Always, I return to Walter Brueggemann when I need a shove. We all need someone to motivate us towards continuing and keeping going, to restore faith resilience and frayed hopes, to make us pay more attention to what in heaven's name the church is for!
"The church as an alternative community in the world is not a 'volunteer association', and accident of human preference. The church as a wedge of newness, as a foretaste of what is coming, as a home for the odd ones, is the work of God's sovereign mercy. For all its distortedness, the church peculiarly hosts God's power for life."
"Imagine any community without a church. For it is that odd community, knowingly grounded in God's love, that persistently raises human questions of neighbour justice, and that persistently enacts and answer to these questions in love and care."
"The church in a quite specific way is the place where large dreams are entertained, songs are sung, boundaries are crossed, hurt is noticed, and the weak are honoured. The church has no monopoly on these matters,. Its oddity, however, is that it takes this agenda as its peculiar and primary business. In all sorts of unnoticed places, it is the church that raises the human questions."
(Texts Under Negotiation. The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. Fortress press, 1993, pages 36-37)
There is an optimism all through those sentences. I know, the church doesn't always live up to those demanding words. But when it does it comes close to that astonishingly grace-laden metaphor, that the church is the Body of Christ.
And by the way, Dietrich Bonhoeffer for one, took that metaphor far more seriously than mere metaphor. When Paul said, "You are the Body of Christ", he was saying something far more demanding, radical and realistic than the children's-talk banality of "And that's a bit like Jesus!"
Not merely, "Your are like the Body of Christ"; not even "You are to strive to be like the Body of Christ". To use the more technical term, ontologically, in reality, as a matter of fact, "You are the Body of Christ."
For Bonhoeffer the Pauline maxim means, the church is Christ existing as community. Where the church gathers in every location and time, the risen Christ by his own Word and promise, is in the midst as the one who animates, guides and gives the community its identity and character as, in reality, the Body of Christ.
All of that is implied in Brueggemann's words, and provides the theological sub-structure of the church's ministry and mission, or its mission of ministry. The church raises, as Jesus invariably did and does, the human questions of justice and neighbourliness, of reconciliation and peace, of welcome and friendship, hospitality and love. When the church fails in this mission of ministry, it weakens its identity, and needs to hear again the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, "You are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it." Jesus' agenda is "the church's peculiar and primary business."
In that sense, every church business meeting should have an agenda shaped by what we believe ourselves to be. "We are the Body of Christ". Now. Here. So what is it that we should be doing? If this church is Christ living through this community what should we give our energy, money, time and abilities to?
I think in those sentences above, Brueggemann points us to some of the essential life-giving oddities of Christian commitment. They could quite easily be turned into prayers for guidance, and prayers of intercession, by a community "knowingly grounded in God's love."
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