My answer was as simple as my interpretation: by coming to be with God’s created and beloved people, which is to say anybody and everybody. So, what’d me and my good friend and co-conspirator do? We grabbed a couple lawn chairs, we made a silly sign and we bought a couple casks of coffee and some paper cups. We went downtown to where all the frantic, Christmas Eve shopping happens and we parked it under the city’s “holiday tree.” We spent a portion of the afternoon asking people if they’d like a free cup of coffee and if they said yes, we asked them how they were on that stressful day.
That’s it. We missed out on an opportunity to evangelize, because (in the traditional sense) we didn’t. If people asked us why we were doing this, we told them that we thought Christmas was about God coming to be with people, so we decided we should go be with people too. We just kept it as simple as we could. Some people imputed motivations to us that we likely didn’t have. We didn’t correct them. Other people didn’t really get the nuance of the cultural critique at work. We didn’t elaborate.
We just tried to enact the simplest truth we felt like we could manage before things got impracticably complex.
Granting that there are many ways in which “Good” is the enemy of “Best,” this was an instance in which the Best would have been an enemy of the Good. In an effort to get the best, the most and the pure into our Christian action, we would have been scared off of doing the Good, however meek and subtle, God had for us that day. Our perfectionist projection of the best would have just shut us down. Scared us off.
“To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
I have every advantage. I’m white, American, rich, male, Christian, heterosexual, well educated and able-bodied. As a result, such modesty of purpose and action might seem at best naïve and at worst irresponsible. My conservative brothers and sisters might hope for a more bold proclamation of belief and my progressive brothers and sisters might desire a more ambitious course of action. Indeed, I’m eloquent and personable. I can be bold and prone to leadership. By hiding in the halls of academia and in all-but-hidden conversations about the “what’s next” of church-life, mightn’t I be depriving the movement of a potent, missional voice? Of an intentional, purpose-driven leader?
Perhaps.
Whatever the value of my talents and resources to the power of a Christian cultural movement, I begin writing in this venue echoing Paul’s commitment: “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me… For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
For when I am weak, then I am strong.
That is the ground-floor paradox on which Christian action must be built.
My best friend and co-conspirator, in a reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, came to the command to “be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” and found that the sort of engaged Christian action a total mess like him (and me. And, I’d bet, you) can conjure in the face of such a command is to begin to “boast in (our) weakness.” Which is not to say that we express despair, but rather we express the grandness of our hope. We can be radically honest about what a fucking mess we are because we have the hope in a transcendently powerful God whose power is made perfect in our weakness.
Stop. Take a breath. Let’s revisit that last bit: God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. Not in spite of it. Not against it. In our weakness. If that’s true, it would mean that, when you hide your weakness, you exercise your freedom to reject God’s good gift of weakness-perfected power.
And if we’re going to make it anywhere near “perfect as (our) Heavenly Father is perfect,” we’re going to need that kind of power.
So, watch the fuck out, because this is going to be an honest, weakness-baring zone.
Now that I’ve given some intimation of how I’m going to be discussing things here, you’re probably wondering what I’m going to be discussing here.
For now, just a taste:
“Our problem with Church life is, put another way, that it has let itself become a subset of Imperial life. Many, including us, live our lives as though Church life is only a feature of something more basic, like the “Church app” for the Imperial iPhone. And, like iPhone apps, the nature of this subset gets pre-approved by Imperial life.
Now, lots of people have this insight and, in response, they abandon Church life. Usually, they abandon Church life for a more generic, “liberal” form of Imperial life.
Sometimes people do this, but they want to still call themselves Christians, so they identify Church life with that liberated/progressive feature of Imperial life.
Now, we understand why they do this and we sympathize. Really. Seriously, we understand that impulse. Still, we also think they aren’t going far enough. We can’t just flee Church for life in the Empire, because we feel that what’s wrong with Church life is Imperial life. We need to keep running until we’re not behind the Empire’s fences anymore. We want to keep running until we find ourselves in the Wilderness.
Not to get away from Church life, but to make room for it.”
But that’s a conversation for another day.
Godspeed.
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