THE CHURCH????

THE CHURCH????

            Over the years I’ve come to believe that the purpose of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was to create the church as the primary locus of the mercies and justice of God.  Given the history and the current state of the church, this sounds like one of the most ridiculous statements that I could make.   My experience in the church as a boy, however, bears out some of this purpose and power of the church.  First Presbyterian Church in Helena, Arkansas, was a place of refuge and love for me in a world where my heart was hurting.  Besides my immediate family, friends, and baseball, it was the main place where I began to hear that I was loved, that I could find the meaning of my life in the God who was at the center of the church.

            I left home and went to college and had other experiences where my worldview would be broadened and deepened, and it was in these places where I began to encounter difficulties with the church.  I discovered that the white people in my segregated home church worshipped the power of race as much as they worshipped God.  I learned that God intended women to be partners of men, not property of men, and I knew that the church had taught me this idea of women as property.  In my childhood, I had not even considered that God created people who were attracted to people of the same gender, so that was not even on my radar.  In my conversion on these and many other issues, I discovered that the church had often tied its identity to the social and political beliefs of its members and culture, instead of allowing God to be at the center of its life.  The church where Caroline and I served so long as pastors, Oakhurst Presbyterian, had a huge crisis of faith when its white members had to confront the idea that they worshipped race more than God.  Oakhurst lost 90% of its membership when white folks fled the church and the neighborhood when African-American families started moving in.  So the idea that the purpose of Jesus of Nazareth was to create the church seemed silly and laughable – if this were the case, God must have been playing a joke on the universe!

            Over my many years as a pastor in the church, I began to shift a bit.  Part of that shift was obviously self-serving – I was a pastor in the church!  Yet I also had to admit that there was something about this institution, an institution that retains great potential even as our relevance fades in a post-modern world.   So, over the next month, I want to look at four areas of vital importance to human life that the church - in our best moments and even sometimes in our worst moments – is uniquely qualified to provide in the 21^st century world:  meaning, love, justice, community. 

            We live in a world of super-humanly empowered individuals with our technology, but we still need and long for a sense of meaning that is greater and deeper than ourselves.  It is at the very nature of our existence, in that gap between biology and chemistry and consciousness.  We long to hear that we are loved; we long to experience that we belong to others; we long to believe that the arc of the universe bends toward love and justice.   Because we live in this longing, we are easy prey for false meaning, as we see in today’s world – tribalism and clannishness seems to be everywhere.  In these crazy and difficult times, this longing is especially deep.  This is where the heart of the church comes in – our very essence is to proclaim through ritual and action and life together that life has authentic meaning, especially in times like these, at the same time admitting that we often trade that birthright for a political bowl of porridge. Yet this connectedness in love remains our calling.

            In this 21^st century when the individual is so powerful and is asked to bear so much meaning, we point out that individuals are not capable of carrying such a heavy load by ourselves.  The fading world of the Enlightenment still hears this proclamation as having a low regard for human beings, but in actuality, we have a high regard for humanity.  We simply want to remind everyone that we are not able to be heroic individuals, and if we believe that we are, we open ourselves to all sorts of demonic powers.  It is not coincidental that as our scientific and technological power grows, so does fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  This is not to slam science – it is rather to note that “facts” can’t give meaning by themselves.   That meaning must come from a different source, and the religious community has a long history in doing this.  We often bring a meaning that is sordid and mean and repressive, but that is not the meaning that Jesus brought.  How do we know if we are bringing authentic, life-giving meaning?  We’ll turn to that next, as we look at the markers of love, justice, and community.