Blue Waters, Stinky Ship

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In fact, he began his journey on this very day!

For months, he and his crew were out on the ocean, cut off from all communication with Spain. No iPod, no internet, no Wii! There was no email, snail mail, or telegraph. Even today’s astronauts do not experience that level of isolation.

Nonetheless, because Columbus and his crew sailed for Spain, they remained organically connected to Spain; so much so that all the territories they discovered and all the wealth in those territories were claimed not for themselves as individuals but for the nation they represented.
(Of course, no one asked the Incas, Maya or Aztecs what they thought of the arrangement.)

As I have been writing about the Church and its role in spiritual life, I have realized just how much all this goes against the grain of contemporary thought. Christians now think of themselves as individually connected to God but voluntarily assembled with others who are also individually connected to God. That is what constitutes a church in our contemporary way of thinking. However, the New Testament doesn’t present things that way.

Paul begins many of his letters with a greeting to a particular local church. “To the saints who are in Ephesus,” he says. Or “to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.” As with the other apostles, Paul assumes that believers will be faithful members of local assemblies. The New Testament writers never assume any other possibility. The thought that a believer might not be organically planted within a local church just doesn’t occur to them.

On the other hand, the apostles did not envision the believer’s relationship with the local church as “membership,” in the sense we use the word today. The believer didn’t voluntarily join a church; he or she was born into the church. The church was the spiritual family of the believer.
Furthermore, the relationship between believer and the congregation had to be deliberately nourished by someone.

Paul writes in Colossians, chapter 2:
For I want you to know what a great conflict I have for you and those in Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the knowledge of the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ.

“Knitting people together in love” requires a healthy community. We are not “knitted together in love” through private piety, by doing good things like reading the Bible or by praying at home. We are knit together with other believers through the rumble-tumble of life, through our ups and downs, through attachments and misunderstandings, through victory and grief: through living out real life in the context of our spiritual family, the local church.

Our private piety is an outgrowth of our community life and our community life is an outgrowth of our shared piety.

Thus, we cannot be “knitted together in love” by jumping from one church to the next or by hopping from one “good gospel show” to a better one across town.

Spiritual growth simply does not happen if we keep an arm’s distance our brothers and sisters in Christ. Being knitted together in love requires intimacy. It only happens, if, over time and through commitment, we live together, work together, learn together and grow together.

As Columbus sailed into the West and gradually lost sight of land, the sailor’s sense of adventure turned into the routine of surviving on the open seas. After a while, when no new land came in sight, when it began to look as though the ocean was infinite; the sailors began to complain. Their fear of meeting untold monsters from the deep, falling off the edge of the world, or merely running out of food and water, gripped them and wouldn’t let go. But Columbus was the captain because inside that ship, they were still in Spain.

I have no idea what the sailors did to remind themselves that they were still Spaniards an on Spanish territory inside that ship. I suspect that they did things like raise flags, sound bugles, celebrate special holidays and observe other kinds of ritual that would keep Spanish life alive in their hearts. If so, then someone had to see to all of that. Someone had to “knit everyone together.”

Then one day, land was spotted. The journey was over. The ship had carried them across the wide expanse to the other shore.

I bet they were glad to get off that stinking ship!

But while they had been at open sea, the ship sure had come in handy – stink and all!

Polly Wanna New Church?

A little church rented a building that had once been a brothel. On the first Sunday of services, the deacons were coming in the front door and saw that the former inhabitants had left a parrot behind. As they laughed at the parrot, the bird looked them all over and squawked: “same old crowd, same old crowd!”

Well, hopefully not! However, undeniably every church is a collection of sinners; who, called to live a different sort of life, gather to receive grace and strength to do so.

Our church is reading through the One Year Bible, so we are presently in the Book of Judges. It is an interesting book, full of some of the Bible’s most memorable stories. It is also a disturbing book since the characters depicted as heroes of the faith act in ways that we would not tolerate in a heathen. They visit prostitutes, cut off members of their enemies’ bodies, and sacrifice their daughters to win wars.

Sounds like the same old crowd!

I like the book of Judges though. It reassures me that God will work among a people, even if they have a woefully deficient understanding of His ways. And that is what is happening here. The generations after Joshua do not learn the ways of God. They sink into the ways of their heathen neighbors, the very thing Joshua had warned them against.

By the end of the era of the Judges, we are entering the time of Samuel. He is the prophet who heard God’s voice as a little boy and led Israel back into a fuller awareness of covenant. After Samuel came David, Solomon and, in time to come, the prophets.

Covenant information and the wisdom to apply it to life, accumulates over time. It takes generations before the full force of redemption makes a visible impact upon a family or a nation. It also takes generations before a backsliding from covenant reveals its full impact.

Many nations that wallowed for centuries in poverty and ignorance are now enjoying rising levels of education and economic prosperity. I have lived long enough now to have witnessed their transformation and understand its cause. It is the single factor that the world’s economists miss: the effect of the gospel on the poor masses.

