Thanksgiving Day, 2013
I’m reading Alan Roxburgh’s Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Books, 2011) on a cold, relaxing morning before we go over to the home of our
former foster daughter, her boyfriend, his adopted son, and their parents and
friends to celebrate Thanksgiving as a vastly different kind of family than
Norman Rockwell had in mind. Roxburgh argues that in retelling the sending ofthe 70 in Luke 10, the Doctor/Evangelist of the late first century reorients
the story of Christ’s followers from an ethnic/geographic/religious enclave to
an infinitely wider world where the Spirit was at/in play. Jesus sent the
seventy ahead to live with people as aliens and strangers in need of
hospitality – not to convert them to Christianity but to experience the
mind-blowing presence of God’s realm at “pagan” Tables and homes, where Christ
had dismantled the walls of labels, hostility and misunderstanding.
Then Roxburgh asks a simple question: “Where is the church
in this passage?” (145) And of course we already know the answer, as surely as
we know beyond doubt what the answer is not – even though we are afraid to
admit the former and beyond frustrated that the latter should be so
astonishingly true. Where the church is not? Precisely where we have always
said it really is, for all this time: in the Temple, the synagogue, the
gathering of the elect, the sanctuary, the cathedral. The holy, consecrated
building. That part is so easy we’re tired of saying it – even if we don’t want
to admit it because we cannot begin to imagine a viable alternative.
The part we’re afraid to speak out loud involves the former
question: Where is the church (big or little “c”)? And something in us knows
it’s in a pagan home where pagan hosts receive a pair of disciples and take
them in as guests – no, as members of their household. The roles of alien and
host have been reversed, and in that reversal, the Spirit plays and scoffs at
our notions of church, revealing a much larger space for God’s presence than we
could have possibly imagined before undertaking this impossible journey because
Jesus told us to do so. We have nothing to offer but our obedience and our
need. And perhaps a blessing at parting, but before we can offer that blessing,
we will share food and work and life together with strangers who will be sad to
see us go, as we will be sad to leave them.
We (and they) will have been called out together – ek-klesia – to a strange place that will
become our home, among strangers who will host us into membership as a family
beyond blood, skin color, dress, or language. We will eat what they eat, keep
faith with them in our continuing presence, and work alongside them for daily
bread at a common Table, where we will come together to share our food and our
lives more and more each day. Thus the kin-dom will come among us, healing what
had been broken, body and soul.
And suddenly, all I could think about was the morass theUnited Methodist Church finds itself in regarding the prohibition against our
pastors conducting same-sex unions, the acts of civil disobedience by a few
pastors and congregations (no same-sex unions on United Methodist property,
either!), and the inhuman trials that preserve law (that half of us feel is
unfaithful and inhuman) but not order. Such is our Discipline without love or
grace before a watching world. We have become a laughing stock – the butt of
jokes among functional atheists for whom our anachronistic arguments are yet
another sign of our irrelevance. Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds. (So long
as you are like us!)
Then it struck me that the dilemma lies in our confining
church to property and people in positions of authority. This confrontation has
traction only because our ordained functionaries are entirely dependent on the
church for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. We would not dream of
taking Christians to trial. But what if we widened our gaze to the parish that
is God’s world and the priesthood of all believers? Even the Roman Catholics
understand marriage as a sacrament conducted not be priests but by couples
(priests are merely witnesses – as in fact everyone present is a witness – to
the vows exchanged that legally bind a couple in this covenant).
If instead we understood the church to be that place where
two or more were gathered in the name (the Spirit?) of Christ, and the sine qua non of a marriage ceremony as
the vows exchanged by the couple (who could memorize or read their vows to each
other as well as they could repeat them, line by line, after a priest,
preacher, Justice of the Peace, friend, family member, or person who just
received a mail-order ordination “certificate” with no other qualifications
besides their ability to pay for it). Quakers have no priests: everyone present signs the marriage certificate. What could those who would deny persons the
right to exchange vows of love with each other based on their sexual
orientation do to stand in the way of these ceremonies? Put the world on trial?
And here’s the really interesting thing. The revolution
would not stop at same-sex weddings. Priests/preachers/clergy would be
repurposed in the manner of Ephesians 4:11-12, to equip the saints for the work
of ministry. The suffocating death grip of United Methodist property (and
perhaps all religious property holdings) would be broken as people of God
recognized the presence of Christ in all relationships, regardless of
geographic location. Thus impoverished, the Church (definitely big C) would be
able to embrace the invitation Christ offers to us to sell all we have (all of
the things that own us) and give it away to the poor – and then to come and
follow him into the neighborhoods our buildings have prohibited us from seeing
(or caring about).
We would, like the seventy, be homeless wonderers with only
the clothes on our backs and a radical dependence on God’s grace such as we
have never known. And thus we would go to our neighbors, knocking on their
doors, begging for their mercy and grace. And some of them would take us in,
and lead us to a Table where our eyes would be opened perhaps for the first
time to recognize the risen, living Christ among us. What an amazing thing that
might be, to find Jesus the Christ at Table with our neighbors!
