A Finger Pointing towards the Moon

Why should we bother with church? Why does a Christian or other spiritually-minded person, need to show up to a certain place, at certain times, with other people? In this fragmented, secular, post-post-modern world, what is the point of church? To borrow a metaphor from the Buddhists, the church is a finger pointing to the moon.  The mission of the church is to point us towards God.  The church isn’t God, it is merely the finger pointing towards the mystery.  It’s a crooked, wayward finger, that often strays off course and requires critical redirection.  It’s a flawed, mistaken, human finger, pointing at the inexplicable.  But, it’s all we’ve got to proclaim the scandalous, surprising, saving grace and love of Jesus Christ, the gospel of a God of losers, of outcasts, of sacrifice.  Any other mission:  loving our neighbors, serving the needy, establishing social justice, is a direct result of the mysterious event of Christ’s death and resurrection, the event that happened and is happening in our own hearts, every moment.

The church is where I go to say, “Yes, me too” to the mystery.  It is where I bask in the grief of Good Friday, venerating the rupture of meaning in the world that echoes the rupture of meaning in my own life.  It is where I go to hear the incredible scandal of the resurrection that turned the world upside down.  It is where I go when I feel the embrace of God, or when I am wrestling with God.  It is where others look me in the eyes and shake my hand and say, “Peace be with you.”  It is where I take my hungry hands and desperate spirit to the altar, to be fed with spiritual food in the sacrament of the body and blood.  It is where we are present to and live within the mystery of a God who loved the world so much that he gave himself to it.

Recently, I’ve had a few “god-filled moments”.  Moments where the REALness of reality ruptured my perception and cut me open.  Moments that were indubitably true and inexplicably mysterious.  Moments that seemed either crazy, or made everything besides them seem crazy.  Moments when all my pretensions fell away.  I saw how I pose and posture, how I strive for certain praise, how I preen and practice.  Grace laid me low and naked in the eyes of God.  I couldn’t promise to do it any better, for any attempt to love or serve felt like it was loving and serving my own purposes.  In that moment, I lie there, stricken and paralyzed. Helpless, I knelt and said the confession, “God, I have not loved you with my whole heart.  I have not loved my neighbors as myself.  I am truly sorry and I humbly confess.”  I didn’t hold hope of absolution, for I was in the desert without an oasis.  I had the incredible gift of sight, of seeing myself clearly for a moment, and it was terrifying.  Christ that brought me to that understanding; Christ ripped the scales from my eyes.  In this moment, Christ did not heal me, Christ wounded me.  Christ did not comfort me; he challenged me.  Christ did not prop me up; Christ ripped away the crutch so I fell flat.

When Christ ripped away my crutch, I lay flat and waited on Christ, in the church.  When I shared this overwhelmingly mysterious and emotional experience with my priest, he said, “Yep. God will do that.”  The church is where bring our questions and our despair to contemplate the finger pointing to the moon.  As we live in the church, we shouldn't find the answers, we should find new questions.  Any answers that the flawed, human church could offer would fall woefully short of the reality of God.   The church should be structured not to give us quick comfort, but to challenge us into greater love.  Any quick and easy comfort would only anesthetize ourselves to the pain in the world and isolate us behind the church walls.  The way out of despair is through love, love of the world in the midst of our pain, living through the sadness until the sadness disintegrates.

The world is weird and wonderful.  God is strange and terrifying.  We want to look to the church for answers, but in reality, the church should raise questions and criticism:  about God, about the world, about ourselves, and about the Church.  It should rock us from our foundations, shake us out of our comfort, and attack our presuppositions.  The church of humankind is too flawed, too myopic, and too human to give any real answers.  Let’s not even pretend to give answers.  Let’s just sit together in contemplation, in communion, in broken-down wonder at the mystery, and point our crooked, wayward fingers towards the moon.

Stumbling over the Grammar of God

I really hope to be wise someday; I really want to "know stuff". I like to analyze and to understand things.  Don’t get me wrong--there are many, many subjects of which I know very little.  I don’t know how to bake, how to play basketball, or how to park my car straight between the lines in a parking lot.  I don’t know why my kids’ socks disappear and I don’t understand why people like to watch football.  However, the things that I do know, I want to REALLY know.  I want to understand them deeply, to let that understanding spill over into other aspects of my life, and (yes, although it’s hard to admit) be recognized for the fact that I understand them.  I become indignant when people underestimate my few areas of expertise:  horse training, teaching children with disabilities, Seinfeld references, and the English language.  Oh, and Christianity.  I am a somewhat-newly converted, dedicated learner of Christianity.

