A Church Seduced

Baboons don’t have empires.

Baboons don’t have empires because they can’t meet one of the fundamental requirements of empire-making; They can’t organize in groups larger than 44.

44 baboons just isn’t an empire. Though one wouldn’t want to meet 44 baboons in an alley, it’s not an organization of any note whatsoever.

Humans, on the other hand, have had many, many, many empires. Several at a time, in every generation, for all of human history. We are just terribly prone to empires in a way that baboons will never be.

Partly because we’re capable of symbolizing. Baboons don’t get into groups larger than 44, because bigger than that, Underling-Baboon can’t see Leader-Baboon and so can’t be included in group tasks. Incas sent messages by runners over their vast and complex web of high mountain roads. Rome put the face of their leaders on their currency and then distributed it all over their conquered lands. So does the U.S.

But beyond just being capable of empire building’s foundational activity (symbolic communication), we’ve also clearly developed, as a species, a real yen for empire building. We just keep doing it, over and over.

Why?

Because, in service of our personal and communal aspirations, Empire WORKS. Now. Powerfully.

Empire just gets phenomenal results. Pyramids. Coliseums. Cathedrals. Manhattan.


Empires can get this incredible momentum and unleash an unbelievable amount of power very quickly. We live short lives and we feel rather impotent for much of them. If we can hitch our wagon to a movement that gets monumental results relatively quickly, we think, “well, sign us up!” That power is often constructive (as in the above), sometimes destructive (Pogroms, the Holocaust) but usually both (slave trades, environmental disaster, atomic energy/bombs). The Empire is a sublime thing that humans can do. It is immense and awe-inspiring. Many people more intelligent, thoughtful than any of us have attached themselves to empire unquestioningly, starry-eyed at the magnitude of its possibility.

So, you’re a Christian and you have this really magnificently lovely thing that is the Christian story. You’d really like to see this magnificent, lovely thing do quite well for itself. You think it’d be good for people, for the nations. And after all, Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations. And Paul tells Israel this is for everybody, not just their community, their ethnic group. So, lets get this show on the road. Let’s hitch this wagon to some horse-power.

Let’s let the good gift of Christian life be carried on the back of the trusty steed of Empire.


And Empire is often cool with this, because empire is about power-through-force. It’s direct like that. That’s part of how empire is so effective. It doesn’t have qualms about petty things like individual dignity or transcendent beauty or rigorous theory. And yet people like to believe in dignity and beauty and truth. And religion lets the brutish empires wear elegant clothes replete with beauty and meaning and truth and honor.

And then these two horrible things happen:

All the beautiful, meaningful, true, and honorable things that are contained in our religious life are put to the service of justifying and/or obscuring the brutish, violent, selfish work of empires doing what empires do. War is justice. Greed is charity. Pride is piety.


And while parts of our religious life are being put to the service of empire, other parts are being sidelined and forgotten because, if we keep talking like that, we’re going to be undermining the fundamental work of empire. If we start saying that peace is justice and love is charity and humility is piety… well, then we are at odds with the way things are done around here.

So. the instrument of imperial violence becomes a gold necklace. The body and the blood become symbols of an abstract idea, not the material of martyrdom. An empty bottle of luxury perfume next to dirty feet becomes irresponsibility. Inefficiency.

And once our allegiance is to the Empire in the Church’s clothing, we spend our days gather straw to build bricks to expand the dominion of Empire and we feel despair. We feel wrong. We feel like nothing we’ve been promised every turns out to be what we thought it was going to be. All this stuff was supposed to be abundance. Instead, it’s turning out to be clutter, to be more shit to stash in a storage container.

And if this goes on long enough, we forget WHY we feel the way we feel.

We sing songs about a Kingdom we don’t remember, so we just try to make them about ourselves.

We recount stories of actions that, six 7ths of the week, we have no time or space or energy to re-enact. So we try to shrink them into our lives.

Well, fuck that.

I’m over that.

It’s killing me.

But you see, the problem is that I don’t know any other life. It shaped me and my desires and my hopes and my imagination. Luckily, I encountered this story of God’s work in history, culminating in Jesus and His Church. It gives me a counter-story. An upside-down Kingdom, like my dad is always calling it.

But we’ve got to figure out what it means now, in the face of THIS empire. And I don’t know exactly what that is yet.

But we’ve got some inklings. We’ve got a few anticipatory ideas that we think are a) true to The Story and b) a decent place to start.

But we’ll get to those next time.

A Desert Within Shouting Distance

Previously, we'd asked that you keep in mind we’re not giving up on Church. We aren’t leaving Church behind. I would guess that, having heard us be so hard on Church life, you’re not sure you really believe us. Let us try to explain:

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.

To find a space, a way of life that can accommodate abundance.

We’re not leaving Church for dead. We’re trying to find room for it to stretch its legs.

We think Church just needs some fresh air and it will be back to its old self in no time.

In other words, in order to change Church for the better, we can’t just change how we “do church.” We can’t just re-imagine what we do on Sunday mornings and the occasional Wednesday night. We have to re-imagine every degree on the clock. Every square inch on the calendar. We have to get out of what our friend Jay-Z calls the “Empire State of Mind.” Get out from under the Empire way of life.

I (Jonathan) love talking about John the Baptist. We have some stuff in common. He dressed weird. I dress weird. He had radical dietary habits (locusts, honey). I have radical dietary habits (Straight Edge). Mostly, I love to picture the 1st Century Jewish mothers getting together and gossiping about John the way I know church ladies have gossiped about me:

“He’s such a nice, devout boy, but (oy) his poor mother! I wish he’d be a little more normal so everyone could see what good kid he is. Join the family business. Buy a proper tunic. Live here in town and be a grown mensch.”

Okay, the Yiddish is an anachronism, but you get the idea.

Aside from all of that, we both embrace John the Baptist for a central reason: He had the faith to step out of everyday life for the work God had for him, but he also had the courage to stay within shouting distance of Imperial city life.

If we’re going to try to prepare the way for the Kingdom to show up, we think this is the way to do it: escape to the Wilderness, yet stay within shouting distance.

We feel that, in order for there to be room for the concrete practice of Kingdom living, we need to step outside the bounds of the normal, every-day structures of Imperial life into a kind of ‘wilderness’. We certainly have trepidation. The wilderness is dangerous and living there is hard work. But we are pretty confident it’s the only place with enough room to accommodate Abundant life.

And yet it’s a wilderness that needs to be within shouting distance from the cities of the Empire. We want those stuck gathering straw and making bricks to look up from their work at the rambunctious sound of Abundant life just beyond the edge of the world they know so well. We hope they might think to themselves, “It seems so different, but it’s also not so far away…”

We want to extricate ourselves from the Imperial way of life, but we want to keep close enough that our alternative lifestyle can be heard if one listens closely.

Furthermore, we understand ourselves as in a long line of folks to engage this tension. Sometimes God’s people are doing really well and sometimes God’s people are just a hot mess. There comes, now and again in our shared story, those who see the mess for what it is and start calling for a big turn around, for repentance. Sometimes they get heard. Sometimes they get ignored. Sometimes they (*gulp*) get dead.

But we believe that the ongoing story of God’s work in the world through His people tells of generations that are able to find a place of, first repentance, and then abundant life.

Please believe us about this one thing: We want to be a part of a generation that, by God’s grace, keeps its covenant.

Something’s Wrong

We were raised at Church. We were raised by Church. We love Church the way someone loves their parents. We love it in a way we can’t get away from, not that we’ve tried that hard. We love Church when it comforts us. We love Church when it tells us things we don’t want to hear. We love it when we see the lessons it taught us bubbling up spontaneously in our actions or thoughts. We love it even when we realize, like we realize about our parents, that church is so terribly imperfect. For all the wealth of wisdom and goodness it has imparted to us in our upbringing, we realize that Church can be the victim of weakness, self-deception and pervasive lost-ness. We love Church because we know without it we wouldn’t be ourselves and we’d never become our fullest selves if we left it behind.

That you understand the above is very important.

It’s important so that you know we’re not giving up on Church.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start again.

Imagine a pastor. She’s smart. He’s compassionate. They take their work at Church seriously. They care about their congregants and care about them enough to tell them that they shouldn’t settle for an hour of church once a week. For a week long mission trip once a decade. Once a year even. This pastor, these pastors invite their congregants to a fuller picture of Christian living and they call it “the Kingdom of God.”

Now, imagine a congregant. A man. A woman. A man and a woman and their children; a Christian family. They sit in their church on Sunday and hear this kind of pastor. They’re moved. They want the abundant life these pastors say the Kingdom has to offer. They want it for their little ones. But when they look at their life spread out on a calendar, there’s so little room in the in-betweens. They have to support their family all on their own. Financially. Relationally. Spiritually. And there’s just no more time to do the above-and-beyond church-type stuff. There’s no extra energy. We’re already stretched too thin. We just can’t add anything else.

No matter how abundant it sounds, it’s just not practical.

Still, both of our imagined Christians, Pastor and Congregant alike, agree that all this Kingdom of God stuff should be happening out there in the world. The Christian kind of families say to their Pastors, “I’ve got this extra money from my job in the World. I’ll set it aside and, here, you take it and you go do that Kingdom stuff. And I believe in you. And I’ll show up when I can. I’ll give you that and, don’t worry, you can still have our Sunday morning and maybe a weeknight and a Saturday here and there.”

And let’s not be quick to judge those Congregant folks. They really are giving everything that’s left. They’ll give until they’re burnt out, because they trust us Pastor types and because their everyday life leaves them so close to burnt out already.

Also, let’s not be quick to judge those passionate Pastor folks. They really love and believe in their Kingdom work. They work many more hours than they’re paid for. They’ll work until they’re burnt out, because they care for us Congregant types.


Here’s our problem: This kind of church life is not abundant life, for pastors or for congregants. And if we know one thing, we know that life in the Kingdom is abundant life.

Instead, we’ve been stock-piling straw.

Stock-piling straw so that we can make bricks.

Making bricks so that there can be “progress.”

And yet, muffled to silence by all the straw and drowned out by the cacophony of brick-making, is a cry coming up from God’s people. A cry for liberation. A cry for the abundance of something weightier than straw.

There are those who have neither straw nor bricks who are also crying out for liberation. Crying out for abundance.

And sadly, they’d be elated just to get some straw.

Funny thing about insulation like straw: it muffles sound in both directions. Muffles cries from beneath the straw. Muffles cries from beyond the straw.

And all this straw-piling and brick-making, it’s a way to make a living, but it isn’t much of a life. St. Augustine called it “this living death.”


So, if Church life these days isn’t abundant life, then we’re worried that Kingdom life and Church life have parted ways.

Not just here and there, but systematically.

And what do we call this systematic parting-of-ways? Which way is church life on these days? Well, we’re going to call it “Imperial life.” As in, “Life in the Empire.”

We think our every-day American life is Imperial life and it’s a kind of living death.

We think the conventional American church, for the most part, has systematically capitulated to Imperial life.

We think that, with some faith, courage, imagination and lots of grace, we can trade Imperial life in the Kingdom of Man back for Abundant life in the Kingdom of God.

In other words, we’re ready for empire rehab and, like addicts, our first step is admitting we’re helpless against Imperial life on our own. We need help.

And, if you’re reading this, we’re asking for your help.

Great, right?

Except, we don’t exactly have any idea what that means.

So, instead of coming to you with a list of what it is we think we need, we’re going to let you in on what’s in our hearts and minds. Then, if the Holy Spirit works like we think the Holy Spirit works, we hope you’ll offer us whatever it is God gives you to share. If it’s as much as, “Thanks for sharing with us!” that’s completely awesome.

Either way, that’s what the comments feature is for. Make liberal use.

Godspeed.

Prolegomenon

This was a blog originally set out to promulgate a Christmas-time act of prophetic performance. I had wondered to myself what, if we were to attempt to attend to the simplest truth (though perhaps not the most important or essential) of the Christmas story, what sort of thing would enact that simple truth. The simplest account of that story I could come up with was this: God comes to be with His created and beloved people. That, of course, leaves out just oodles of rich, awesome, important stuff, but it seems to grasp the root of things. So, in the season where we remember that coming-to-be-with, how do we re-enact that simplest truth?

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.