…No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it —
What God has arranged for those who love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9
The Message
I remember the conversation with my father, himself retired after 40 years of service in the Methodist Church. I was in my first appointment serving a small-membership congregation in a cove of the mountains of Western North Carolina, full of myself I suppose, and zealous — so eager to make a splash in my community — convinced that the church could be reformed and the world transformed by hearing the gospel. After all, doesn’t Jesus say that the kingdom is breaking in among us? What’s to stop the church from turning the world right side up?
Dad listened patiently as I stood on my soapbox, and then he humbly said, “Well, I just wanted to help people.”
I suppose he was cautioning me to set my hopes a little lower, adding a dose of realism to my idealism. Maybe he saw me as naive and in need of a wake-up call. In any case, over the course of time I learned to curb my enthusiasm. Painful experience taught me that what the gospel proclaimed as possible was often improbable when confronted by the intransigence of the church and my limitations as a leader. My initial self-image as a prophet gave way to my adoption of the role of pastor - more often seeking to help people, like my father did, and only occasionally challenging them or myself with reform.
In those early years I remember also reading an editorial by Martin Marty, long-time editor of The Christian Century, in which he mused fondly on his local church. No banner-waving crusades were led by that congregation. Rather, they were engaged in more pedestrian ministries - helping in soup kitchens, supporting a missionary’s family, volunteering in local schools, sending short-term mission teams to hurricane-devastated areas. Marty’s article, my Dad’s counsel, and my own discouragement at how difficult it was to stir up change in my own local church led me to gradually lower my expectations. I sought to love my people who, after all, were each bearing some hurt and brokenness, in need of grace and healing. I put a priority on comforting the disturbed, only once in a while disturbing the comfortable.
But looking back over the last several decades I wonder if I made the right choice. I have witnessed the decline of the church - not only my denomination, but the church in general. We seem to be going out with a whimper. Maybe I should have been more forthright about the possibilities the gospel presents to us. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what the Lord has prepared for those who love him.” Does not Jesus challenge us with observing and living into the kingdom of God? If resurrection is real, if the Holy Spirit is blowing hither and yon, and the kingdom of God is breaking in among us, why do we as a faith community settle for less?
Annie Dillard once wrote:
“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we 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 ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.
I keep hanging in there with the church. By and large, in our local church we love each other and I would give most of us the benefit of the doubt that we are doing the best we can to be Christians in the world. But I think our notion of what it means to be Christian has generally been defused of its power. When we baptize our children we seem to be following a social convention unaware of what God might do with them.
Will Willimon, once the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, was confronted by the parents of one of his students.
“What have you done with our daughter?”
“What do you mean?”
“She was all set to go to medical school and become a doctor. Now she says she’s dropping out of school, moving to Nevada to teach children on a Navajo reservation.”
Dr. Willimon responded, “I never told her to do that. All I’ve done is preach the gospel. I can’t control what God is doing in her life.”
My colleague “Duke” was teaching about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit breaking in on the disciples to a confirmation class. He asked those twelve-year-olds what they thought about Pentecost. The kids were all quiet for a moment, then, leaning back against the wall on the two hind legs of his chair one of the boys who seemed never to be paying attention said, “It means that God is loose in the world and there’s no getting away from him.”
I can’t help but wonder if God doesn’t expect more out of us. Instead of sedately going about our business, sitting staidly in our pews, we more often should be strapping on our crash helmets for the wild ride we are on. More of our children should be eschewing the normal path to the American Dream (so-called) in preference for counter-cultural choices. Churches should be less often training up good citizens who go along with the flow, and more rabble-rousers getting into “good trouble,” as per the late John Lewis.
I admit I’ve become a bit tame with age, experience, and a good deal of pain. I’ve become more conflict-avoiding over the course of time, but I’m thinking I should become more of a good trouble-maker. Since God is loose in the world, there’s no telling what might happen.
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