If you remember one prophetic word, this is it: Soul slips away easily from a church or an institution. You may go to any of these places and find that the Spirit has departed; the Shekinah is gone. When a local church loses its soul it begins to slip into mediocrity and is unable to give life. The average person doesn't even know when a church begins to lose its soul. It takes unusual deeper wisdom to see it, and then when we see it, it is costly beyond words to retrieve it.
sermon
A church is a group of people collapsing into God and collapsing into one another.
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.
If men and women today began by the thousands to experience the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straitjackets of Christianity.
We were born into and continue to live in a blatantly unjust world. It is blatantly unfair, and it didn't just happen. Powerful people who wanted more power and privilege made decisions, which took privileges away from those less powerful. Events in Haiti and the Sudan and in Iraq and in Washington didn't just happen. It didn't just happen that 49% of the children in Washington are living in poverty. It happened because budget decisions were made which meant that many low-income families would have no affordable place to live and would have to live in areas with schools which could not educate. It is a structured injustice, which always leads to structural violence.
Listen to Isaiah 10:1 -- "Woe betide those who enact unjust laws and draft oppressive edicts, depriving the poor of justice, robbing the weakest of my people of their rights, plundering the widow and despoiling the fatherless. What will you do when called to account?" The prophets were speaking 2800 years ago and we have to ask, does it do any good for the prophets to speak?
The church founded by Jesus is intended to be the embodiment, the incarnation, of who he is so that he might be seen, discovered, known, experienced in the local corporate life of those who have been invaded by him. I emphasize the word local. What would a true expression of Christ's body look like today, in the neighborhoods where we live, if it really embodied the essence of Jesus lived out corporately?
I think the central question for those of us who are in Christ and are eager to obey his 'follow me' is how to be authentic church in the 21st century. How can we learn from our unfaithfulness to God's covenant in the past? How can we embody, incarnate, become the local expression of Christ's body now?
If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straitjackets of Christianity.
Protestant or Catholic, neither one is structured to contain a mass of devoted people who long for spiritual depth. We are structured towards infancy.
We have imagined that Christianity itself is a religion of virtue. But no, Desmond Tutu reminded us, 'Christianity is not a religion of virtue; it is a religion of grace.' And there's a difference. A religion of virtue says, 'If you are good, then God will love you.' A religion of grace says, 'God loves you.' God loves you despite your foibles and failures, not because you're so good but as a sinner in need of mercy. God loves you; live then as one who is beloved, who has been forgiven.
A deep inner sickness has taken over when we can't feel the suffering of those who are enduring structural violence every hour. We are in the psychological and spiritual condition of Dives who couldn't see Lazarus on his doorstep, with his wounds and sores being licked by the dogs. He went through his whole life, never seeing this person at his doorstep.
How do we awaken from our sickness of not hearing the screams? First, by claiming our sickness. "God, I'm sick. I can't feel the pain of another human being created in the image of the same ultimate reality that brought me into being." Something is very wrong with a mother who can't hear the crying of her baby in the night. And something is very wrong with me when I can't hear the crying of the babies and their parents in Iraq and in the Sudan, and when I can't hear the cries of the babies in my city when 49% of them are living in poverty.
God, I'm sick. I need a savior, a deliverer from the inner cancer eating away, not just at my emotions, but at my very soul. Claiming my sickness is the first part of awakening.