Having come off the road from 1000+ miles and three days on a motorcycle exploring the woods of the great north with my brother, nine or so hours later I was loading up the truck for the 8 hour, 480-ish mile trek to southeastern Maryland. Becca and the girls had headed down to spend a week or so with the in-laws the day before I had hit the road, and the plan was that I would join them once I had had my fill of reenacting "Easy Rider".
Undertaking a road trip in the wee hours of the morning has it's pros and cons. On the upside, there's simply no better way to beat the traffic. And, given that the road between southern New Hampshire and southern Maryland takes you past every major urban center on the northern half of the East Coast, this is a primary concern. The right timing - or the wrong timing - can mean a difference of literally hours of travel, and there's just nothing like breezing from one end of Manhattan to the other on I-95 in under 15 minutes. If you can't imagine what that feels like, it's because you've never done it at 4am on a holiday weekend. On the downside is the fact that you are defying every good and healthy physical instinct that your body possesses, and only doing so by way of significant chemical assistance. When your breakfast is taken at 1am and consists of two economy-sized packages of peanut M&M's and 32 ounces of Red Bull, you just know that there is going to be price to be paid later, probably in terms of years subtracted from the end of your life. But, when your idea of hell is being stuck in the midst of a sea of humanity on the Jersey Turnpike in the vicinity of Newark for a predictably tortuous and indeterminate period, you just do what you have to do. I rolled into Sharptown at nine o'clock on Monday morning in a state of jittery, suspended alertness; feeling a bit queasy but undeniably efficient. A couple hours to sleep off the residual Guarine, and I was ready to settle into a few days of family-centric quietude.
But these times spent on the eastern shore have always been 'working vacations' over the years; a good excuse to settle in and take a significant bite out of the reading list that I had compiled over the year between visits. This year, with the ruminations of the previous weekend still fresh in my mind, I set out to undertake "Center Church" by Tim Keller; a 380 page textbook of a work. All told, it's basically like reading a PhD thesis in practical, missional ecclesiology. If 'theological vision' and shaping the practice of church life is something that happens to be pertinent to you, I would recommend it highly. I would also recommend giving yourself more than three days in which to read it, but there you have it; the gauntlet had been thrown, and the opportunity of time had presented itself.
Keller's strength, to me, has always been his absolute devotion to the Gospel; the Good News of what Jesus Christ has accomplished on our behalf: in history, through His life, death on the cross, and resurrection. He is obsessed with it. It permeates and anchors every sermon he preaches and every book that he has written. Within a highly educated, western Christianity wherein the temptation is always to regard the Gospel of grace as 'elementary' - as a threshold concept to be understood, accepted, and moved beyond on the way to 'meatier' questions of doctrine and other ecclesiological intricacies - Keller simply refuses to cede this ground. In our desire for principles upon which to build a moral life or craft a system of theology, he would argue that we attempt to move beyond a Truth so deep, so multi-faceted and beautiful that it can never be genuinely comprehended in it's fullness, this side of eternity. When it comes to Christian spirituality, properly understood, the Gospel of grace is not merely the doorway that we step through into life, it is the entirety of the house that we are stepping into, and that which we are being invited to live entirely within.
And all of this, to come back around to it, brings me to my struggle with the church as we so often experience Her. Institutionalization, as well as the movement from the proclamation of the Gospel to mere, structural and social moralism, is a lot like gravity, you see. We struggle with grace, and we struggle with the reality of a savior God soaked in holy graciousness to the very depths of his being. And so, as Keller brings to light, we pay lip service and intellectual assent to the Gospel of Grace, and to salvation by faith (that is, trust) in the sufficiency of Christ's redemptive and substitutionary work for our sake, but we in the end we find those things difficult to organizationally quantify. And so, the Body of Christ - the Church - as an "organized organism" nearly always stumbles toward the gravitational default of institutionalized moralism, rather than joyous, miraculous, whole-body Gospel proclamation and celebration. Our creeds bear witness to a Gospel of fantastical, unmerited favor, but our church life speaks - implicitly or explicitly - of behavior and bootstraps; of keeping ourselves in line and of stirring up the moralistic will to spur ourselves on to accomplish our own studied work of sanctification. Christ has come that we might have life itself, and that to the fullest, and we in turn have offered the world Religion. This certainly isn't a new critique - in the throes of the 'millennial' generation, perhaps it has now even crossed the line to mere cliche' - but it is, unfortunately, an accurate one.
What a razor-thin line we walk between the abundant corporate life of Christ himself, and the mechanical deadness of clock-punching religiosity! We speak of a Gospel of Grace and Faith - we use the right words, for that is what it is - but in truth these are words that we simply do not genuinely understand in their true depth and breadth. As such, we are prone to gross - even if subtle - and destructive misapplication. We do not understand the genuine power of the truths to which we give such easy intellectual assent: they are dynamite, but we handle them as if they were as innocuous as birthday candles.
And so, where the Church ought to be comprised of a vibrant community of people standing in perpetual amazement that the God of the universe has seen fit to personally bleed to death for the sake of bringing us back to the life He built us for - and that, while we were still and in many way remain trapped in blindness, idiocy, and in hardened resistance against Him - instead we find communities all too often bereft of amazement. Instead of allowing our hearts to be captivated, transformed, and carried along by the spectacular grace of our Savior God into His life and purposes, we have instead 'captured' grace - conceptually and intellectually - and institutionalized it. We have stamped it as a word on our programs and on our letterhead, as all the while our hearts have grown more and more immune to wonder.
Oh, that my own heart would know the true wonder of Grace in my day-to-day! Oh, that we followers of Jesus would feel the very breath stolen from our lungs as we ponder the Gospel of our salvation, even more so than as at the view of the most spectacular vistas and landscapes on earth! If only we might daily know the feeling of tears of joy coming to our eyes in simply pondering the beauty and love of Christ! The love He has displayed for us deserves no less from us; in actual fact, it deserves a great deal more. But until our hearts have been thus captivated by the wonder of the Gospel, we will never know the greater things. How can we imagine that we might ever give our whole lives to the purposes of God's coming Kingdom when He even now cannot claim lordship over our hearts?
I am a man, a New Englander, and by all accounts particularly reserved in personality and countenance, but how I long for wonder! And even though I know that institutionalization is like gravity, and I know the cultural ease of one-dimensional moralism when compared to the messy dynamism of the living grace of God, I cannot escape the conviction that Church must be more than our cultural gravity would determine her to be. All told, if we followers of Jesus would commit to pondering the depths and beauty of the Gospel of Christ - not merely moving beyond it in haste, but allowing the very limits of our hearts and minds to be stretched beyond bursting in the wonder of it - and our gatherings for worship came as an outflow and corporate expression of the life and joy found in that pondering, then I have no doubt that our times together would be inexpressibly compelling to the watching world. THAT would be a gathering worth attending, and a living community such as that would constitute a mission worth investing in.
This isn't radical and this isn't new. Scripture calls this breathtaking community of wonder, worship and witness simply, the Church, and thousands of years later she remains a revolutionary idea. I long to see her in the fullness of her beauty; I long to have my own life wrapped up in hers. I long to envision and embody the great, boundless love of Christ until that day when He comes again in Glory to claim his Bride; in all her faults and failings made beautiful by the light of His love. For that is what His love has done in me, and I will never cease to be amazed by that great truth.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Motorcycle Theology
So a couple of weekends ago I spent three days traveling the perimeter of the state of Maine, inasmuch as there are actually roads on which to do so, this side of the Canadian border. My brother and I do this every year - not Maine, necessarily - but take off together on motorcycles for a couple of days; just to ride, sleep in the woods, get exposed to some beauty and weather, and more or less pretend to be rootless for a little while. Time spent on a motorcycle, particularly whole days at a time, provides a lot of opportunity for thought. And, as this has been a summer that has provided a great deal to think about in my own life and ministry, this ride was particularly 'full'. In fact, I had to confess to Michael that our Sunday morning on the road in the heart of the Maine woods had even brought with it a moment of genuine pastoral/existential crisis, which was interesting.
