Well, it's been a few weeks since I've updated this thing...Life has a way of reorganizing my calendar for me, so I've been nowhere close to being the master of my itinerary lately :) I wanted to jot down a few thoughts, though, about a topic I've been thinking a fair amount about, and has coincidentally also gotten some media attention. We just kicked off a new series at Element called The Lowdown...The idea is that there are a bunch of basic questions people have about God and the Church, and the Church needs to be a driving force in dealing with them honestly. This past Sunday, we opened with the age-old "What if I don't buy into organized religion? Can't I just do the spiritual journey thing on my own? Why do I need the Church?" And I, for one, think it's a great question...Why, indeed?
Now, there are a bunch of things that come to mind here, but one of the biggest contributing factors to this question is this - the Church has issues. No surprise there, right? I mean, the church is full of people, and the people have issues; therefore, the Church has issues. Not really rocket science, is it? This past Sunday I talked a bit about a guy named Christopher Hitchens and a woman named Anne Rice. Well-known authors both...One a respected journalist and the other a writer of fiction. Both intelligent people, and for a variety of reasons I've enjoyed and learned from both of them in different ways. The reason they came up this past week, though, is precisely because of the fact that Church has issues. Hitchens is well known for his atheism, and has spoken at length, and written a great deal on why He's doesn't buy into the God thing. Rice considers herself a Christian, but recently made the announcement that she's leaving the Church - not denying Christ, but leaving the people that claim Christ.
There a number of reasons Hitchens doesn't believe in God, but one of them is a longstanding mistrust of the way the Church has handled itself in interpersonal ways. For him, the fact that Christians (and followers of other religions as well) sometimes display hypocrisy, arrogance, employ coercive tactics, etc., means that these people don't really have anything to offer that's different from what he sees elsewhere. Thus, God Himself has nothing to offer. I realize I'm reducing his arguments down to a fraction of what he has spent years elaborating on, but you get the point, and I don't think Hitchens would argue that I'm misrepresenting him. For Rice, she came to follow God after a long journey that also included embracing atheism, and now 12 years later, is dismissing the church as well. Interesting that two people with very different conclusions on the existence of God conclude the same thing about the community of God.
But here's the problem I have. Ask anyone you know about the Church, and whether believer or not, pretty darn-near everyone will assent to a slew of problems in the Church. The bottom line is that the Church is full of people, and people can't seem to get their act together, and we all know it.
But here’s where they make a critical mistake, and where so many of us do when we write off the Church. Since we are all, every last one of us, sinners (meaning that every last one of makes mistakes and often operates in a way that’s not what God says is the way He created us to live), does it make any sense for that to suddenly change when we get together as the Church? If we’re all prone to sin, does putting a bunch of people who are prone to sin together in the same community, magically remove all potential for human stupidity? Of course it doesn’t. But the problem here is that for so many of us, it freaks us out when we see the human side of people in the church. Somewhere in the the thought process, we think about God's claims of changed lives, realize that's not very evident in a great many people, and throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
I hear people say quite often that they've always wanted the church to be more real and more accessible. They say that they've had enough of the shiny veneer, of the idea that you can get all too often in the Church that following God means that life is easy and perfect. The problem is, though, that many of them write off the church as not practicing what it preaches when it is real. The fact is, when we commit to dealing honestly with each other, warts and all, and when we make the statement that we're all screwed-up but God loves us anyway, then people are attracted by that message. And so they come, and become a part of the community, and then they screw up. And by "They", I mean "all of us". And when the screw-up happens, we throw the hypocrite tag around and and in some cases, go so far as to write the church off, as though God somehow promised that a community of people would somehow never act like humans. Someone treats someone badly in the church, and we sadly shake our heads and write off the church. Someone doesn’t perform a church task well or with integrity, and we write the church off. The church doesn’t look or behave exactly how we want it to (as though anything in life does), and we write the church off. And we think we can make the statement that I’m all about God, I just don’t like the people who claim to follow him, so I’m not gonna be around them.
If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? 1 John 4:20
[Anyone who] does not love other believers does not belong to God. 1 John 3:10
If someone claims, “I know God,” but doesn’t obey God’s commandments, that person is a liar and is not living in the truth. 1 John 2:4
And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their Christian brothers and sisters. 1 John 4:21
Well, hang on, we say...I don’t hate my brothers and sisters... I just don’t want to be around them, extend them any grace, or be patient with them when they screw up. But that's a problem. Because God loves us anyway, despite our stupidity. Why do we think our definition of love should be different than that? And here’s where Hitchens and Rice and probably each of us at some point or another just flat-out get this wrong: We’re defining God by the community, rather than the other way around. God is an amazing, perfect God, working through and redeeming imperfect human beings. And to be brutally honest, we're being pretty darn arrogant when we say that other people aren’t representing God well enough for my standards. Because I guarantee that those standards are situationally different for ourselves. I'll sign off with this...
But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. 1 John 1:7
But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God's Son, purges all our sin. 1 John 1:7 (Message)
In other words, it’s not just a good idea. It’s not whether or not it happens to fit my comfort zone of what I like in other people. It's not a verse for pastors to pad their sermons with...And it’s certainly not a way for you and I to lay out our own requirements for the kind of community that meets our own flawless standards. As sinful people, we don't get to draw that line. God smashed the line, and loves us anyway. And God says, if you love me, then you love my people, and you be with them...