The thing with learning Christ, is that it’s not a straight ahead process.  I can’t follow a scope and sequence and assess my understanding.  I can’t progress up the levels and reflect back on the areas in which I need to improve.  No one gives grades in the work of building the Kingdom. I cannot earn extra credit in Christ.  As a matter of fact, Christ confounds our understanding and confuses our wisdom--and then we learn.  

St. Paul tells us (1 Corinthians 1:20-25):  "Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, he world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of god and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength."

The other day, God showed how his foolishness was wiser than my perceived wisdom; Christ made me stumble.  I know a thing or two about stumbling--it happens to me all the time.  I’m wandering around, lost in space, and I trip over something in plain sight or walk into a wall.  I often find random bruises on my shins.  My father used to say, “We should have named you Grace, because you don’t have much of it.”  So, I am an experienced stumbler. I stumble when I am in a hurry and when I'm not noticing things in the way; I stumble, curse, and right my path again. There is always a lesson to learn when I lose my balance: Pay Attention! Look!  Christ made me stumble recently, over an argument about grammar, no less.

My discussion group at church is reading Peter Rollins’s excellent book, How (Not) to Speak of God, which, of course elicits much speaking of God.  My priest and I were hypothesizing whether God was a verb--an action--the love we do, or God was the subject--the ground from which we exist--the place from which we love.  He said, “Maybe God is both the subject and the verb.”  “What!” was my indignant response, “That doesn’t make ANY sense!  The same word CANNOT be a subject AND a verb!”  He was now messing around in my wheelhouse, as an English teacher and lover of grammar.  Never mind that he was a priest and had earned a PhD in theology--don’t start talking loosely about sentence structure.  Don’t make some bald statement just for effect that was so clearly inaccurate.  I was just a little bit hot about it!  I mean, debate theology all you want, but leave diagramming sentences to me!   Luckily for us, our friend, Joy, jumped in to change the subject back to the actual question at hand and the conversation continued on more appropriate topics.

Later that night, I continued to chew it over.  How could the same word be subject and verb?  Was it a true statement that Fr. Tim made?  Or was he just saying something impossible for effect?  I imagined all the diagrams of possible sentences in my mind, over and over again.  Then, Bam! I stumbled over it.  God’s foolishness trumped my perceived wisdom, again, as always.  Love loves!  We often use love as a noun, for example, “Love wins.  Love hurts.  Love heals.”  We often use love as a verb, “I love you.  We love each other.”  So, love can love.  Love, the subject, can act in love, the verb. To take the concept further, love loves the loved. Subject, verb, object--Holy Trinity!   God is love, which loves the loved one. What the hell?  The grammar of God!

Love| loves | loved

I texted my priest the message:  “I see it!  Love loves.  Love loves the beloved.  Trinity!  Duh!”  He responded, “It is the Trinity.  The Trinity makes our grammar illogical.”  Normally, I don’t like illogical things.  They bug me.  I tend to stumble on them and bang my shin.  I like things to fit into the spreadsheet and calendar of my life, into the diagram of my sentence.  I like to understand them. This moment tripped me up and jarred me out of my logical thought, thanks be to God!  Even in the midst of an epiphany, I didn’t really understand it, but I saw it was true. My analytical, grammatically correct mind was pulled into seeing things differently, into allowing the possibility of the impossible.  God made foolish my knowledge, and I, when I let go of it, I saw God.

If God had a mouth, God would've bitten you

I detest looking for things.  My general attitude towards locating lost items is not “seek and ye shall find”, but rather “make do without it and hope it will appear eventually”.  I have lost my Ipod in my car for a week or so.  Two weeks ago, my watch fell off my wrist in my house and I haven't looked for it at all. I just hope it will turn up, washed up to the shores of our clutter by the daily tides of my children and pets.  Once, I lost the remote to our VCR for a year or so, until my brother-in-law located it behind the television in the kitchen.  During my childhood, my mother often told me, “What do you mean, you can’t find it?  Let me look.  See, Linda, if it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten you.”  I just can’t stand looking for things.  I don’t enjoy hide-and-seek or scavenger hunts, and Easter egg hunts drive me up the wall.

