The body of Jesus, in the American experience, is as deeply disappointing as it is essential.
Pike Place Market,1 lying in the heart of downtown Seattle, is full of sounds and smells, unique. “20 lb. Salmon, coming up!” is yelled out by the man behind the counter and immediately echoed by all the employees of this fish market. Another employee immediately picks up a salmon, slippery and with eyes bulging, from the ice filled chest and apparently without looking, tosses the fish through the air in the direction of the original caller. “Fish flying!” echoes throughout the open market, again by all the employees. Amazingly the fish finds its new home and is quickly wrapped into the awaiting newspaper. The cash register rings, money is exchanged and the banter of two strangers, cashier and buyer, finish the drama being acted out. Their conversation sounds as if they were lifelong friends, but all present know; they are just intimate strangers. Retailer and customer both play their parts as the public looks on with a smile in our eyes and on our faces.
In this city Pike Place Market beckons back to another time and place. It is the village square where the retailers and customers know each other and engage one another in an easy and playful spirit, bread of hundreds of years of shared experience.
The tragedy of the modern Church is that we have opted for a ministry of ‘intimate strangers’ instead of a community of ‘intimate neighbors’ built upon a genuine reverence for those who, admittedly, we in any other context would likely never hang with. We have tried, through our own therapeutic ministries and in our worship to replicate the Pike Place Market
No institution other than the Church offers salvational hope as it’s essential mission. Salvation, being the existential question—Who am I? Who are we? Why am I? Why are we? What is human and human making all about?
In the Apostle John’s circular letter’s prologue he, reflecting from 40-50 years distance from the human Jesus event, defines salvation as “human making” and the Church as the institutional presence through which the human Jesus is known. He writes: “We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life. The life was revealed, and we have seen, and we testify and announce to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us. What we have seen and heard, we also announce it to you so that you can have fellowship with us. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. This is the message that we have heard from him and announce to you: “God is light and there is no darkness in him at all.” If we claim, “We have fellowship with him,” and live in the darkness, we are lying and do not act truthfully. But if we live in the light in the same way as he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin” (1 John 1:1-3, 5-7 CEB).
In other words, it is the inter-connected Story and The Spirit residing in and among and with The Church that makes knowing our humanity as received from the Human One, Jesus, real—and in Him, The Father.
As we walk authentically inside The Story there is a fellowship with the historical Jesus and with the Trinity of God in the Communal Presence of the Church that removes the shame and guilt that every human feels in isolation; that knowing sense of hypocrisy or failure or disappointment in our own isolated journey to date. Such is John’s vision of the ideal church; a space where confessional authenticity creates a human space far from perfect, yet living into a communion where light permeates precisely because we know the wounded spaces, the sin that so easily casts a shadow of darkness.
John emphasizes the point: “If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God” (1 John 1:8-10 MSG).
Such is the historic inheritance: A community essential as it is old, connected to a human encounter with God made flesh, nevertheless a constant struggle with disappointment inside our own attempts at fleshing Jesus out.
In a Naz Pastor’s Think Tank pastoral post of an article written by Sharad Yadav, a probing of the nature of our dis-content is offered. Sharad focuses on two very human hungers driving our parishoners and exhausting we who manage them. The twin human pursuits are self-improvement or therapeutic happiness and a safe place to be “real” or accepted, not as you succeed only but especially in failure.
These twin needs are at the heart of the human pursuit, yet become monsters if we are driven by either. Nor is the Church uniquely gifted in realizing our calling in light of our culturally reinforced hunger to “be happy”, to “be loved;” one the writer calls a Leviathan, the other a behemoth.
In the writer’s words: Sharad
“I work in the church, which means I live with constant disappointment. These days I have been commiserating with Sartre in his well-known self-diagnosis: ”Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” Churches have titanic power to disappoint because so many of them exist between two crushing realities.
The first is the Leviathan of market forces which translate every aspect of our spiritual lives into personal advancement. This mutated monstrosity is a hybrid of both educational and health/wellness industries, in which the church aims to provide the goods and services necessary for the therapeutic emotional centering of selves and promotion of good spiritual hygiene for the whole family.”
And the second he describes as “a Behemoth constructed from our most transcendent yearning; the hopes which we are encouraged to nurture for something different than our culture’s littered relational landscapes of broken fidelities, tenuous commitments and superficial dalliances. Church awakens a colossus of desire in us, hungry to know and be known as we really are, to see purity of motives, the generosity of familial patience, the joy of some communal arrangement not soiled by the extortion of a cost/benefit analysis.”
Sharad’s conclusion is too accurate to dismiss, especially if we accept our fate as “intimate strangers.” He concludes by way of reflection: “Church communities are locked in a terrible struggle between these two mammoths raging inside them. Church isn’t just another consumer hell, because it draws people by their very real desires (noticeable or not) for another world. But, as we know, neither is it a heaven where we can escape the toil, burden, complexity or tragic stupidity of this world.
