Leaving the Land of Uz

       “Once upon a time in the land of Uz…” Have you ever been there? I often like to visit. Many of us were born there but have had to move on. It is a beautiful country, where the sky is deep blue, and the rivers run clear and clean. There is no need to watch for trouble lurking in dark corners, and there appears to be a good reason for everything that happens. Uz is a safe and secure country, full of bright colors and straight lines, where the righteous flourish and where the wicked are banished for their evil deeds. Those who live upright lives dwell there in spacious homes, surrounded by loving families, protected by a divine fence. Some televangelists have their tents pitched in Uz right now, where they take pictures for us of the many blessings that they see raining down on those who follow the rules.

Even in Uz, however, suffering is eventually going to rear its ugly head, and its inhabitants are never prepared. Cancer survivor Carol Shields writes: “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all of your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.”[1] Once it is smashed, we find ourselves sitting on the outskirts of Uz, tossed aside like the trash, using the sharp, broken pieces of our happiness to pick at our painful wounds. Once it is smashed, we are Job. Once it is smashed, we have to figure out how to keep our integrity, what it means to be whole when our world breaks open.

There are two sides to “integrity” or wholeness. There is the moral integrity that is the upright “fulfilling of commitments.” [2]  This is the kind of integrity that is expected in the land of Uz. As Job says later in the book, “Until I die, I will not put away my integrity from me. I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go.” This desperate holding on to traditional religious duties, no matter what, is one side of Job’s integrity. Indeed, as the most perfect man in the Hebrew Scriptures, more graced with virtues than Abraham or even Moses, Job is completely righteous in his dealings with others, and he respects the divine will, serving his Creator in all things. He walks with “integrity,” fitting seamlessly into the Creator’s flawless design for the world. And as a direct result of his integrity, he receives blessing upon blessing from God’s hand.

But wait! Integrity is also “giving credence to one’s experience,” finding meaning in a wholeness between our inner selves and the world around us.[3] We cannot be whole without being true to our experiences. When things are turned upside down in the land of Uz, and Job’s children are all killed and his livelihood destroyed, the text in today’s reading praises Job for “[persisting] in his integrity” and refusing to blame God. But how can Job walk in integrity when he knows that he is blameless before God, yet finds himself suffering as only sinners are supposed to do? Job’s wife sees the problem before Job does. As he sits among the ashes, picking his sores and refusing to be moved, she comes over to him and sighs, “Do you still persist in your integrity?” In other words, the ground on which your piety was based has been yanked out from under you. Your experience no longer fits with the way you are acting. If you continue to bless God, you will lose your integrity. It would make more sense for you to curse God and suffer the consequences.

So what are all we Jobs to do when faced with tragic, meaningless suffering? Aren’t we supposed to “keep the faith?” Aren’t we supposed to trust in the Lord, no matter what, like today’s Psalm encourages us to do?  “I have lived with integrity,” the Psalmist boasts, “I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered. Test me, O Lord, and try me; examine my heart and my mind.” I haven’t done bad things like those other sinners. In the end, I won’t get punished like they will. I should be redeemed because I live with integrity.

Of course we are to trust in the Lord, but we are not to trust in God based on the system of protection and reward that is practiced in the Land of Uz. What the book of Job wants to make clear, is that our relationship with God is not based on this kind of theology of retribution. We don’t have to be one of those Prosperity Gospel people who think that God sent hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for the sinfulness of Mardi Gras, in order to share an ingrained theology of retribution that seeps from the land of Uz into our own thought processes. I hate to admit the number of times that I have sat on an airplane caught in scary turbulence and looked around, anxiously counting the number of cute babies and kind-looking people sitting around me, calculating somehow that God wouldn’t let a plane full of that many good people crash.