Due to my severe lack of skills, discipline, and patience in finding lost items, when I do lost something crucial (like my phone, my car keys, or my coffee cup), I panic.  My blood pressure rises, I lose my train of thought, and I wildly move around the room, throwing around papers and other clutter in a disorganized fit.  I am distraught when I lose the few things I cannot function without in my life.  Imagine what I act like when I lose God.

Now, I know I cannot really lose God.  God is not a possession to be tracked.  God does not have a LoJack, because God is not an object.  God is the subject, the Who or What from which the Action stems, the Action which acts upon Us--the Objects of God’s love.  We can no more lose God than we can lose the air which we breathe, or the ground on which we stand.  I realize the truth of this, but I assure you, there are times in my life when I feel like I’ve lost the air I need to breathe, and the ground underneath my feet. There are times when the blessed balance and grace and gratefulness I find in God seems to have disappeared.  There are times when God, the subject of my life, is noticeably absent to my limited perception.

In those moments of loss, I sway between two extremes--overconfident laziness and outright panic.  I try to pretend I can just make do without feeling the presence of God, like I never really needed God anyway, like I can just hit the buttons on the VCR without the remote, like I can just handle it myself.  That lasts for a while, depending on how individualistic and self-sufficient my ego feels at the moment.  Inevitably, the pendulum swings back again, from complacence to desperation.  I spin in circles of anxiety that spill over into my work and my relationships.  I drive the people in my life crazy; my poor husband says, “You need to settle down!”  So, I pray, I read, I listen to spiritual music, I read theology.  

Recently, a moment of anxious searching brought me to Peter Rollins, one of my theological super-heroes.  In his book, How (Not) to Speak of God, I saw it.  As my mom would say, “If it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten me.”  Rollins writes, “Seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already been found.  Rather than desire being fulfilled in the presence of God, religious desire is born there.  In short, a true spiritual seeking can be understood as the ultimate sign that one already has that which one seeks, or rather, that one is already grasped by that which one seeks to grasp.” (Rollins 2006)  Did you hear that?  That I am already grasped by that which I seek to grasp.”  The mouth of God just BIT me!

As a child, I learned to sing the hymn, “Seek and ye shall find, Knock and the door will be opened, Ask and you shall receive…”  I never forgot the words, but I never understood the meaning.  God is not something to locate, to pin down, to lock up for safekeeping. God is not an object to be found; God is the subject from which I stem, from which I act, and from which I seek to find God.  Seeking and finding are not separate acts to participate in the mystery of God; they are not cause and effect.  Rollins tells us, “Matthew 7.7-8 does not refer to two separate moments but rather to a type of present-continuous tense by which the seeking is the finding, the asking is the receiving and the knocking is the opening.”  (Rollins 2006)  The moments when we think we lose center, our balance, when we think we lose God, and we begin to seek the Object of God again, are the moments when the Subject of God embraces us and we find ourselves.

Rollins, P.  (2006).  How (not) to speak of God. (5th ed.)  Brewster, MA:  Paraclete Press.

Broken Windows; Broken World

“Oh my!”  My priest texted me in the middle of my day.  “Wow!”  “Amazing!”  Now, it’s not very unusual for him to text me.  We are 21st century friends; we like immediate answers and convenience.  Also, this year is my turn as a warden of our parish and there are about a dozen things going on at church, a few with which I’m directly involved.  However, when your priest starts sending you random interjections of amazement in the middle of the day, without any context, it’s a little concerning.  My response, “What the hell?”  (We don’t stand on ceremony much.)  His reply doesn't exactly answer my question, “Watch this video, right now.  It’s everything we’ve been talking about.”  He wanted me to watch a video.  What?  I texted, “What are you talking about?  Quit messing with my head.”  He replied, “I’m not messing.  WATCH IT RIGHT NOW.”  Yes, sir!

So, I pulled up Dirt, by Florida Georgia Line on Youtube and sat down to watch.  Holy Ash Wednesday:  there was everything!  The song was a beautiful portrayal of a life well-lived, a life anchored in the dirt from which we come and to which we will return.  It was the perfect sermon for Ash Wednesday, and for our season of Lent. It embodied all the ideas I’ve been struggling to enact, loving people in your life, honoring the everyday world, living in love with the people in your life.  And then there was this line, from the wife to the husband, “I don’t need to go see the world.  The world comes to my kitchen window--even if it’s broken.”  

