iempathize
altera civitas
So this week I am going to write some thoughts for the Blog. We have some pretty amazing writers coming up in the next few weeks so please keep checking back to hear some really good stuff. I twitter here and have a defunct blog here.
It may come as no surprise to you all but I have some fairly strong opinions about “What the Church is” and “How we do that.” And I think many of them can be illustrated by this passage in Ephesians:
“Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of god in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.”
- Ephesians 3:8-12
I won’t go to much out of my way to “expound” on the text but perhaps you can read the following words through the lens of this passage and let it guide as a the framing of many of my thoughts.
If you go onto my facebook page (first off any diatribe on “church” that opens with “on my Facebook page” should be looked at as suspect… or at least I would… so feel free) you should take a look at my “political” and “religious” views. I spent way to much time trying to figure out what to put there. Part of the reason is that those two distinctions seem odd to me. “Political views” seems to imply the question “how do you think the present reality and it common goods should be organized?” while the “religious views” seems to ask the question, “ what internal set of moral principals do you adhere to as a means to derive your ethics.” This, to me, seems like a very strange distinction as two separate things. I believe, if we are going to follow the biblical narrative, that how our present reality is ordered (or our politic) is directly derived and is intertwined with the origins of our ethical motivations. What I am getting at is simply this: Christians have our own politic called the church and an ethic determined by the Christ’s Cross and Resurrection. The church is its an alternate city to the cities of the world, that is constituted by a people who are governed by a good father, guided by the Spirit and are being transformed in to the likeness of the Son.
I know this all seems drastically abstract, and for that I apologize, but I promise you that this alternate city metaphor is drastically helpful for understanding how we are to be a people called by YHWH and are being transformed in to the image of His Son. Let me expound a little further and then try to give some examples of how this “applies to the real world.”
We are a people who believe in a God that pronounced that his Kingdom is at hand. N.T. Wright summarizes the tangibles of this kingdom well in his book “Justification,” when he says that God’s coming kingdom (which is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 15) is the place where God will be “Dealing with sin, saving humans from it, giving them grace, forgiveness, justification, glorification… now fulfilled in Christ.” As you can tell by the tense in his verbs that this Kingdom of God is presently happening and eternally coming. And as people who received this story we believe that those who are in Christ are participants or conspirators in that Kingdom.
I think that using the simple example of sacrament of communion will help make this whole “church as alternate politic’ thing a little less abstract. Partaking in communion is one thing that Christ asked all his followers to do in order to remember him. And there are three things that I want take out of sacrament of communion as means to illuminate what I am talking about.
First, when we take communion we remeber the sacrifice of our God. This is an action. When we take the bread and wine into our body it gives us nutrients as fuel to propel our actions forward. I think it is amazing that the way we remeber our savior is through a community “meal,” it is so counter cultural! And by that I mean that, the political leaders in Jesus’s time were very similar to ours. In order to remeber their great leaders of the past they built monuments and statues in their honor. I think this is specifically because, to some degree, the monument is the thing that does the remembering for the people… it lets us off the hook. Americans don’t need to remeber the great sacrifices of the soldiers in WWII because there is a memorial that will do it for them. And when they go to visit, they are thankful for the memorial because carrying the weight of remembering would be difficult. But we, as the alternate political body of the church, remeber the death and resurrection of our God by becoming remembrance, we embody the memory of our God. The way our memory is constituted is different than the world around us. We are an alternate political body.
Second, in the same way Christ was “the bread of the world” we too become a like sacrifice as we take communion. I had a theology professor in college who said that “in the western church we always got to much wrapped up in what communion is.” Was it transubstantiated or was it a symbol? He went on to say that “such a question takes away from the more important question of what we become when we take communion.” When we take communion we become the body of Christ. We take on his mission when we become his body in the world. And in the same way that he did, and in the same way that the bread and wine we just consumed nourishes our body we, we go out into the world to nourish it. We make sure sure that the poor are cared for, the broken are healed, the widow has safety and orphan has a home and we give shelter to the stranger for we know what it was like to separated from our family. We have conversations with our God, we read the words saints before us have written and the spirit told us that those are our Holy Scriptures. We go out into the world and act like the kingdom is already here but just not finished. In a world that builds fences around its homes to keep people safe, in a world where might is the thing that bring security and peace, we believe in a way of sacrifice and generosity as means to progressing our Father’s Kingdom and in the process we find that we are transformed more and more into the likeness of our God. We are an alternate political body.
Lastly, and this will be the most controversial but I think drives the point home, communion makes a space for all people who are God’s family to commune with one another and their Father. This means everyone, documented or undocumented. How can we as the church believe in a space where we commune with the Father, are transformed into the Son, and propelled by the Spirit and then forcefully send those same brothers and sisters away from this physical location simply because they do not have the proper documentation. How can a people who have this passage in their holy writings expel strangers from their midst:
“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
- Deuteronomy 10:17-19
The identity of being part of God’s family supersedes any national identity. In a land that is suspicious of the stranger, the church welcomes them openly to the table of the Christ. The church is an alternate body politic.
This is already long so I will some it up with a question…
- How do we become this body that is transformed and sent out into the world?
- What functions do you personally participate in that makes this happen for you (and if you simply say i come to a gathering on sunday… please don’t be offended if I say, get your ass in gear and get yourself into space where people are being transformed into the likeness of Christ… our sunday gathering is one place that happens but not the primary place)?
Questions…. Comments…. Name Calling.
p.s. None of these thoughts are original. For more in depth inoformation on this perspective of Church check out “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony” by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon or “A Peculiar People: The Church As Culture in a Post-Christian Society” by former editor of “Christianity Today” Rodney Clapp.
- Garret Shelsta
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