In Mary Doria Russell’s novel, The Sparrow, Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz struggles with this theology of retribution in his travels to the faraway planet Rakhat. Upon arriving on the new planet, as one of the first humans ever to see its wonders, he feels chosen by God, a part of an amazing divine creation, part of an entire universe where everything has its place and faithfulness is clearly rewarded by God. He is empowered by a sense of divine purpose and feels that his whole life has been leading up to these crowning moments of mission. In the end, however, Emilio’s friends all die on Rakhat; human interference makes a mess on the new planet; and Emilio himself is left, like Job, a physically and psychologically broken man who bitterly mocks his own former sense of purpose. “If I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true [Emilio complains], then the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness.”[4] Russell comments on her characters: “we seem to believe that if we act in accordance with our understanding of God’s will, we ought to be rewarded. But in doing so we’re making a deal that God didn’t sign on to.”[5]

By the end of the The Sparrow, Emilio does not yet find a way out of his bitterness, but by the end of the book of Job, Job finally catches on. He allows himself to maintain a deeper kind of integrity by raling at God, by shining the light of his experience on his earlier notions of piety. At the end of the book, Job understands that God’s blessing is a free and wondrous gift, that God is a God of Covenant, a God who gives himself unconditionally to Job. Job can worship God in gratitude for the “gratuity of God’s creation,” rather than calculating where he stands with God.[6]

Our ever-creating, ever-loving, ever-self-giving God, calls us into the kind of relationship that cannot be weighed and measured and counted. God is indeed a God of justice, but it is a justice that is beyond our understanding. While we cannot understand God’s judgments, we can trust in God’s compassion, seen in the life and death of Jesus Christ. We can trust in that deep power that doesn’t look like power, that Resurrection power that can bring to life what is broken by pain and even by death. Yesterday, at Father Joe Smith’s funeral, we began the burial service by singing the Christmas carol, “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” As we all sang, “O come, let us adore him,” in the face of tragic death, we were marching bravely together from the Land of Uz to Bethlehem, to the city where God mysteriously yet graciously joins us in our pain and suffering, as a human child.

New Testament scholar Kathy Grieb wonders if Mark, in today’s Gospel on divorce, doesn’t include the story of Jesus taking the child in his arms, in order to show us that the reign of God is open to all who receive it in the way that only a little child can receive it: “as sheer gift to those with no power, no rights, no demands, no status, and no sense of their own achievement.”[7] In the Land of Uz, these remarks on divorce would cause us to condemn ourselves or others as deserving of punishment for our failure in God’s eyes. In Jesus arms, the God who became a little child holds all of us sinners, however, in a loving embrace. In our despair, in our incomprehension, in our pain, in our guilt, we hold up our arms to God, tears running down our cheeks, sobbing and screaming for all we are worth, like a baby waiting to be picked up from his crib and held in loving arms: in this cry is our integrity.

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[1] Carol Shields, “Unless,” quoted in Samuel Balentine,  Job (Smith and Helwys, 2006), 16.

[2] Carol Newsom, quoted in David Hester, Job (Interpretation Bible Studies, 2005), 13.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow, 394.

[5] Ibid., 415.

[6] Susannah Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity, 73.

[7] Kathy Grieb, “Blogging toward Sunday.” http://theolog.org/2009/09/blogging-toward-sunday-is-it-lawful.html.

How Broken Playmobile Figures can be Relevant: On Christian Cooperation and Responsibility

          This week, I was coming back to St. Thomas from running an errand out in the Industrial Park, and, as always when on unfamiliar roads, I got lost. I decided to pull over so that I could look at the maps on my trusty i-Phone and pulled into what I thought was some giant industrial complex, with its fairly full and busy parking lot on this weekday morning. When, to my surprise, I saw the sign that said, “Southeast Christian Church,” I immediately went into defensive mode. “I wonder what fear-mongering Bible study they are having at Six Flags Over Jesus this morning,” I thought uncharitably, as I looked with some jealousy at all of the cars. “They are probably trying to stop all these people from thinking for themselves…! "The church building looks like the Astrodome,” I mumbled as I looked around the campus. "How can you have Christian community in a place that big?!”