Our survival depends on our ability to recognize that the communal project of church is not to conquer or domesticate these primordial beasts, but to learn to live with them. Did you really think any of us, individually or together, could quench hell with our tears or rope heaven so as to bring it down? You can’t drown Leviathan and you can’t saddle Behemoth. These realties are bigger than us. Church is nothing more than living in their midst. They will rampage around us. They will rage inside of us, in our communities and within our own breasts. Church is the place we go to name these things - in our songs, prayers, creeds, sermons and benedictions. It’s the name of those people who share the struggle to survive.” 2
Having cut my heart by truth I, Terry, initially responded by narrative:
My own Experience:
I was about six years into an 18 year run, now turning the 26th year—these last years as an associate in the same urban, small multi-economic and multi-cultural community—when the impossibility of the Leviathan expectations hit me squarely in the heart. Driving home from Costco Corp where I worked to pay the bills and heading 26 miles east to west Seattle where I worked to renew an all but deceased community of faith—I enjoyed the brief respite between worlds; one with clearly defined expectations that I excelled in and the other with a series of conflicting needs between the white, female and aging women, a Samoan congregation from another cultural world and place and the homeless and poorer communities of color just six blocks away and into which I poured myself.
I had been listening to NPR reporting on a Texas faith community of sufficient size to have literally created a self-contained and entrepreneurial world where worship, sports, self-help learning groups, bowling, cafes all co-existed in an inter-dependent model of healthy therapeutic ministries on one campus. As I listened the weight of my own little, sometimes fun but always exhausting and largely superficial relationships and needs overwhelmed, as I at last pulled over to the street curb just outside our three story and historic 88 year old building falling down around us. I leaned over my steering wheel and wept deeply, blurting out to God and no one, “Lord, if that’s what it takes, I can’t do it.”
My wife opened the door of our parsonage and ignoring my obviously depressed demeanor signaled I should come in and take a landline phone call—cell phones not yet intruding mercilessly on my every quiet drive.
On the other end was an older gentleman who would become something of a mentor, an associate of a neighboring wealthy suburban church gifted in Missional support. This gentleman who would serve over a hundred thousand meals to homeless persons in Seattle simply said, “Terry, you don’t know me but God has placed you on my heart and we’d like to help you as you serve the vulnerable.” He did. They did. I discovered that the Missional Presence, now funded and supported by expertise largely put the sword in Leviathan.
The second gift was a chaotic, fun, hard inter-active communion between our now cross-generational and mixed ethnicities, now including our Samoan congregation and the gathering second generation of Samoans identifying with our community, the homeless and our neighbors who in the midst of learning to fight fair also laughed deeply and became a crazy assortment of authentic, open persons approaching the ideal inside the behemoth desires.
Even so, 15 years later the monstrous expectations of our reputation in our own eyes has landed us in the very place described; exhausted and no longer living on the edge of excitement but with the very real awareness of a compromised approximation only.
Even today I would not want to be anywhere else and our communal bonds are now familial, but with the lowered expectations and disappointments managed only by the authentic expression of our pastors and congregants very human wrestling with depression and anxiety mingled with a peace—the result of psychological therapy and meds combined with the Catholic confessional built into the fabric of our community via Wesleyan small groups, the open altar, liturgies such as our weekly and live ancient prayers of the church 3 interacting with the intermittent sins, failings and confessed renewals that also attend.
But what makes the mundane not only bearable but sometimes quite fun is a restorative gospel focused on the most vulnerable among us, ourselves included. Knowing and failing, accepting and striving turns “Intimate Strangers” seated horizontally in pews facing forward into a commonly shared, sarcastic, fun and disappointing journey in hope of the “renewal of all things.
Our Christian world is no longer divided between “saved” and “unsaved” as though the Jesus event never happened. God is reconciled to all and in that sense we are all being saved, restored, made human; the outcomes not yet revealed but dependent only on wether we live into or away from the very saving love around and within every human of every culture and faith tradition.
For the first time my/our story feels directly connected to John’s historic witness of the One whom John, the early church and we with them “have seen with our eyes, …and our hands handled, about the word of life. The life was revealed, and we have seen, and we testify and announce to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us” (I John 1: 3).
Closing Reflections on the Theme
I think the reality of disappointment and apparent inability to do nothing more than manage these twin expectations (monsters) is the result not only of the larger culture but of the Church’s culture, informed by an escapist raptural theology that fails to take seriously our own partnership with the Divine when we pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
I grew up in the Church that Sharad describes, served as lay minister and associate nurturing connections of need based on the human therapeutic model addressing every itch to attract and a gospel of hope, highly personal and other worldly. “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through, my treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue. ..Oh Lord, You know, I have no friend but You, If heaven’s not my home, I don’t know what I’ll do. The angels beckoned me to heaven’s open door and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”
There was and is value inside such faith, most especially when the result is a purity of love for God. But it was largely a faith that missed the heart of Jesus life mission, still defining who is in and who is out, and that by means of a judicially based gospel of sin diagnosis and management; The sinners prayer the prime example.
A faith that sees “Sinners” verses “Saints” feeds the very behemoth that the Church is uniquely gifted to tame—the need for acceptance. We are called only to see children of God be they Muslim, Jewish, Christian or Agnostic; All of us family and who at various times and in incredibly unique ways manage to be a victim of our own choices, attitudes, prejudices—our sins. If we can find a way to value, to receive one another wether at our best or worst then, as if by magic, Jesus lives among us, just as he did John, so very long ago.
Blessings! Terry :)
1 Opening illustration from my book, “Jerusalem Gates”, Chapter 6, “Life in the City—The Fish Gate”
https://www.amazon.com/Jerusalems-Gates-Narrative-Devotional-Holy-Love/dp/1520512570/ref=sr_1_5?crid
2 For the original article referenced:
3 WSCN Wednesday Noon Prayers:
Comentarios