Holy Fool

One of the images used to describe the Lord's people is the 'bride of Christ'.  In wedding ceremonies the bride is often beautified with dress and jewelry, her hair is done and makeup is applied.  She is radiant as she walks down the aisle and her grace is evident.  She is attractive in her beauty and in her character, her purity.  She is so beautiful.

Does that really sound like the church?

Of course we all know that the 30 minutes a bride stands before a group of individuals is not her every day persona.  She is an office worker, a teacher, a doctor, a student, a lawyer, a homemaker.  She has her good days and her bad days, her moments of exhiliration and her stretches of drought and normalcy.  Throughout all of this though her husband remains committed, he did not just marry the gilded and adorned beauty that walked down the aisle to meet him.  No he married her largely for her consistent character and faitfulness to their marriage vow.

One thing I have come to notice over the years is that married couples who are passionate about each other are beautiful.  In their age and their years they acquire a beauty as they fall ever deeper in love with the other.  It is a beauty that spills out into the laps of those that are near them, they inspire others towards connectedness in their relationships and a deep intimacy.  This is a love not easily feigned nor imitated, because it is a love that knows beauty is more than cosmetic, it is it's own language of knowing the other.

The church is not perfect, we are after all human.  However as we continue to fall in love with our spouse, with our lover and creator our love can become a beautiful thing.  We do our love with Christ a dis-service when we describe it solely in the realm of the platonic or brotherly.  The relationship of God's people (our own relationship) with Christ is to be passionate, romantic, intimate and deeply connected.  Perhaps if we really embraced this truth the church could begin to really be the church.

I would argue that largely the church today is concerned with cosmetic beauty, and as a result we end up looking worn and trashy.  The world is to look at the church, to smell the perfume of our relationship with Christ, and to be attracted to that covenant.  They are to see a transforming power at work in the world, but instead they only see human political parties and hypocritical nationalists.  Through our actions we have not shown that God can change the hearts of men, we have instead shown that God likes to boycott Target and water board Muslims.  We do our groom a disservice when we pursue after influence among the powers of the world, when after all we are already betrothed to the Lord of All, the Lamb of God.

She is so beautiful, and the beauty is held in the intimant closeness of Christ.  We must not look elsewhere for our affirmation and power or we will surely become an adulteress.

I love going to old buildings which have not been used for many years and just looking at them.  There is a certain beauty in watching as nature reclaims brick, mortar, steel and asbestos.  The works of man crumbling, slowly beaten down by prairie winds.  There is peacefulness in the eerie shadows of the artificial mountains we were once were so proud of, so determined to protect.

Just north of me about ten minutes lies the remains of the Sunflower Ammunition Plant, it once was an originating source for munitions for the U.S. military.  Today its 6,000+ acres of land and buildings sit largely empty and decaying.  On the southern edge of the property lie fifty or more buildings, each about the size of a decent sized barn.  It was in these buildings that ammunition was stored, and kept until needed to perform it's duty.  Each of these barns are devoid of electricity, so that the ammunition would not have exploded due to a stray current.  Today these storehouses are empty shells, empty and dead inside and whitewashed on the outside.  They are ghosts of the Kansas prairie.

My father-in-law used to own a large building in Centerville, Kansas that had once been a rail-road car repair facility.  It consisted of two large rooms, the largest of which was about 300 feet long and about 60 fet high.  It was inside this room that they would repair the axels, wheels and couplers on rail road cars.  Centerville had once been a thriving town with businesses, a small main street with a cafe that was run by my father-in-law's youngest sister.  Today the town has more houses empty than occupied, they have gone the way of the railroad building.  Like the water tower on the old property the architecture of the town is rusted and if left alone will be reclaimed by nature before the end of my time here on earth.

I think though that this is how it should be.  There is a certain beauty in 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust' that helps us remember our temporary place in this land.  We are like summer flowers in the high tundra of Alaska, our roots are shallow and our time here short.  The wind beats at us constantly, but it is a fair wind.  Permanence is reserved for the one who is and is to come, his Kingdom endures, but it's in-breaking is fleeting and shifting.  It is never in one place for very long before its tide has receded here and swelled there.

So let your barns fall and your castles crumble.  They are but gravestones, ghosts, hints at our past but never our homes and never our future.  Let go of ownership and find the beauty and serenity of the wilderness.

There is book floating around called 'The Great Emergence' by Phyllis Tickle.  I haven't read it for myself, but in the world of blogging it is not a prerequisite to actually have read something before making bold and audacious claims about said book.  Infact I believe it is encouraged in the blogging community to, 'shoot from the hip' as it were; perhaps with an image of Clint Eastwood from one of his spaghetti westerns in your mind.

But I digress, the reason this book seems to be getting so much play around the blogosphere, is that asks the question, "where now is our authority?"  Now having watched numerous videos with Ms. Tickle in which she summarizes the content of her book I have to say that I don't really have a problem with the question.  I don't even really have much to disagree with in regards to most of her assesments.  At least in the Nazarene/Methodist/Anglican world we have forgone the idol of Sola Scriptura all together, so that is not really a huge issue for me.  In many ways when we are forced into discovering The Word, i.e. Jesus as the source of all truth, vs. what is written (inspiration or otherwise) about him, it helps us form a better Christological focus from which we then live out the gospel in our contexts.

Here is my caution in all of this.  There will be some that will go the way of the classical progressive/liberal track and try to engender that as being the 'emerging' culture, when in fact it is old school liberal theology with a shiny name.  This is no different than the denominational hijacking of the word 'missional'.  In regards to authority however we must be careful because when we swing the pendulum too far we end up with legalism.  If we set up a 'Sola Scriptura' idol we fall into legalism, we will have indeed as Phyllis exhorts exchanged Christ for an idolotrous reverence for the Bible.  On the other end we have classic liberalism, which for all it's claims of liberty is simply a set of rules set in opposition to the other side.

Either way, when humans start trying to 'decide' where the authority comes from we end up with some form of legalism; either conservative or liberal, but both legalists to the end.  I think asking "Where now is our authority" is a lot like asking why gravity works, or why water is wet.  At the core we know the authority, the only true and lasting authority lies in God Almighty.  We have his authority as it is revealed to us by his Son Jesus Christ and the experiences of the first Christians.  We already know where the authority comes from.  The real question, the underlying question that Phyllis is asking is, who gets to decide who is a Christian and who isn't?  Who get's to decide orthodoxy/praxy, etc.?

That is where grace comes in for us humans.  The New Testament gives us a pretty clear picture of who Christ was and what he was here to do.  It gives us a generally agreed upon source from which to become a people of love, charity, and grace.  There is a lot of our faith that God has chosen to leave to personal discernment of the Scriptures and their meaning for our own moral context.  Because of our free will and fallible intellects we have the ability to mis-interpret and mis-appropriate scripture and misapply it to our lives (and other peoples lives as well.)

I say all of that to say that the way of the Cross transcends the either/or legalism of the conservative and liberal debates.  If you have read anything Brian McLaren has ever written on anything than you would have heard that before.  I would add that what we actually 'do' (our practice and relationships) as a people of Christ says a lot more about where we look for authority than what we 'say' (human ideas about who God is) about Christ, scripture, etc.

It's entirely possible to give the Bible the complete authority of your life and to never know Jesus Christ in the way he intended you to.  It's also possible to be smug and arrogant as you squash the conservative imbicles in the name of Christ.  If you want to find out where God's authority lies, then I suggest you do less theologizing and more watching.  Look for the fruit of the Spirit and that is where you will find the authority you seek.