Jesus would not have been pleased with me, as I was acting just like those disciples in today’s Gospel lesson, the ones who were trying to censure another group of Christians for casting out demons, just because they belonged to a different group. “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward,” he explains, probably with exasperation in his voice. Contrary to the idealized portrayals in the book of Acts, the early church was as fragmented and quarrelsome as the Church has always been, and Mark has Jesus addressing the issue of “us” versus “them” in no uncertain terms in our Gospel lesson. Instead of accusing other groups of wrong deeds or wrong beliefs, says Jesus, you had better pay attention to how you yourselves are acting. You are all my disciples, and we are all walking the same path.

Jesus goes beyond just chastising the disciples for a lack of unity, however. With frightening hyperbole, Jesus warns me and every self-righteous little group of disciples that it is going to take all that we have and all that we are to live lives of Christian discipleship; our attention needs to be on our own ways of caring for fellow disciples (“these little ones who believe in me”) and on the series of roadblocks that litter the path of a Christian life, a life that even our own hands and eyes and feet can pull dangerously off course from one moment to the next. All the talk of “hell” in this passage might cause us squeamishly non-hellfire-and-brimstone-Episcopalians to squirm and shut our ears. That would be unfortunate. “Hell” here is not Dante’s Inferno of eternal fire that we imagine when we read Jesus’ words. This “hell” in the Greek text is “Gehenna,” a real valley near Jerusalem where, at once point in the history of ancient Israel, human sacrifices were once offered to a foreign god. As such, it was a defiled and unclean place, a place that was in Jesus’ day a garbage dump for the city, a place where burning trash smoldered night and day, and a fitting image of desolation and decay.[1] If you want life in God, Jesus is saying, you need to rid yourself of everything that is a stumbling block, even if it seems as essential to your present life as your hands and feet and eyes. If you hang onto it, it will burn away your time and your will, and you will smolder in the garbage dump of living death, until nothing is left but dust and ashes. We need to get rid of whatever is preventing our Christian communities from being places of deep responsibility, responsibility for the salvation of the “little ones,” total commitment to the healing of our brothers and sisters.

To be in community these days is tough. In our fragmented, often isolated and lonely, modern world, we long for community, but we don’t really know what it means. Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, a pastor who specializes in community and Christian practice, points out the longing fascination of our “radically autonomous society” with all things communal: we have “online communities” like Facebook and Twitter and Match.com; we have “planned communities” like Norton Commons, that promise the safety and closeness to neighbors of bygone days; we have “community-supported agriculture” and “community investments,” that bring us together for a common goal. “Community Churches” spring up like weeds, hiding the implied fragmentation and institutional bureaucracy of a denominational name, and marketing a sense of cozy camaraderie. At the same time that we strive to create the communities that we long for, however, we avoid making commitments and seem lacking in “any collective capacity to prioritize the common good.”[2] We resist “joining” churches and clubs, preferring the freedom to float around at will. We promote individual success and reward, being the “best that we can be.” We have little common moral ground, and are disillusioned with the role of government and institutions in solving our problems. We are left with “communities” that compete with one another, communities that provide a sense of belonging without the discipline of community interest.

Here at St. Thomas, I have to say that, whatever our own stumbling blocks, we do pretty well in caring for the little ones among us. We have the discipline and sense of responsibility that is often lacking in communities these days, and we need to honor that in ourselves. Our little community follows the practices outlined in today’s reading in James’ letter: we pray faithfully for the suffering, anointing one another with oil every Sunday at the Prayer Chair. We openly confess our sins and tend to live our lives without pretention. We pray, and we sing songs of praise. We look out for one another and encourage one another in discipleship. The way that we come together to support our children and those in our parish who are ill or in need is proof that we take our responsibilities for one another seriously.

Nevertheless, I still think that we, like all churches these days, suffer from a lack of understanding our role in and our relationships with the greater community—the community of believers and nonbelievers in which we live our lives. In our strategic planning sessions with the Vestry, we face again and again the question of what on earth we mean when we talk about “community.” Are we talking about our parish community, about the Westport Road community, about our community in the Deanery or the Diocese, about the community of Christians throughout the world?

