We all tend to go to seminary thinking that studying theology will bring us closer to God. But seminary is much more about forcing a conformity of thinking on students than it is about exploring what it means to live in relationship with a God Who is at the heart of things a Mystery. Almost all of us when I was there struggled with this disconnect—how can studying to be a pastor for Christ have so little to do with our relationship to Christ?
The answer, I think, is that seminary is much more interested in our being pastors who protect the established culture of the church than it is in our being pastors who follow Jesus. The Reformation was a reaction to the church’s worship of itself as opposed to its submission to the living God; five hundred years on now, we should be much more sympathetic to the mother church. We have fallen in the same hole—we now worship our own accretion of culture more than we worship the Christ who calls us to follow Him in newness of life.
We do this because culture is stable, rigid, and powerful. If culture is on our side, we are guaranteed some security and some comfort. But that safety comes at a price—the walls that we rely on to keep what we are afraid of OUT are also the same walls that imprison us. Culture inevitably becomes a prison for the human spirit—Jesus set us free to be a nomadic, pilgrim people, not a new empire.
We have surrendered to the wrong god.
And once surrendered to that god, it is devilishly hard to escape that surrender. The church that emerges from the travails of this current time, this current crisis, will have to become a more pilgrim church than the stone piles that we have created will allow us to be. How do we become people who embrace a call to be fully human, rather than a call to success, goodness, or some other culturally determined form of success?
We have to surrender to the right God.
Surrender to the right God transforms us from centripetal beings, where everything is sucked into the vortex of our conscious and unconscious whims, desires, thoughts, and feelings into centrifugal beings, where every thought, desire, feeling, whim is transformed into love and pulled out of us and pushed in the direction of the other person. Surrender to Christ can only really be accomplished by the death of that centripetal force within us—our will, our sense of our self at the center of all things. When that dies, Christ raises a new self built not on what comes into us, but what comes out of us.
You cannot protect culture and project Christ, any more than you can love another person and simultaneously demand something from them. The demand transforms love into another transaction. Protecting culture reveals our deeper need for safety which makes our desire to escape self a shallower lie. God is judging the church, setting it right, by removing the choice to retreat into a safe culture and find survival there. Survival will only come by surrender to the God revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We pastors must lead God’s people there by example, and then by projecting the resurrection love of Jesus Christ into our congregations. We must let culture go and embrace the dangerous and unnavigable journey of taking Christ’s hand and going where we do not wish to go. Only then will the church cease to be a football, a weapon, a mascot in the control of any race, class, or group, and once again become the place where all those lesser allegiances bow at the feet of the Lord of the world, Jesus Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment