Friday, April 11, 2014

Church.

I really love church.

I always have.  When I was younger, like eight or nine, I like many of the day, brought up in the Left Behind fervor, would often think of where I wanted to be when the rapture happened.  I didn't pick home, though the blue house I grew up in will always be special, I didn't choose my grandparents house where I spent countless Sunday afternoons.  I picked the front row of Friendship Baptist Church. I wanted to see the green carpet, look at the big pulpit and I wanted my dad to be playing piano.

That sounds a little crazy to me now, but I think it really reveals what I have known all my life, but am only beginning to know now - I really love church.  When I have to rehearse my call, or give a intro to my life story (with seminary and camp this happens more often than you would think) I say we weren't at church every time the doors were open, we were ones who were opening the doors.  I grew up literally with the church as a second home.

One of the fondest memories of have of growing up in church is of a Sunday night tradition.  After the pastor was done preaching we would all join hands around the sanctuary and sing;

"I'm so glad I'm a part of the family of God,
I've been washed in the fountain, cleansed by his blood.
Joint heirs with Jesus as we travel this sod.
For we're part of the family,
The family of God."

Those are holy words to me now.  The sense of community I felt growing up in a rural Arkansas church is a sense of community I long for others to feel.  I want four year old little boys to get to ride to Pizza Hut after church with their second parents every Sunday night.  I want them to remember staying with close friends from church when their mom has had a baby or had surgery.  I want them to see church as a sense of family.

In college I felt that too.  It wasn't uncommon the last two years of my undergraduate career to walk in the Anderson house after church and sit for a couple of hours and do homework.  I felt welcome.  That's church.

Church is messy too, though isn't it?  It has been messy from the very beginning.  Acts shows us that.  In Acts 6 the deacon ministry is established when no one is there to care for the widows.  Before that in chapter 5 Ananias and Sapphira are put to death.  Church is messy.

While I have never seen husband and wife carried out on stretchers from business meetings I have seen my share of messy-ness in churches.  I have seen heated business meetings.  I have seen nasty chain letters.  I have sat under theological, ethical, moral and social squabbles.  Church is messy.  And why is that?  Because church is full of humans.

Church is going to continue to be messy.  History says it will. Great Reformations, Schisms and other things. Labels like evangelical and conservative and liberal and fundamentalist all are going to be placed on name tags and given out.  It is going to happen.  What do we do with it? What do we do with a church full of all this human-ness?

But that is what Jesus created his church to be - human. But holy.  How are we holy, because 1 Corinthians 12 tells us we are the Body of Christ.  We are to be him to the world.  That has sooo many implications I am just now beginning to understand.  We are to be Christ to the world. We are his body.  We, together, the church.

When we take communion we are symbolically taking the body and blood of Christ.  We are to remember what he did, and thus in doing so remember what we are to do in response.  We do this as a Church.  One body. One spirit. One faith. One baptism.

Friends, Paul warned the Corinthians we do not preach Apollos or Cephas or James or Paul.  We preach Jesus Christ and him crucified.  We are the image of Christ, through his church.  We are the Body of Christ.

Similarly we don't preach Piper, or Chandler or Beth or Louie.  We don't preach Barbara or Fred or Scot or Stanley or whoever. We preach Christ and we him crucified.

Growing up those call and response sections in the Baptist Hymnal were often ignored.  In seminary I've learned to appreciate various types of liturgies.  I love when we read scripture the reader always concludes with, "this is the word of the Lord."  And as a community, as a church we respond, "Thanks be to God."  What a great picture that is. One voice.




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