We’re talking about them all, Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel. We are responsible not just to our own parish community, but to everyone who bears the name of Christ, whether they agree with us or not, whether we like them or not, whether it is easy for us to share with them or not. I hope that here at St. Thomas, we will be able to open up to work more with the Episcopal churches in our deanery, to participate more fully and more often at Diocesan events, to work together with the many denominations of Christians in our area to care for the little ones who would otherwise be out of our reach. I hope that we can get more involved with the work of Eastern Area Community Ministries, that we can work with Zachary Taylor Elementary, that we can join in all kinds of projects with the many churches that line Westport Road. Working to cooperate and to take responsibility with all of our brothers and sisters in Christ to meet the needs of the world and one another will not leave us time to waste in judging one another, and it might just save us from dwindling down to ash on society’s trash heap.

          In Confirmation Class this week, my challenge was to present the whole of Church History in about thirty minutes. To engage the kids in what might have been an intolerably long and boring lecture, I gave them each a handful of Playmobile figures that I had scavenged from a box of old toys in my basement. Like the real Church, these figures were a motley crew: some were holding props like guns and canoe paddles, some were missing body parts, and some were expressionless adults and children. The task for our young people was to move these figures in and out of groups as I outlined the history of the Church.[3] As we went from a small community of persecuted Christians, to a church split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, to the divisions and wars of the Protestant Reformation, to the fragmentation within the Protestant Churches that creates all of our present-day denominations, the kids were kept constantly busy moving the figures, as the communities in our story fought and morphed and divided and dwindled. At the end of the exercise, looking at the tiny groups of pitiful Playmobile figures, clumped in irrelevant disarray all over the table with their guns and canoe paddles and missing limbs, we couldn’t help but shake our heads in sorrowful self-recognition as today’s Church (with a capital C.) Finally, one of our wise middle-schoolers commented, “Why can’t all these groups just concentrate on what they have in common, instead of on the things they disagree about?” Jesus couldn’t have said it better.

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[1] Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Blacks New Testament Commentaries, 1991), 232.

[2] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice A Common Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 114.

[3] Thanks to lesson plan from Confirm not Conform.

"And Jesus said, 'My wife ...'"

        Have you heard the news about Jesus’ wife?! It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but I am being quite serious! A Harvard professor announced last week that she is in possession of a fourth-century Coptic manuscript fragment that says, “And Jesus said to them: ‘My wife …’”[1] Now, before we get too excited or upset, there are scholars who dispute the authenticity of the wording on the ancient papyrus , claiming that the writing is a modern forgery. And even if the manuscript is authentic, its fourth century composition date is even later than the dates of any of our canonical Gospels, so there would be major questions about the historical accuracy of such a text.  And yet, the news reports and the Twitter feeds are spreading like wildfire, as scholars line up on one side or the other of the question. My favorite of all the jokes on Twitter quips, in the tone of Jesus’ wife: "If you can feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes, then why do I always need to run to the grocery store?”

Seriously, though, the idea of Jesus having a wife seems to dredge up all of the anxiety that we still have in the Church over sex and over the role of women, anxiety that sets us to bickering. I can’t help but relate the issue to the angst created by today’s Old Testament reading, for the same reasons. The book of Proverbs ends with the poem in our first reading, a poem that describes the ideal wife from A to Z, each line beginning with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This ideal wife, this “superwoman” of the ancient world, spends her time serving her husband’s household, managing home and lands and family and cottage industry with skill and untiring devotion, working so hard that “her lamp does not go out at night.” While she is hard at work taking care of everything on the home front, her husband is free to sit with honor “in the city gates,” governing and making the important political decisions.