It went something like this: I was riding along and realized that for perhaps (though I'm not totally sure, but perhaps) for the very first time in my life I was in the act of missing church for a second consecutive week for purely recreational purposes. The weekend before had been spent camping with friends, the weekend in question I was in the middle of a ride; ignoring the fact that this, in fact, simply constituted an honest use of vacation time, in my heart at that moment I was a minister gone AWOL. For two Sundays in a row, for no other reason than to fully enjoy the glory of northern New England in late August, I was not setting foot in a church. And the problem? It was awesome.
We woke up Sunday morning in the heart of Maine, rode our motorcycles to the nearest small town to see what local flavor we could discover. We took in a leisurely breakfast at a previously unknown 'greasy spoon' called the "Bears Den". I ordered a blueberry pancake the size of a pie plate, ate in no particular hurry, laughed with my brother about the adventures of the weekend thus far, and enjoyed his company. After loosely planning a route that would take us west to the NH border and south through the Great North Woods and the White Mountains, we set out.
And there I sat, basking in the warmth of the late-summer sun, taking in the vast and breathtaking beauty of God's creation as fresh air was pressed into my face at 60mph. It was then, rounding a corner to take in yet another mountain vista, that I realized that it was Sunday and that for a second week in a row, I would not be present for church service. Suffice it to say, I was not disappointed to be where I was at that moment; I sang God's praises from the seat of my motorcycle and thanked Jesus that in the depth of His love He had created such a world as this for us to bear His image within. It was a private worship service in the cathedral of creation and I realized that, given the simple choice between this and the Sunday church gatherings that I have known all my life, this would win out every time. Hence my crisis, as a vocational minister.
It was as if it suddenly became clear to me what it was that we were "competing" against with our weekly worship gatherings. I thought of what, from an outsider, nuts-and-bolts perspective, a Sunday morning spent in church consisted of: Bad coffee, some canned greetings with a group of people you interact with for 5-10 minutes a week and probably wouldn't naturally spend much time with otherwise, a singalong, listening to a mediocre public speaker do a mediocre job addressing the deepest and most significant questions of the human experience, and an appeal for money, just so we can keep all the fun going.
And so, the million-dollar question: if a person could be fishing, or traveling, or sleeping in - or literally ANYTHING else even mildly enjoyable - why would that person opt, instead, to spend a Sunday morning in church: mine, ours, or otherwise?
Of course, I DO believe in the importance and beauty of the local church; I am, after all still a pastor. But this realization, and this question, have pressed home for me in a new way the conviction that so often the forms and functions of what passes for 'church' in our experience are simply a shadow and a farce of what Jesus intends for us to be. As awesome and life-giving and beautiful as a Sunday morning spent among the mountains may be, in the end should not the communally incarnate vision and presence of the very Spirit of God be even more compelling? Whatever it is that "church" is supposed to be, if the Gospel is true - and TANGIBLY true - as the transforming power of God's own grace in the lives of His people, should not the gatherings of these people for worship and mutual exhortation - echoes of the ongoing praise of the courts of heaven itself in all eternity - exhibit something of a beauty and Truth that simply could not be found elsewhere on earth? Should not seekers and skeptics come away from a gathering of the people of Christ with the inescapable impression that they have just witnessed something HOLY?
In the end, the trap of thinking of a worship gathering as a sort of "experience" that must out-compete other experiential options for the sake of drawing attendees is obvious: we must be talking about more than mere emotionalism, and about more than crafting a higher quality spiritual-consumer experience. But, that being said, our Sunday morning clock-punching that passes for worship, or church life, is simply insufficient. God wants to do more in, through, and with His body; of that, I am sure.
