Nostalgia

                In his book, Quietly Courageous, Gil Rendle calls out the great temptation of this age that continues to trap us in fruitless conflict: nostalgia.  We are in love with who we were in that aberrant time that still skews the baseline of our expectations and hopes, the 1950’s.  Government, society, neighborhood enforced a communal uniformity that drove people in the doors of our congregations ready to serve on committees, commit to the common mission and ministry we had already articulated, and happily become “one of us.”

                That world is gone—and as Rendle points out, it is not the fault of the Progressive who has forsaken the Gospel or the Conservative who has twisted Christ’s love into fear/hate.  The scale and scope of the tsunami of change that is coming at us is many orders of magnitude greater than whatever divides us, and has nothing to do with the quarrels that have defined us for too long.

We silently crossed into a new world this year that will define us as a culture for decades to come: the average American now spends more time on her/his phone than watching TV.  The “smart phone” is systematically disassembling family life, and every form of communal life in our culture.  There is no more “us” to be a part of—and most people now are distrustful of any “us” that is suggested.  We  have transformed community into another consumer item by turning it into a “do it yourself” proposition, fostering an understanding of communal relationships as another personal comfort, rather than as a challenge/check to our own personalized reality. In our obsession to avoid pain and discomfort, we seem to be perfecting a way of life that has little or nothing to do with other people.  We shop alone; we recreate alone, online with chat buddies; we talk politics and religion alone with people who think like us; we even love alone.

                Malls and ballparks are dying as fast as churches—the reason they are dying has little to do with what goes on inside.  It has to do with the fact that they are uncontrolled space—one has no control over who one meets, one cannot simply cut off interactions that are painful or uncomfortable.   Uncontrolled space in this culture is increasingly seen as dangerous space.

                The wave that is hitting us doesn’t care whether we are Progressive or Evangelical, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, prophetic or pastoral.  We are all together part of a truly countercultural movement: come together, and love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

                The most important value of Christians must become our unity—our togetherness.  We need one another!  Bigger barns won’t guarantee our survival.  Neither will uniformity of theology, culture, race, politics, or socio-economic status.  Christians are being pushed back into the one thing that should have defined us all along: Love. 

                When we submitted our report in 2010, now lost in the internet’s back forty acres of terabytes, the Moderator’s Special Committee on the Definition of Marriage and Civil Unions saw this as our true challenge.  Ten years ago this summer, I wrote this:

In his book, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer states:

        We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.  What does this mean?  It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ.  It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ.  It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.

          We all come to Christ as sinners, as strangers, whether we are in worship the week we are born, or come to know Christ in our youth or old age.  But once in Christ, we are inextricably linked to one another—not by affinity, comfort, or culture, but first and foremost because we belong to Christ.  It is Christ who sets a place for us at the table; it is Christ alone who calls.

          With Christ’s call comes the forming of Christ’s mind in each believer. In Christ, no matter who we are, what condition we are, we come to understand our essential humanity, which Christ redeems from the shadows of sin.  Christ alone knows us—it is through the mind of Christ alone that we truly come to know others.

          Christ is the center of our life individually and of our life together.  From the moment we are called forth from nothing and formed in the womb, through the moment in time when we hear and, Lazarus-like, rise from sin and follow, to the moment when we are united with Christ in a death like His and a resurrection like His, Christ is calling us.  We are not our own.  We have been bought with a price.

              

            It is time for us in the Presbyterian Church (USA) to pick up our cross together and follow God into the land that God will show us by reclaiming the essential good of uncontrolled space created by Christ, where we do not all agree on all things, where we are not from the same cultures and the same schools.  We must start to live into the complicated blessing of each other, embracing the pain that comes with the stranger, the one who does not agree or think as we think, because it is Christ Who sends them to us.  We must learn to love one another as Christ has loved us.

                There are other ways to buy and sell clothing and electronics than the mall.  Professional sports can survive and even thrive on media revenue.  There is no other way to learn to be fully human than to learn to love and live in community with other people in spaces we cannot control.  As this tidal wave of change sweeps away our power and privilege, we must find a way to not succumb to the fear that metastasizes as each shrunken soul recoils from the work of loving.  We must find ways to reorganize our common life around the essential task of loving Christ and each other in space Christ alone controls.

What would happen if our presbytery meetings were organized around strengthening and encouraging congregations and pastors in this work?  What would happen if the people around our cities, around our presbyteries, around our congregations could look at us and say, “see how they love one another!”  This tide of change will forever alter the geography of our culture.  Blame and fault-finding will do nothing to change that fact.  We must put out into the deep, trust in Christ, learn to truly hold on to one another, and live out as best we can the Gospel we preach.