See for yourself right now: Dirt by Florida Georgia Line

“The world comes to my kitchen window--even if it’s broken.”  What’s broken?  The kitchen window?  The world?  This statement stretches beyond the context of the song into a larger reality.  As Christians, especially during this season of Lent, we see the world through broken windows.  We are flawed, longing for God, desperate for salvation.  We want peace, but instead we get the world.   In our personal lives, the world doesn’t care if we are not feeling well, if we’re sad, if we didn’t sleep last night because our two-year-old was sick.  The world needs us.  People are hurting, people are poor, people are sick, people are broken-hearted.  We view it through broken windows and we decide.  We decide to go out and do something about it, we decide to act in love.  We decide to listen, we decide to help, we decide to show up for someone else.

As a church, we see the world through broken windows, too.  The world doesn’t care that our budget is tight, our parking lot is covered in snow, or our heating bill is due.  The world needs us and it keeps coming to our door, with challenges and with blessings.  We are tired, but we’ve got a job to do.  We meet the world at the resale shop, at fish dinners, at community events, at mass, at the soup kitchen and the food pantry, and we strive to love it through the broken windows of our souls.

However, the windows are not all that’s broken, friends.  The world itself is broken; people are lost and longing for something they don’t even know they are missing.  People we meet within and from outside of our community are searching for something.  I know I can’t give them the answers.  Honestly, I doubt that the incredible combined faith of this entire community is enough to heal someone, on our own.  But we can respect, love, and serve all the people we meet.  In our brokenness and our longing for God, we can love God so much that we see Christ in everyone we meet.   Love is a verb--an action--and God is the loving.  God is in the action that we do for the world and for each other, as we see the broken world through the broken windows of our hearts.  Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

I wish you a blessed season of Lent, my friends.

What are we serving? Evangelism (Part II)

“In a world where people believe they are not hungry, [churches] must not offer food but rather an aroma that helps them desire the food that we cannot provide.”  (Rollins 2006) In his book, How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins, one of my personal theological superheroes, gives us the evocative metaphor of the church as a restaurant, luring people in by the smells of tantalizing food that the public doesn’t even know they’re craving.  I love this image for many reasons, most of all because it reminds me of Dwayne Johnson, AKA The Rock.  You know, Dwayne Johnson, the professional wrestler turned actor, the guy with the handsome face and catchy catch phrases back in his wrestling days.  The guy who used to taunt his opponents with, “Can you SMELL what the ROCK is cooking?”  The Rock was a great evangelist; he really made me wonder what he had in store for his opponents.  He lured viewers in by the aroma, just like a church should do.

Which leads me to wonder, what is MY church cooking?  Well, since it’s Lent, the literal answer is, “Fish!”  We serve lots and lots of fish on Fridays during Lent, and the delicious aroma and buttery taste does bring in the crowds sometimes.  With the fish and potatoes, we serve up some friendship, some moral support, and some teamwork.  We serve the community with our smiles and our sugary treats.  Which makes me wonder again, what other aromas do we put out into the world?  Do we help people hunger for God?

Rollins warns churches not to pretend to answer questions, to offer security blankets in an insecure world, and to promise easy fixes for complicated problems.  Rather than patching wounds with band-aids and promising heavenly salvation at the end of a sad, sad life, we need to challenge the easy answers, ask tougher questions, and strive to love in a broken world.  If we live into the love of Christ, we live into a messy, mundane mystery, one we cannot understand, but one we can only hunger for as we follow the aroma.

How do we speak of our church to those we meet?  Do we speak as though our work there is an obligation?  Do we use it to sound necessary and important to the community?  Do we use it to sound like “a good person”?  Or do we share the excitement we find?  Do we share the frustration and our desire to do more, help more, and serve more?  Do we share the challenges we find there, the richness it brings to our life, and the important questions it raises?

What aromas are we creating in our relationships with each other?  Do we accept and value differences of opinions?  Do we recognize individual’s gifts, even when those gifts are different from, or challenging to our own?  Do we speak honestly and respectfully in times of conflict?  Do we support each other in times of need?  Do we gossip?  Do we backstab?  Do we apologize when we can’t help but fail, from time to time?  Do we forgive?  Do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and accept help graciously?

