Tomorrow

Oaxaca has made it through the weekend. Most of the voting stations stayed open, though a few closed when teachers burned their equipment, and the federal police opened the refineries of Oaxaca, allowing tankers to supply the gas stations. For now, there is an uneasy peace, and life has returned, somewhat, to normal. But it made me think how easily one determined group of people can shut down a city--just by cutting off its gas. It’s not like the crop failed, or the sky rolled up like a scroll, or the water turned to death. I finished Revelation and imagined how those final plagues could come true tomorrow with one all out nuclear war, and no amount of federal police would solve anything. Yesterday I said that in the light of this, we are called to follow Jesus (however impossible that is), and a few days before that I made a statement about how Jesus intends to get this job done, and I said his church is his agent on earth. I still believe that, because it’s his body, but I also said some things I’ve had to rethink.

I was visiting a friend, and over wine (which I didn’t drink because I’m just not sure how it will mix with the cocktail I already have

 inside me) and excellent food, my friend told me she had taken issue with something I’d said in an earlier post. She was gentle, and as we talked, I could see her point. My statement had been categorical, you know, one of those that implies "all," "none," "never," or "always." You have to watch those. Categorical statements get you in trouble, and I am learning to use less and less of them as I get older. As we talked, I realized that I had done precisely what I keep insisting we should never do to one another: judge someone’s spiritual status when you disagree on ideas, especially without listening first, which I hadn’t. Here is my statement: “If you walk away from Church, you walk away from God.” I realize now that sometimes we walk away from particular churches, not because we are rejecting God, but because these churches have turned us off, and we just don’t want to be a part of them anymore. My friend described it this way: “They just aren’t life-giving.”

Some of our churches do not know how to relate to people outside the narrow cross section of the population that agrees with their particular doctrinal checklist. Sometimes the people who aren’t “in” get tired of sitting in pews and hearing how they don’t measure up. Being involved in this kind of church may not “spur them on to greater love and good works” but instead feel like a constant drain. You can just get numb after a while. This is not a healthy scenario. Maybe these people need to walk away, and it may take a very long time for them to heal. Probably most will never return to organized or structured church at all. I think we all know people like this.

Fortunately, the organized church does not represent the entire Body of Christ. Churches with credentialed pastors and beautiful buildings do not own the Body of Christ. Remember when the Holy Spirit first birthed the church? It had no buildings, no credentialed leaders, no formal structure. It met in homes to break bread and in the Jewish Temple to worship. We’ve since clothed the church with many cultural trappings, as we do with all our belongings, and this is not wrong, just human—unless our cultural trappings get in the way of people finding God. The Jews had this problem of allowing their cultural trappings to get in the way of people finding God, and we all know what Jesus had to say about that! Do we think we are free of this sin?

 I asked my friend, who loves Christ but is simply exhausted and done with organized church, “So if you could define the church any way you wished, what would you say?” Here is her definition, and I like it very much: “church could be people who connect, preferably over food and wine, who worship God together, and listen to one another, holding out their interpretations with open hands. This group would be intergenerational and diverse, and outwardly focused on all the people that they find living around them.” If this group that connects over food and wine does not look much like the group inside the beautiful building with the credentialed pastor, so be it. It is still the body of Christ.

So let me rephrase my original categorical statement in the light of my friend’s gentle and necessary remonstrance: It is impossible for those of us in love with Jesus to walk away from his body because his Spirit has placed us there, forever, and Jesus is there (thank goodness—at least one member is on the mark). We may walk away from certain expressions of his body because we are unhealthy, or because they are unhealthy, or maybe both, but we should always be creating ways to worship and serve God in community with one another, in his body, because at the end of the day (Finally back to Revelation, which is overwhelming and leaves me tongue-tied), when everything else is gone, the body, the bride of Christ, the true Church, is what remains of humanity. And I'm convinced that she's not some puny, surviving thing but some vast, vast, vast, shockingly vibrant and utterly captivating...body. And you know what she says, what she calls to everyone through gates left eternally open? She and the Spirit? She keeps insisting, “Come.”

Come.

This is what sends Robert and me to Oaxaca and Guerrero, to Hispanics and Mixtecs, and team members reaching out to even more people. Because who knows about tomorrow. Today is the day of salvation.

 

 Durer's Praying Hands  1508

Durer's Four Horsemen 1478. The era was obsessed with End Times themes