, we are most miserable offenders,” (or something like that!). Boy, oh boy, does that nail it.

And the irony is that the closer we get to the glory and transcendence of God in Christ, the more conscious we are of that all of that. Christ’s disciples are questing for true humanity, for their conformity to the divine nature. This confession sets us free to know who we really are and to allow others to get close. It creates a transparency and a humility that is such a beautiful part of what the church is called to be. If one is too proud of one’s religiosity to admit that one is a “most miserable offender” then that person has missed something of the essence of God’s New Creation. Jesus came to set us free, and our confession of our status as sinner is at the threshold.

One does, in fact, need a great sense of humor, and an uninhibited sense of personal honesty and transparency to be engaged with Christ’s church. But such is the sweet fragrance of Christ, and glorious freedom that such communities/colonies incarnate in this present scene.