At its most basic level, my vision of being the Church is simple enough - living out that love incarnate in Jesus crucified and risen. A love that knows nothing but compassion for all who suffer. For those excluded by a society who surround the word "value" with dollar signs. For those whose lives are ruled by fear of the yawning abyss beneath, above, and around them; an abyss of their own creation, but that has broken the shackles and now rules them.
My stumbling block, the rocks upon which my comfortable ship of faith always seems to break, is the existence of those who hate, exclude, divide, and deny in the name of Christ. More than contempt and frustration, they arouse a passionate rage within me. I find myself unable to move beyond it to the love and forgiveness to which we are all called. I find myself unwilling to grant to them the same dispensation that is granted me - unearned, prodigal grace in the midst of their sin.
What is most frustrating isn't the distortion, deliberate or otherwise, of the message of faith and hope and love that is the Gospel. It is the smallness of their vision. Their God, their Jesus, their Holy Spirit are small creatures, not seeing beyond the boundaries of their own fear and hatred to a world filled with all sorts of real people in need. Their God just cannot be reconciled with the testimony concerning who God is contained in the Bible. That God, the creator of all that is, is also the God who called Israel out of the land of bondage to be a light to the nations; this God called no people and made them The People.
This same God invested all of Divinity in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. In that life, God showed us who God is - a God who laughed and loved and raged at imbecility and reached out to those who had only seen hands raised in violence. In that death, God embraced the abyss and took it in and buried it. Then, on an early morning God left all that behind, never to have any power over us or the world ever again.
Maybe we have just become used to fear, used to being subject to the whims and fancies of arbitrary power, either natural of human, to really believe that in surrender we find the final, only truth. Maybe the lure of power, the seduction of all the trappings and gewgaws that accompany it blind us to the nothingness that surrounds them. Maybe the belief that, by declaring themselves the arbiter of who is within and who is outside the bounds of God's grace, they are only repeating the stale formula of days gone by gives them some kind of tenuous connection with the long history of the faith.
For whatever reason, these prosecutors, juries, and judges insist that deviation from their small set of principles results in exclusion. Not just from the kingdom of grace, but from society as a whole.
For me, what's left in the Church, after all this chaff is blown away, is simply this - grace lived out as openness to all.
Even those who would close the door behind them, lock it, toss the key down a sewer grate, board up the windows, and insist that anyone caught breaking in is a criminal to be dealt with dispatch.
