What friends are for...

"Jesus Christ, our Lord, whose footsteps we're to follow, called his betrayer 'friend' and willingly handed himself over to his crucifiers. Our friends, then, are all those who unjustly inflict upon us tests and ordeals, shame and injury, sorrows and torments, martyrdom and death. They are the ones we should love most, for what they're really inflicting upon us is eternal life."

St. Francis of Assisi, with thanks to Friar Rex

An unexpected consequence…

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

I never realised this in the early years of my Christian life. Strangely, it was not until I had followed Christ long enough to become “familiar with suffering” (Isaiah 53.3), until I could say with the writer of Psalm 119 that “it was good for me to be afflicted” (vv. 67-71) that I realised the truth of what Peterson is saying here. But it is true, every word of it; and the joy of Christ is a joy no-one can take away… As Paul says,

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8.31-39)

Out of the ruins…

Is there proof of the resurrection? Why can we not glance at what is going on in the church and, staggered by spectacular grace, believe? The problem can be stated bluntly: The church is all too human. We scarcely see some mystical vision of the “invisible” church marching through time and space “like a mighty army.” No, to us the church is a human organization that lives in peculiar, mortgaged buildings, several of which are to be found in any American village competing like Wendy’s and McDonald’s for the American religious consumer.

The church wears a human face; it breaks store-bought bread, preaches into microphones, sings remarkably trite poetry in hymns, and puts up signs to attract customers like liquor stores or gas stations. Was it not C.S. Lewis who had the devil remark that the best way to disillusion Christian people was to keep their minds flitting back and forth between high-sounding phrases, such as “the body of Christ,” and the actual human faces of people in church pews?

Church affairs are seldom soul-sized; they tend to be tedious. Although we strain to jazz up church services with storytelling sermons and so-called creative worship, trivial is still trivial. Perhaps in South Africa or in regions of South America martyrs may blaze, but here in America we seem to be stuck with what Søren Kierkegaard described as “the caricature of Christianity.” The church we see is all too human…

When church is reduced to church management and the soul is scaled down to psychological promptings, who can speak of resurrection or spot surprising signs of redemptive power among us? No burned martyrs light our skies; ministers burn out instead. No Christians are persecuted; they merely perish from boredom. Where there is no significant cross, how can resurrection have meaning?…

In preaching the reality of resurrection today, we must begin by being scandalously honest about the church. It is not merely a matter of not being smart, prominent or wealthy--we may have all of these types in our congregations. But certainly we stumble along at the brink of apostasy and would sell out Jesus Christ for a good deal less than thirty pieces of silver any day. We may make biblical noises, but are usually bored silly by biblical study. We praise the Lord but, increasingly, long for leisurely Sunday bathrobed brunches with coffee, fruit and the ponderous Times… We must begin with an open-eyed acknowledgment of our corrupted Christian communities.

Then, just maybe, we can be surprised by the life of Christ living in the midst of our common lives. Look, we continue to break bread--women and men, labor and management, black and white—at the table of the Lord. We preach, and oddly enough the good news seems to be heard through our inept testimonies. And once in awhile, backed up against the wall, we are forced to speak for peace or justice. To be honest, we know everything is happening in spite of our natural inclinations. We can begin to name grace in the midst of our brokenness, and sense, even today, that the risen Christ continues ministry among us.

David Buttrick is professor emeritus at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. This essay is excerpted from his book, The Mystery and the Passion, with thanks to inward/outward.

It occurs to me that we would do well, here in England, to read this carefully. We are concerned, and rightly so, with threats to our freedom to exercise our religious conscience, preach the Gospel, witness to our faith, pray for people, and so on. But perhaps out of this atmosphere of suspicion, the abuse of law, and political correctness gone malignant, new energy, and a new sense of Christian identity, may emerge. God has a disturbing way of bringing the best out of the worst, as Paul describes in Romans 8.28ff, and as the Resurrection supremely demonstrates. Perhaps it would be right to pray that out of the ruins of a demoralised and marginalised church a new and glorious thing may arise, fuelled by the very forces that had hoped to finish it off once for all?