(to be continued...)
It went something like this: I was riding along and realized that for perhaps (though I'm not totally sure, but perhaps) for the very first time in my life I was in the act of missing church for a second consecutive week for purely recreational purposes. The weekend before had been spent camping with friends, the weekend in question I was in the middle of a ride; ignoring the fact that this, in fact, simply constituted an honest use of vacation time, in my heart at that moment I was a minister gone AWOL. For two Sundays in a row, for no other reason than to fully enjoy the glory of northern New England in late August, I was not setting foot in a church. And the problem? It was awesome.
We woke up Sunday morning in the heart of Maine, rode our motorcycles to the nearest small town to see what local flavor we could discover. We took in a leisurely breakfast at a previously unknown 'greasy spoon' called the "Bears Den". I ordered a blueberry pancake the size of a pie plate, ate in no particular hurry, laughed with my brother about the adventures of the weekend thus far, and enjoyed his company. After loosely planning a route that would take us west to the NH border and south through the Great North Woods and the White Mountains, we set out.
And there I sat, basking in the warmth of the late-summer sun, taking in the vast and breathtaking beauty of God's creation as fresh air was pressed into my face at 60mph. It was then, rounding a corner to take in yet another mountain vista, that I realized that it was Sunday and that for a second week in a row, I would not be present for church service. Suffice it to say, I was not disappointed to be where I was at that moment; I sang God's praises from the seat of my motorcycle and thanked Jesus that in the depth of His love He had created such a world as this for us to bear His image within. It was a private worship service in the cathedral of creation and I realized that, given the simple choice between this and the Sunday church gatherings that I have known all my life, this would win out every time. Hence my crisis, as a vocational minister.
It was as if it suddenly became clear to me what it was that we were "competing" against with our weekly worship gatherings. I thought of what, from an outsider, nuts-and-bolts perspective, a Sunday morning spent in church consisted of: Bad coffee, some canned greetings with a group of people you interact with for 5-10 minutes a week and probably wouldn't naturally spend much time with otherwise, a singalong, listening to a mediocre public speaker do a mediocre job addressing the deepest and most significant questions of the human experience, and an appeal for money, just so we can keep all the fun going.
And so, the million-dollar question: if a person could be fishing, or traveling, or sleeping in - or literally ANYTHING else even mildly enjoyable - why would that person opt, instead, to spend a Sunday morning in church: mine, ours, or otherwise?
Of course, I DO believe in the importance and beauty of the local church; I am, after all still a pastor. But this realization, and this question, have pressed home for me in a new way the conviction that so often the forms and functions of what passes for 'church' in our experience are simply a shadow and a farce of what Jesus intends for us to be. As awesome and life-giving and beautiful as a Sunday morning spent among the mountains may be, in the end should not the communally incarnate vision and presence of the very Spirit of God be even more compelling? Whatever it is that "church" is supposed to be, if the Gospel is true - and TANGIBLY true - as the transforming power of God's own grace in the lives of His people, should not the gatherings of these people for worship and mutual exhortation - echoes of the ongoing praise of the courts of heaven itself in all eternity - exhibit something of a beauty and Truth that simply could not be found elsewhere on earth? Should not seekers and skeptics come away from a gathering of the people of Christ with the inescapable impression that they have just witnessed something HOLY?
In the end, the trap of thinking of a worship gathering as a sort of "experience" that must out-compete other experiential options for the sake of drawing attendees is obvious: we must be talking about more than mere emotionalism, and about more than crafting a higher quality spiritual-consumer experience. But, that being said, our Sunday morning clock-punching that passes for worship, or church life, is simply insufficient. God wants to do more in, through, and with His body; of that, I am sure.
(to be continued...)
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