On the one hand, many very traditional Christians still hold this text up at face value as God’s will for all women. I was amazed at the number of Internet websites devoted to “Proverbs 31-wives,” sites that are full of recipes, devotions, childcare advice … and rants against contemporary American society. These websites give advice such as the following: a woman has but “one purpose which is to be a crowning joy to her husband, to make him as joyful as a king.”[2]

On the other hand, many feminist Christians are horrified at yet another biblical text that asks women to deny their personhood, to give and give of themselves while men take all the credit and make all of the decisions. They cringe at the history of interpretation of this text, interpretations written by men, stereotypical interpretations like the one that I found by good old allegorizing St. Augustine (who, like the new papyrus fragment, is also a product of the fourth century). He explains: “To prevent the flapping folds of carnal desires from getting in the way of her work, [the ideal wife] girds her loins … as she hurries about her work. There lies the chastity of this lady, tightly bound by the girdle of the commandment and always ready for good work.”[3] While some pious Christians might agree that such a virtuous and chaste woman could even be a suitable wife for Jesus, for many modern women, this text is merely an outdated example of the evils of stereotyping, oppression and patriarchy.

          While we immediately jump on the cultural stereotypes portrayed in this text, I would like to point out that the real wisdom of Proverbs 31--what women and men can both learn from it--lies in the ways in which the wife portrayed here does not fit ancient cultural patterns.
       The first surprise in our text is the emphasis on the wife’s strength and boldness. What our translation calls “a capable wife,” is really in Hebrew a “valiant wife,” or a “wife of competent strength.” Usually used to describe men, this Hebrew word is used for someone who is a valiant warrior, a mighty and strong hero, a man who is set over the people, someone who is expert and in charge. The only other woman described with this word in the Hebrew Scriptures is Ruth, so called by her kinsman Boaz, who is impressed with her loyalty, strength and courage when she dares to come to him at the threshing floor. The woman in our text is no wilting lily, hiding behind her husband’s coattails. She is bold and confident like Ruth. She is “clothed in strength and dignity.” She even “girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong.” Such “girding of the loins” and strengthening of the arms are not, like Augustine suggests, signs of feminine chastity. They are common masculine images of preparation for battle or for hard physical labor. The valiant wife is physically and spiritually prepared to surmount whatever obstacles are put before her. All of us, women as well as men, could use some of her wise valor in our lives. Jesus’ wife would need such valor and strength, I imagine, as she watches him walk away to die in Jerusalem.

The second surprise in Proverbs 31is that the characteristics of beauty and charm, so often ascribed to women, are derided here as deceitful and vain. This poem is not about Miss America winning the swimsuit competition. Its emphasis on the ideal wife’s industry rather than on her physical charms makes me think of the clever Shakespeare sonnet that I was delighted to discover in high school. Buried in the anthologies of sickly sweet love sonnets is Shakespeare’s number 130, describing the poet’s beloved as one who, “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head… And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. … And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.” Just as Shakespeare is parodying the typical love poetry of his day, it could be that the author of Proverbs 31 is rejecting the widespread emphasis on outer beauty in Near Eastern literature in order to call attention to the importance of wisdom, wisdom that is defined as “fear of the Lord.”[4]  

I doubt that the Bachelor on that addictive TV show of the same name lists “fear of the Lord” as one of the characteristics of his ideal wife! But Psalm 112 utters similar praise to the wise man: “Happy is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.” To fear the Lord is not, of course, to curl up in a ball of abject terror before a cruel Judge. It is not to expect punishment or to second-guess one’s every move as sinful. To fear the Lord is to know that God is God and that we are God’s creatures.  To fear the Lord is to worship God and to obey God’s commandments, to keep in covenant with God. From the valiant wife in our text, we see that we see that fearing the Lord means to help the poor and take care of the needy; and that we are to relate to everyone, rich and poor, with loving-kindness.

