I think, in Lent, and as we read the books selected, the overwhelming cry for the church falls along these lines: God chose the church to be a servant community to the world that He loved. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…” (John 3:16). Yet how will the world know this? Through us. We are the means that God has chosen to let the world know of His love. No holy huddles here. We don’t just cozy up around a warm fireplace and horde the love for ourselves. We are sent out into this cold and dark world where broken lives exist, because someone did it for us.
George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community wrote prophetically: I simply argue that the Cross should be raised in the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified on altar between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town’s garbage heap; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. That is what He died for. And that is what He died about. And that is where church people ought to be, and what church people ought to be about.
One of the ways we get in touch with our passion for service is at the intersection of the compassion we learn from Jesus flowing through us to a point of need, trouble or challenge in the lives of others. A key question is: Where does the compassion of Christ (his sympathy and outrage) in us intersect with the brokenness of people’s lives?
In I Chronicles 12:32 it is said of one of the tribes of Israel “the men of Issachar understood their times and knew what Israel must do.” We need to understand our times so that we can know what we must do. Yet, how should we understand these very difficult and uncertain times?
In the Western world we have been going through a cultural shift of seismic proportions that has tremendous implications for how we "do" church. We have been living through a time of massive transition that has repositioned the church within a new missionary context.
Where we once thought of missions as a far-off enterprise in lands beyond, the mission of the church has returned to its doorstep. No longer can we think of missions as a bunch of Christians who support one person we send to another part of the world. To be a Christian these days, to some extent, means we have to be a part of a fringe group like the original apostles.
The primary mission of the church during its early days was to bear witness to this resurrected Christ who had the power to transform lives. Until the 1960’s the church was respected, consulted, and influential. Western civilization has been, for the most part, a churched society.
If we are no longer a churched society, how might we be church for society? These are the questions our books in Lent have asked time and again. It is a question that demands that we let go of some things and take on others. Every faith community must open itself to the moving of the Holy Spirit and get honest about what it is doing and why it is doing it. We must do the same in our personal lives as we evaluate our resources: literal, emotional, physical and spiritual.
I watch churches struggling to survive these days. We rent buildings, hold fundraisers, try desperately to keep things going as “they once were.” Our impulse for biblical stewardship has been eroded in so many ways. I love the promise of Micah 3:10 and try to live by it-- Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.
Can we trust the Lord enough to love His world and to give of ourselves in the most sacrificial of ways? Tough questions for tough times.
A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:
Sometimes it seems as though you have given us
eyes so that we cannot see,
and ears so that we cannot hear,
and hearts so that we cannot know,
and we miss it.
Work on our ears today.
Clean them, circumcise them,
turn them so that they may tingle in the ways
in which you have turned loose among us the powers of death
and the forces of life.
Grant that we should not live in the safe middle ground,
on the surface,
but push us to the edge,
where the action is.
Your action, where you cause all those terrible Fridays
and all those amazing Sundays.
Give us Saturday ears for your tingling.
We pray in the name of your Saturday child.
Amen.
Amen. And wow!
ReplyDeleteLella