Come to church with me?

Friday, October 21, 2022       

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Come to church with me?

Brothers and sisters, I urge you to live in a manner worthy.

Humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, love, unity, the bond of peace, hope, faith … as Paul wrote to the Galatians, “Against such things there is no law.”

So why do so many, so often, including me, fail in these workings of a good life? My simple, obvious need is to read the rest of Paul’s words. He admonishes and teaches these folks of Ephesus, and certainly he is admonishing me as well.

Become a prisoner for the Lord, worthy of the call, with the unity of the spirit, one Body and one Spirit, called to the one hope, one Lord, one baptism, our God and Father of us all.

Paul might walk alone on the Turkish highway, demoralized at times by what he sees as betrayals and abandonments, but he does NOT expect his congregation to let this happen to them. Come together … right now. Goo goo ga joob!

(See tomorrow’s devotion for more from the Beatles.)

In Holy Longing, Ron Rolheiser claims the church as life-preserving just as Paul did. But first, he writes about what the church is not:

1. It is NOT like-minded individuals, gathering on the basis of mutual compatibility
2. It is NOT huddling in fear and loneliness
3. It is not “family” in the psychological sense
4. It is not one roof, one ethnicity, one denomination, one rule book, or one book of common prayer.
5. It is not a shared task or common mission.

So why even go to church? Rolheiser’s list is long:

1. Because it is not good to be alone
2. To take my rightful place humbly within the family of humanity
3. Because God calls me there
4. To dispel my fantasies about myself
5. Because 10,000 saints have told me so
6. To help others carry their pathologies and to have them help me carry mine
7. To dream with others
8. To practice for heaven
9. For the pure joy of it – because it is heaven!

Within Holy Longing, Rolheiser’s essay on the “spirituality of ecclesiology” is brilliant, and far more comprehensible than the chapter’s title. Take a little time to read it, or quotations from it. Church matters, and we want to get it right.

Jesus said to the crowd, “When you see a cloud rising in the west you say immediately that it is going to rain – and so it does. But do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

Paul wants us to learn from each other as we listen to the Holy Spirit. Rolheiser remembers a friend’s comment, “I knew we had church when after some years of praying together, we gave each other permission to mess with each other’s lives.” Not too quick, that meddling, but not too slow either. Trust takes time, but it also takes touching each other, and not always gently.

Church, however, is not always in the same building, or the same neighborhood. Paul’s favorite virtues (Ephesians 4 and Galatians 5) stretch out its aisles and open wide its doors. Rolheiser says:

Living in these virtues is what binds us into community, immune from separation by distance, temperament, race … or even death. All who live in these virtues are one body and constitute the church. (p. 120) The church is always God hung between two thieves. It betrays the gospel and also carries grace. (p. 128) The task of church is to stand toe to toe and heart to heart with people absolutely different from ourselves but who, with us, share one faith, one Lord, one baptism, and one God who is Father and Mother of us all. (p. 131)

David wrote hopefully in Psalm 24:

Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord or who may stand in his holy place? He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain … Such is the race that seeks for him. Lord, this the people that longs to see your face.

(Ephesians 4, Psalm 24, Matthew 11, Luke 12)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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