So, if we were to fill in the blank on the papyrus fragment about Jesus’ wife, we could write, “Jesus said, ‘my wife … is strong and valiant and wise; she does her duty and lives as a child of God.” Modern women could deal with that description. I wonder, though, if all of our fighting over the role of women doesn’t resemble the fighting of the disciples in our Gospel lesson over who is to be the greatest. Wisdom deals with our “place” in the scheme of things, with order and hierarchy, with works and duty.  Yet, for us Christians, there is a paradox when it comes to wisdom. Wisdom can teach the way to right action in our daily lives, but we cannot grasp hold of our categories and roles and hierarchies for security, as we are wont to do, for Jesus invariably turns them all on their heads. Remember the words of St. Paul, “Where is the one who is wise? …Where is the debater of this age? For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (I Cor. 1:20-25)      

When Jesus heard his disciples arguing, he took a little child and put it among them, throwing all society’s roles and hierarchies to the wind: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” Jesus says.  A child in the ancient world had no role. He could be here today and dead tomorrow of some disease. He had no status and no legal rights. Yet Jesus welcomed him and put him at the center of his group of disciples.

          It is fitting, then, that the ancient papyrus is missing an adjective. “And Jesus said, “My wife…”

“And Jesus said … “my disciple”

“…my friend”

“…my child”

“…my beloved”

With God, it’s not the role that matters. It is the relationship. 

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[1] Deirdre Good, Daily Episcopalian, “On the ‘Jesus’ Wife’ Fragment,” found at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/scripture/academic_conferences_are_not_u.php.

[2] relijournal.com/.../what-is-a-proverbs-31-woman-anyway

[3] St. Augustine, from the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. IX, 187.

[4] Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15-31. Eerdmans, 2005, 517.

A Growing Church

It has been almost thirty years, but I can picture those big French Reformed Church buildings, made of stones as stubborn and sturdy as their Huguenot builders, yet now slumped on their foundations and looking inward with wide, vacant eyes. In every town, it was the same: On Sunday mornings, the empty balconies that framed the proud central pulpit looked down on a dozen or so elderly men and women who were huddled for warmth around a gas stove in the center aisle. The pastor didn’t bother to climb into the pulpit anymore; its tall canopy and high steps were too grand for the small number of worshippers huddled together in their winter coats and practical shoes. Birds made their nests in the balconies now, and the paint on the walls was buckling and ripping open the drywall like old wrapping paper. The organ no longer worked, and so the elderly congregation croaked out the old Goudimel psalms unaccompanied--sad, like an old record that was playing on slow speed. The pastor stood with a smile pasted on his face in the midst of his flock, bravely proclaiming resurrection. At home, though, he spent his time wondering if it would help attendance if they moved the services to Fridays, before the weekends when busy French families found other occupations. And the pastor’s wife spent her time wondering if the government allocations from a fifth child would buy them a new stove for the drafty kitchen of the ancient, crumbling manse.

Way back in 1982, I raised my nose from my theology books and peered out at this foreign religious world that seemed to be collapsing in front of my eyes. I had come, full of youthful enthusiasm, to study, and then to serve, the descendents of the courageous Huguenots who had held firm in their faith through centuries of persecution. The Reformed Protestants were still widely recognized and admired in their secular country for their strong moral stance, for their work for justice and peace, for their care of the poor and outcast … but strangely, their churches were dying, and icy gusts of hopelessness blew through the chinks in the church windows and swirled constantly around our heads during worship.

“How do these French pastors do it?” I wondered, a product of flush, program-sized American parishes, remembering the full parking lots back home.  “Social justice and outreach work are nothing without faith and prayer and worship, without the beauty of the Episcopal liturgy” I opined. “Where did the French Reformed Church go wrong, to be dying like this? They must be doing something wrong,” I muttered to Jesus, more and more desperately. Instinctively, in an attempt at self-preservation, like Peter in our Gospel reading, I turned away from this dismal and disintegrating world, unwilling to stay on board a sinking ship when life and hope and love beckoned in the sunshine outside the church walls. A husband and babies and life, not death, were what I wanted. So I quit even going to church, and I didn’t hear Jesus when he hung his head and sighed at my self-righteousness: “Get behind me, Satan.”

