for this guy in the inn. Foxes have holes and birds of the air nests, but this guy has no place to lay his head. This guy was a prophet lacking honor in his own country. He came to his own and his own knew him not. This guy eventually is judged to be so wrong that he is placed on a garbage dump between two other outcasts to be killed.
We are all saved by the Wrong Guy—there is no other way. The point? Well, our church is so quick to divide in part because we find it painful, even impossible to put up with the wrong people—whether they be of the left or the right. We prefer to be with the right guys and gals, people like us. Which is why it is so hard for us to hear the gospel, why its gracious logic upsets our more conventional type, why it often leaves us standing outside the party, harrumphing, while our Father and others are celebrating with the wrong guy who just came home.
What connects us to the other wrong guys is not tolerance or a sense of diversity or our own virtues. What connects us to other wrong guys is the Wrong Guy himself. In him “all things hold together,” says Paul (Col1:17). In him. The divine comedy is just that, a comedy. What we fear, what we have so quickly separated, God insists on being joined together, surprising us with the wrong people who become the very means of our salvation. God is sneaky that way, but then what would you expect of One who sticks us to the wrong people by sticking us to the Wrong Guy?
October 3, 2012
A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”15
Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a friend, during the course of which I was struck by what seemed to me to be the crucial issue facing the church today. There are so many issues one might mention: hunger and poverty, war and peace, ethnic and racial conflict, internal anger and bitter divisions, economic hardship and limited resources. My friend was justifiably upset with the weakness of the church’s response to many of these issues, and even angrier about the quality of life exhibited in the church itself.
It is so easy to grow bitter about the church. Richard John Neuhaus has written about sheep who all too easily become wolves. And he has noted further that for ministers just starting out, congregational life can provide a real shock in terms of the virulence of sheer nastiness that Christians can deal out to each other. “It is a special sort of nastiness,” he writes, “perhaps because proximity to the sacred multiplies the force of the demonic. Envy, resentment, and unalloyed hatred can make their appearance in any association, but they seem so ghastly in the church because they so flagrantly contradict the stated purpose of the association.”16
So the temptation is to imagine a better church, one that is more attractive, successful, even nicer. And there is nothing wrong with that. We should all long for a church to which people cannot wait to enter, for worship services that are filled to overflowing, for benevolent budgets that expand to include the whole world, for programs that transform lives, communities, even cities. The hard part is living with our disappointment that people don’t always love what we do, or support what is obviously worthy of their best passions, or accept our vision of what the church can be and do. Then is when it becomes difficult to love the church. Then is when it becomes easy to write people off. Then is when we are tempted to look for an exit. But then is also when the crucial question presses upon us: Can we love the church?
Or do we love our dreams of the church more?
I have recently been reading an account of the German church struggle and despite the occasional heroism displayed by various individuals, the witness there was, frankly, disappointing. I wonder if we would have done any better. And I think of those whose task it was to try to rebuild the church in Germany after World War II. How hard it must have been to summon a gospel witness amidst the ruins and manifest failure of the church itself.
But maybe it was no harder than what we face today, where our affluence and abundance of choices so easily trivialize the faith. Maybe our preoccupation with our own decline is more of a symptom of our desire for self-preservation than it is of anything else.
The truth is we are not promised increasing number of pulpits in an ever-growing denomination of successful people. There is very little of that in scripture. Rather there is only (!) manna; only loaves and fishes; only waiting and not knowing and bearing witness and being raised again from the dead. John Calvin insists that the church lives only as it is raised from the dead again and again. Can we love such a church? It seems so paltry at times, so unfashionable, so awkward. Are we really called to love that mess?
A final note: recently I represented our seminary at the inaugural event at another seminary nearby. I was struck by the service, which contained two sermons! There was a good deal of celebration of the success that had already been attained. Success upon success. No stumbles, no failures, no questions, no wilderness, no exile, no losses. Where was the struggle, I wondered.
Perhaps we are blessed to be living with a church that struggles so obviously. It is a gift to be preserved from some kinds of “success.” The hardness, the difficulty, the limits are probably closer to the “narrow way” the church has ever been called to walk. And as affluent and comfortable as we are, we have much to learn still. Only in America might we think that being the church is meant to be one successful thing after another. The crucial issue of our day, as it is of any day, is whether the church will be the church, whether it will, with its words and actions, its life and possessions, bear witness to Jesus Christ. Can we love the Body whose body is always a mess, and is always at its best when struggling? Or would we rather have something neater, cleaner, nicer, more spiritual, something that carries less theological baggage? There is only one reason to love a church that is so messy and troubled. The head of the church seems to do so.
January 31, 2013
We often think of tradition as confining. We learn early on to celebrate “non-conformity” even as we buy the same kind of shoes and shirts. But musicians and bricklayers, I would guess, might tell us that real non-conformity lies on the other side of mastering a particular tradition. One cannot attempt to improvise until one has mastered the instrument or craft and is comfortable enough in that mastery to think imaginative thoughts in another vein. Otherwise, what one is doing is merely cheap and silly and self-absorbed.
The life shaped by Christian discipleship is none of those things. Wallace Alston, in his essay, “The Education of a Pastor-Theologian,” suggests that it is in fact our tradition, particularly in preparing students for ministry, that actually liberates. He notes that in the Reformed tradition, the “ordered life” is a rather different thing from the “driven life” (and by extension, “the purpose-driven life”), just as it also differs from the “scattered” life or the “un-called” life. What is an “ordered life”? Alston calls it a life “lived in the confession of the power of the living God to make sense of human living and dying.” He cites John Greenleaf Whittier’s lyrics: “Drop thy still dews of quietness, till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace.”17
In a similar vein Karl Barth refers to the “ordered life” when he writes that it is the Holy Day, Sunday, that signals true human freedom.18 By ordering our lives the Sabbath liberates us from both the drivenness of our self-justifying busyness and the lassitude of our self-justifying despair.
Alston is bold to suggest what I think to be profoundly true, and that is that no small part of the work of ministry is the task of traditioning. He points out how many sermons today seem to be “first-generation”