Churches often talk about how to attract more people, to get our message out, to be seen in the community.  What aroma do we evoke to the community?  Are we looking to serve our needs:  balance our budget, work our fundraisers, or teach our Sunday School classes?  Or are we looking to open our minds to other people's perspectives, to question our own views, and to challenge us into a greater love?  Do we strive for justice?  Do we help the needy, while working for a world in which the needy won’t need us anymore?  Do we proclaim the gospel?  Do we enact the love of Christ until every last person we meet feels loved?  Do we hunger for God so much that we seek to meet him in the face of every person we encounter?

In a world where people don’t know they’re hungry, what are we serving them?

Rollins, P.  (2006).  How (not) to speak of God. (5th ed.)  Brewster, MA:  Paraclete Press.

Can you SMELL what the CHURCH is cooking? Evangelism, Episcopalian-style

My husband likes sports; I like books.  If it is some sort of competition that involves hitting, throwing, bouncing, or kicking a ball, or two people competing in some sort of hand-to-hand combat, he is fully attentive.  I usually read while he’s watching some sporting event.  Once in a while, something causes me to look up from the words on my page.  Professional wrestling fascinates me a bit, with the over-the-top costumes, the soap-opera backstory, and the trash-talking.  My favorite used to be Dwayne Johnson, AKA, the Rock.  Everyone loved the Rock, with his chiseled physique, classic features, and witty discourse.  He had his famous eyebrow, and his catch-phrase, “Can you SMELL what the ROCK is COOKING?”   Those other guys, strutting and posturing, didn’t interest me at all, but the Rock, he was mysterious.  I don’t really know what he was cooking, but you can bet I was enticed by the aroma.  Back in the 2000s, The Rock was the best evangelist in the world of professional wrestling.

Evangelism is a difficult word for many Christians, especially for many Episcopalians, especially for me.  When I hear the words, “Let me tell you about Jesus…” I freeze and look for the nearest exit.  Even now, as a baptized, confessed Christian, an every-Sunday attending, Sunday-school-teacher, vestry member, heavily invested, lay-person in the Episcopal church, I’m a little frightened by the question, “Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”  The classic television, or street-corner evangelist reminds me of those screaming wrestlers, proclaiming victory and threatening punishment--ridiculous and a bit crazy.  No way were those weirdos going to threaten me into salvation.  Even my well-meaning friends put me off when they start talking about JEE-sus.  

I had a college friend, on the path towards seminary, who seemed genuinely concerned about my morality.  He often questioned my faith.  He was politely relentless, until I told him, “I know all the answers to your questions.  I passed my catechism.  I sang in the choir.  I went to Vacation Bible School.  I just don’t FEEL the answers anymore.”  He left in frustration.  He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t buying it.  All of his questions felt like threats, no matter how politely he worded them.  I wasn’t going to come back to church through interrogation.

In his book, How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins gives us this excellent image.  “In a world where people believe they are not hungry, we must not offer food but rather an aroma that helps them desire the food that we cannot provide.”  (Rollins 2006)  This is exactly how evangelism worked for me, and the only way I can manage to swallow it.  Rollins explains that Jesus flavored his teaching with salt, to make people thirst for God.  It is through the hunger and the thirst, through the enticing aroma that arouses our desire, that we find God, not through answering multiple choice questions.  Is God a.  the Father,  b.  the Son, c.  the Holy Ghost, d.  All of the above.  We find our faith through the seeking, through the questioning, through the hunger.

I was hungry for Christ, but I didn’t know it.  Almost ten years ago, I spent some time with my relatives at their church in Georgia.  It’s what you do when your uncle is a priest and you want to hang out with the family.  I remember my uncertainty in the unfamiliar liturgy, as my aunt guided me to the well-worn pages of the prayer book, nudged me to kneel and stand, and led me up to receive communion.  I remember the sermon speaking of social justice and care for the poor and marginalized.  Most of all, I remember the fellowship hour afterwards.  During the Sweet and Low Jazz Tea, members of the congregation snacked, sipped, and supported each other.  I had interesting conversation with a number of people, about my life in Chicago, my views of the South, the latest books I’d read.  No one asked about the state of my immortal soul; they just treated me like a person they would like to know better.  Later that day, I attended a class for new members to the Episcopal church.  I thought I understood that Henry VIII started the church so he could marry Anne Boleyn and take over the church property.  I had no idea that Celtic spirituality was a separate, integral branch of Christianity for centuries before the Wars of the Roses.  I had no idea of the beauty and poetry of the Book of Common Prayer.  I was fascinated.