Having run from the struggling French church, here I am back home, a priest in my own country. My priesthood is proof that Jesus has a sense of humor and a never-ending stock of mercy. Thirty years after telling Jesus that suffering, death, and rejection do not belong in the Church, I am the pastor looking up at cracked ceilings and negative budgets, doing the disheartening math of ever-declining attendance and ever-increasing age, wondering if it would help to move the services to Fridays, and serving in an American religious world that is quickly catching up to the one that I abandoned in France.

We come to church looking for Life, do we not? Eternal Life—now and in heaven—that is what Jesus promises us, is it not? There’s enough death and failure in our lives, already, without finding it at church, too. Our jobs suck away our energy or our morale. Our family relationships are complicated. The news that bombards us now 24 hours a day from TV’s and computers and smart phones frightens us with violence and overwhelming social problems and natural disasters and financial meltdown. In church, we want happy music to lift our hearts, clever words to inspire us, sacraments that are filled with the Holy. We want a giving church, not a needy one; a life-giving church, not a dying one … and yet, and yet, we follow a Savior who brings life by dying.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Jesus plainly proclaims. While we might cringe at the force of his hyperbole, we know deep down that what he is saying is true. At St. Thomas, we are filled with individuals who know about giving. We know the powerful joy that fills the giver of gifts, whether we are buying a present for a loved one or for a needy child on the Zachary Taylor angel tree; whether we are using our musical gifts or our artistic gifts or our leadership gifts to give pleasure to others or to God; whether we are spending our time with a lonely shut-in or doing an errand to help a friend. Therapists will tell us that helping others makes us feel better about ourselves. Experience shows us that giving love is just as life-producing as receiving it. Giving brings life and happiness, because in giving we join with our Creator, the Giver of life itself. We all recognize the truth of St. Francis’ famous prayer that concludes: “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”    

Should we be surprised that it is the same for our Christian communities, as it is for our individual souls? There was a blog spreading like wildfire among clergy last week on the Internet called “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” Even with all that we know about the power of giving, its description of the giving, growing church is not a comfortable one. Let me paraphrase the author’s description of what a growing church might look like these days:

A growing church will not have the old, inactive members in the pews again, the ones with whom you remember such good times. A growing church won’t guarantee that the parking lot will need expanding. There will be a few new faces in the pews but not many. The new people will want to make changes, too. They will have new ideas that make members uncomfortable. A growing church will feel like a different place all of a sudden. You might have longer vestry meetings that include prayer and Bible Study. A growing church might move furniture around and play with new liturgy. It might do a kind of music that you don’t much care for. The priest will tell you that you need to come to church more often and might ignore your phone calls because she’s too busy praying or studying Scripture. Putting more money toward mission and outreach might cause a negative budget. You will be asked to give away precious time and money. Your weekends might be filled with exhausting volunteer projects that serve people who will never worship with you. The “ugliest and meanest freaks in town will be invited onto church property at odd hours, and they will beg for handouts, track muddy snow into the building, leave their cigarette butts in the parking lot, and spill their coffee on the carpet.” They might even put trash into your recycling bins. (OK, I added that one!) [1]  

A growing church these days might feel like a dying church. Like those churches in France that sent me scurrying away for cover, it’s going to look as if it is asking for more than it gives. A growing church will not say, “Give yourselves to us because we are successful.” It will say, “Give yourselves to us so that we can pour ourselves out into the hurting world.”A growing church is going to ask us to love more than we can love; to hope in the face of hopelessness; and to believe that a Lord who is hanging on a Cross will live again and will return for us in some limitless future time.

          Big churches and small churches, conservative churches and liberal churches, they can all be growing, life-giving churches. But a church who chooses to follow Peter in rebuking Jesus’ strange and upside-down version of life and growth, living instead by the values of the power-hungry, consumer-driven world, will eventually succumb to death, although that church may look successful now. Church shopping and church hopping for success or ease or perfection is not the same as following Jesus. To be ashamed of dying is to be ashamed of the One who died for us. To be ashamed of dying is to deny the power of Resurrection.

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[1] J. Barrett Lee, “A Growing Church is a Dying Church.” http://streetpastor.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/a-growing-church-is-a-dying-church.