After I started writing these posts, I didn’t really like the title and wanted to change it, but I’ve already started. I see God’s blessing pouring out from large and small churches, from Reformed and Pentecostal not to mention Liturgical churches. His Sovereign love and redemptive power cannot be limited by our frail and failing attempts to “solve” His church problem.
We cannot domesticate the divine through our structure, rationality or emotional encounters. Rather, we can only lift up hands and hearts of thanksgiving for His unflinching faithful love to the faithless, stumbling saints who walk toward glory.
And yet, I don’t think it wrong to question and challenge and seek to be a people and a church that is always reforming by the continuing light that shines out from His Word. I believe we live in a time between times. The world has not seen such drastic challenges since waning of the Middles Ages. As the Crusades and the Black plague and the shifting patterns in Western Europe shook the whole framework of medieval life and thought, God worked in and through His people to bring change. A new articulation of the future came through Martin Luther. His song echoed and developed in the growing chorus of other saints who stretched forward to the future God was creating.
God worked in mighty ways through the modern world that was to emerge. But time came for His judgment upon the excesses and arrogance of the modern world. And the 20th century experienced the devastating blows of war and destruction as the modern world crumbled before the face of modern engineers who finally figured out a way to create paradise without God.
I believe we are living in time between times as we weight (and wait) for a new articulation that leads God’s people (and the world) forward as a reforming people rooted in the every living Word. What some call post-modernism is more like remains of modern failure. The new time we are being stretched toward will continue the movement of God’s Spirit that transforms and blesses creation through the frail people of God.
Continuity in Time (and space)
With those thoughts, I would suggest that one of the great challenges for the church (large or small) is to find continuity in time (and space). We’ve grown up as heirs of Descartes (and others) who decided we don’t need anyone before us. There is a difference between subjecting tradition to the judgment of God’s Word and rejecting tradition altogether. Many of us grew up in churches that lost their memory and functioned as atemporal islands.
Today some have started looking backwards, grasping at various rituals from the past and hoping to resurrect some ancient experience of God that is older than this morning’s cup of Starbucks. This is good but is a bit chaotic and can sometimes create a mix-mash of rituals that may be another way we try to domesticate God.
I think the church is challenged with watching and listening to the developing story in Scripture of God’s people. When YHWH appears to Moses, He is the God of the Fathers. In others words, He appears as the faithful keeper of the covenant. As Israel emerges from the dust of Egypt, she consistently is challenged to remember the story. By the time Jesus comes, He is coming to a story of redemption that is deep in the memory of God’s people (recounted and re-enacted through feasts and festivals, sacrifices and Sabbaths).
Jesus breaks the bread and pours the wine and tells the disciples to do this in “Remembrance of Me.” The temporal continuity continues. They are called to be God’s blessing to the world and as they go out into all the world, they are called to continually remember who they are.
We must listen to the Scripture and learn ways to remember. First and foremost by the breaking of the Word and Sacrament. We are part of a people who God has called out to bless the whole world. We are not isolated islands. Somehow, we must relearn to remember who we are and who went before us. Somehow we must learn to retell Biblical history as well as Church history. We are connected with God’s people across time and space.
Our struggles at church are not about figuring out how to fix what all the other folks ruined, but to consider one another above ourselves. If I just decide to leave church and start meeting at a coffee shop, I may be simply exchanging one form of subjective interiority for another. But if I humble myself before God’s people throughout time and throughout space, I may learn to love and serve those with whom I disagree. I may be changed, humiliated. I may even learn to suffer for my enemies and love through death and beyond.
Before I actively tried to do home church, I was so certain that I knew the problems of church and knew exactly how to would correct them. Now I realize what an absolute failure I really am. By God’s grace, I continue to serve and to try to follow this call, and to trust that in spite of my arrogance that has been humiliated again and again, God is transforming me into love.
In some small way, I believe seeking merely to break open the Word and listen to God’s command, and to break the bread and drink the wine, God is at work. Changing me. Reintegrating me, the disconnected modern, into a body that has known suffering in the wilderness, that has been crushed in again and again, that has walked through the midst of a warring world, bearing the Name of Jesus, the Word of Love to the forsaken and forgotten.
And even as I am learning to remember, I trust my Father above is and does remember His people in the bread and wine, and will not forsake His people, but will create a marvel greater than anything our world has yet to fathom.