Upon returning home to the cold north, I asked my uncle, Dan, the priest **, “Are all Episcopal churches like yours?  I think I could go to a church like that.”  Instead of pouncing on an opening to add another convert to the books, he sent me a basic primer of mainline Christian denominations, with thoughtful comments considering my free-thinking views.  I saved the conversation in my email and decided to wait and see.  The aroma from the church drifted into the background, but it lingered, along with my intrigue.  How fascinating!  A church that just met me where I was, didn’t ask me uncomfortable questions, didn’t try to help me, and didn’t exploit the smallest chink in my I-don’t-need-God armor.

After exploring Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, humanism, and a few other theologies, the hunger for Christ grew a little stronger.  I was craving something and I wasn’t sure what it was.  Hymns from my childhood captured my attention.   I opened up the Bible.  I prayed The Lord’s Prayer.  I stumbled across sermons on facebook and blogs.  I googled churches, and the one that “smelled” the best was the Episcopal Church.  As I stalked the website of St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church, I saw pictures of people who seemed to enjoy each other’s company, even when they looked like they were working pretty hard.  I read a newsletter article by the priest, who wrote about cleaning up a mess from the Pascal candle, and how he found meaning in the midst of the spilt candle wax.  A few short weeks later, I walked through those red doors, and I have not looked back since then.  Like the Rock to his fans, the Episcopal Church had lured me into its fold.  I could SMELL what the CHURCH was cooking!

Rollins, P.  (2006).  How (not) to speak of God. (5th ed.)  Brewster, MA:  Paraclete Press.

**This particular priest is currently the Episcopal Bishop of Nevada**

What is a congregation? It's where sh*t gets real

What is the mission of a congregation?  How can it be structured?  The Acts 8 Moment posed that question this week. There are so many eloquent answers, so many ideas.  A congregation is the in-breath and out-breath of the church.  It is where the mundane becomes the sacred.  It is God’s money laundering service, taking our junk, our baggage, our brokenness, our pride, and turning it into service. Where God mashes our dirt around and churns out love for the world.  It is where our shi*t gets real.  It is where we learn to love each other, and to love ourselves, even when we seem unloveable.

It isn’t easy to let God take our crap and turn it into something useful.  It takes some honesty and some bravery, and quite a bit of trust.  It takes the courage to admit our anger with each other.  It’s not all calm conversations, devoted prayer, and careful consideration.  Sometimes it is passion, anger, and heated words.  Sometimes, it is hissy fits before the altar of God.  Recently, I had my own temper tantrum towards my priest, in front of the new vestry, after a congregational meeting, in which I’d just been voted one of the new wardens.  Not one of my most eloquent, thoughtful moments, let me assure you.  But, it was real.

My priest had made an off-hand comment during the meeting, venting his frustration at a vestry discussion.  He didn’t mean to target me, but man, did he hurt my pride!  No one else in the room would have realized how personally I reacted, if I could only have settled down.  Instead of making nice, I got my back up and clenched my fists.  I had it out with him.  “How could you say…  How could you imply that….”  The actual issue didn’t really matter anymore; I was pissed and I wanted people to know it.

Thank God that priests are trained to deal with hissy fits and temper tantrums.  He acknowledged my frustration and embraced my passion.  He didn’t back off and he didn’t blow up.  As we spoke, I regained my equilibrium and began to see things rationally, with a deeper understanding of each other’s point of view. As we spoke, my prideful anger bounced around in God's cleaning machine and was transformed into a commitment to God's mission. Moments like this are where God burns our dross into gold.  When we disagree with passion, we clear the air of pretension.  When we respect each other enough to speak honestly, when we trust each other with the burdens of our heart, we practice listening to the other.  One on one, we can see beyond our perceptions, and understand the perceptions of another.

I do not know the best way to structure or govern a congregation, but I know this.  No matter what the system, it must allow for differences of opinion, it must challenge conventions, it must raise expectations for its members.  It must teach members not to convince or destroy the point of view of the other, but to see their own selves  through others’ eyes.  When we get real with each other, in the midst of our brokenness, anger, and pride, we learn to love each other.  When we learn to love God and to love each other, we can love the rest of the world.  That is the mission of a congregation--the only one that matters.