rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d83d8813-0dd2-5519-a15b-0e0c2a97eecf">13 My hope is simply that we train students to love and to serve that ridiculous church. I think if we do that, we will find that the church will become both more transformative and a more interesting place to be, such that even the culture will grow curious about such a strange body in its midst.
February 1, 2012
In 1919 William Butler Yeats published his poem, The Second Coming, whose sentiments have almost become a cliche today. He was writing in the aftermath of World War I, yet the poem articulates what many of us are feeling in the church today: a sense that the centrifugal forces that are pulling us apart are more powerful than the glue that holds us together. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . . .”
The other much-quoted line in the poem expresses what seems all too true in our culture and religious wars of the day: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I suppose that line could apply to many of the political campaigns that are surrounding us at the moment, but they might also apply to the politics of the church, describing a poor choice between a wise and wearied indifference on the one hand, and the passions of entrepreneurial intensity on the other.
It seems strange that largely affluent, comfortable, unthreatened American Presbyterians have found it so easy to pull apart, so hard to stay together, so exciting to construct a new denomination, so tiresome to bear with each other in the old one. I wonder why we are so angry today, why resentment provides such powerful rhetorical fuel for our arguments and divisions. Resentment adds by dividing; it increases by subtracting. And it is very powerful.
So what is the opposite of resentment? And how do we find that stuff? How do we find the grace to bear with each other? The church, Calvin reminds us, exists where the gospel is proclaimed and the “visible word” of the sacrament bears to us Christ himself. Word and sacrament do not bear to us instruments of social policy or denominational purity. They bear to us Jesus Christ, whose life among us is a social policy, whose Passion liberates us from our worst and most earnest passions. As Paul writes, “He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is head of the body, the church . . . .” (Col 1:17, 18) In him all things hold together. Which means, I take it, that resentment dies as we are drawn to him. His cross bleeds our anger away.
The most prophetic word that can be said today has to do with what it means to be the church. We know how to serve this or that political end; we know how to engage with this or that righteous cause. What we do not know is what it means that “in him all things hold together.” We would rather grow weary with our resentments and divisions, angrily and no doubt passionately inventing a more spiritual body. Splits happen, we tell ourselves. Divorces are sadly prevalent. That’s the way it is.
I don’t know the solution, much less the best ecclesial strategy. I do know that there is absolutely no point in trying to justify ourselves. There is enough sin around for everyone. And self-justification, no matter how righteous, is finally boring and tedious work. And if, in fact “in him all things hold together,” then we are surely liberated from such tedium and called instead to rejoice in his word of hope. Such liberation deprives our many divisions of the honor of taking them quite as seriously as they demand. In any case, the only appropriate song that answers to our separations and resentments is doxological in nature, a song sung not defiantly or ironically but happily and truly in the knowledge that not even we, with all our “passionate intensity,” can tear apart what Christ has joined together.
February 15, 2012
This past week our seminary has been enriched by the presence of Dr. Darrell Guder. His lectures on the missional church have reminded me of another great missional churchman, Lesslie Newbigin. Many of our students have read Newbigin’s book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. In that book, there is a chapter entitled, “The Logic of Election,” in which Newbigin exegetes Romans 9–11 to show that the God of Jesus Christ always saves by electing the “wrong people.”14 For example, God employs the Jews to save the Gentiles, a scandalous thing to do, particularly since the Jews, in Paul’s judgment, have rejected the gospel. But, he insists, the promises of God are irrevocable, and Israel remains God’s people. Their rejection of the gospel only makes room for the Gentiles to come in. Conversely, the inclusion of the Gentiles is meant to make Israel jealous, and though a hardening has come upon Israel, it will only last until the full number of Gentiles has come in. But when that happens, to quote Paul, “all Israel will be saved.” (Rom11:26a)
Newbigin’s point is that the Gentiles weren’t particularly looking for the Jews to save them, and the Jews weren’t particularly looking to be saved by the Gentiles, the last people from whom they would expect help to come.
If all of this seems a bit contrived to you, think of all the places in scripture where people are saved by the wrong person. The man who fell among thieves is not saved by his fellow countrymen or co-religionists but by the wrong guy, a Samaritan. Joseph’s brothers are saved from starvation by the wrong guy, the guy they had considered murdering and in fact had sold into slavery. The mighty warrior Naaman is healed by paying attention to a little Jewish slave girl, hardly the right person. Jonah considers himself the wrong guy for this job and eventually sulks because the wrong people repent. The “apostle to the Gentiles” is the Jew, Saul, who was bent on persecuting the church, holding the garments while others stoned a follower of the Way. He became Paul who appeared to many as absolutely the wrong guy for this job. God’s people are saved by the wrong guy because they are saved by the Wrong Guy. There was no room 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