January 7, 2004
Care for the church
A fellow presbyter writes, “Just tell me why that we really, really, really care about the Church? It’s been a burden of mine since I was ordained.” I take it that his burden is the question, Why do we care, not Why should we care.
Well, it’s not easy to care for an ambiguity [unless you just revel in linguistic tar-babies]. The Church is the mother of all ambiguities, unless we count life, itself. But then it is life that prepares us for the Church. For either one, if it’s answers you want, forget it.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus told Thomas. I suspect we’ve never been satisfied with that answer and just plain embarrassed to say so. Rather do we pull out answers where there are no answers, and like the nursery rhyme kid with the plum (his name is geriatrophied somewhere in my memory) get altogether nauseously proud of ourselves. Then that’s the kind of church that we make, and then divide and divide and divide, always looking for answers that fit the questions and pretty soon accepting our own answers, forgetting the questions, and also what Jesus told Thomas, then anathematizing anybody who dares ask one again.
Somebody a lot smarter than I once said that the gospel is ironic, not heroic. He could have said that about Jesus, as well. Until we discover and accept and embrace the messianic irony and answer Jesus’ prayer that we all be one in spite of ourselves, and until we stop the hero worship and get to work, we’ll continue this battering-ram search until we’re wasted. The history of Christian thought says we’ve been doing that for centuries, always picking up the pieces and starting over and over, but never accepting the irony.
Here’s a long quote which is, I think, relevant to the question. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the masters of irony, said it in his *The Irony of American History.* It goes like this:
“The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity, but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be completed by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be made whole by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are fulfilled by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be healed by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
That’s why we care for the Church, because in such caring together, connected, it’s the best floating crap game around. Even Nathan Detroit would have loved it, maybe even did. God does, and that’s reason enough. You do, and that pleases God.