When I was a teenager in Ecuador, the masses of the nation were desperately poor and illiterate. Cars were few and roads were bad. We still used many of the of the old Inca highway system from the days of the Empire; cobblestone washboards that made thin ribbons across the Andes and down into the jungles. After a few hours creeping on these roads, one was thoroughly exhausted.

Today, the nation is full of energy and intelligence. A beautiful mass transit system effectively carries the people of Quito from one end of the city to the other. Good roads connect the cities of the mountains with those of the coast. Markets are full and the people are healthy.
This is the story of many of the countries of Latin America.

What did all of this? It wasn’t politics, that’s for sure. Neither theirs nor ours understood the suffering of the masses – or cared, for that matter. Politicians on both the right and the left botched numerous opportunities to improve the lives of the people. Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum ping-ponged the poor from one extreme to the next.

Meanwhile, something had entered the backdoor of Latin culture. In the hovels and barrios of our great Latin cities – in the rural huts of the starving people living in something akin to slavery on the massive plantations – very flawed and simple people were teaching the scriptures. Often barely literate and poorly educated themselves, Christian workers taught a new kind of life and laid down their own relatively comfortable existence to awaken the people of Latin America to new possibilities.

While politicians strutted across the stage before their middle class audience, while those who could listened to the speeches and read the newspapers; while the left and the right battled it out in the streets with Molotov cocktails and tear gas; while revolutions came and went; the poor memorized scripture and spent nights in prayer.

Their grandchildren are no longer poor. They are the nation’s teachers and judges. They own the new businesses and run the clinics and hospitals.

It took a while and the ones who made it happen didn’t get to see it. The leaders of nations and universities still don’t see it. They paddle on and on about theories that never worked and don’t work now. Their grandfathers missed the point and so do they.

In an earlier blog, I talked at length about how the early church fathers borrowed the Latin word "persona” from the theater. To the ancient Romans, a persona (from the Latin prefix “per” meaning “through” + the word “sona,” meaning sound; thus “to sound through”) was a mask used by actors in drama. The persona allowed the audience to understand the actor’s role in the play. When the audience saw the persona, they knew what character the actor was wishing to express.

We have already seen how the early church used the word persona in their development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Now I would like to use the word persona in another context. I would like for us to consider that the local church is the persona through which the church catholic, the body of Christ, is seen and experienced in this world.

We cannot see the mystical body of Christ. We can only see the shape it takes in a particular time and place, upon this fallen planet, peopled by fallen men and women.

Although believers know that the spiritual body of Christ exists, although to believers that eternal body is more real than the earth itself, it is nonetheless, invisible to most of the world. Most of the times, it is invisible even to believers. Naturally then, when we hear the word “church,” we usually think of that face of the church that we can touch, see and experience. We call this part of the body of Christ, the local church.

While the local church may seem so much less that than the mystical body of Christ, it is the place where the rubber really meets the road. The local church has a quality about it called community, a characteristic of corporate existence that nurtures believers while they are making their journey to eternity. Believers do not make their spiritual journey alone. In the Old Testament, believers belonged to a real country, a nation called Israel. New Testament believers belong to a real community too, as should we. It is called the local church.

The writers of the New Testament stress the importance of belonging to a local church. The writer of the Hebrews (10: 24,25 NKJV) says,
"let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching."

I have been fortunate to live long enough to witness the power that is hidden within the local churches. The world ignores the most powerful of these assemblies because they seem so ordinary – so much like the same old crowd. Even Christians cannot be proud of everything done in the churches, especially when the gospel is poorly understood and so inadequately practiced.

Still, the parrot is wrong. It just looks like the same old crowd. In all the mess, a nation is being born in the home of one of those people so badly living out the faith they profess. A little boy will soon hear a voice and answer “behold, your servant heareth.”

Altared States

The Part and the Whole

On today’s date in 1865, federal troops shot and killed John Wilkes Booth. He had been running for days after shooting Abraham Lincoln. The nation, weary of all the fighting and dying, had little sympathy for Booth. Even Southerners, who merely weeks before had been fighting the armies commanded by Lincoln, joined the search for the ego maniacal actor.

Booth was perhaps the last real casualty of the American Civil War.

The amount of books, academic papers, movies and other media depictions of the War Between the States would take a lifetime to read. Americans keep trying to figure out how and why their ancestors took up arms against one other. Most American families with long roots in the nation descend from people who fought on both sides. That is certainly true of the Scott family.

So why do nations divide into such bitter conflicts?

In Joshua, chapter 22, there is an interesting story about civil war. In that passage, Israel almost goes to war against two of its own tribes. Surprisingly enough, the contention was over an altar! Two tribes had built a separate altar from the one upon which the rest of the Israelites offered sacrifices. This was such an egregious act that it nearly resulted in bloodshed.

Just before the troops marched to battle, the nation sent the high priest, together with representatives from each tribe, to ensure that their information was accurate. As it turns out, it wasn’t. The tribal altar was erected as a memorial. It would never be used for sacrifices but would remind the descendants of the two tribes that they were a part of a nation. The tribal descendants would observe that although their altar was identical to the national altar, sacrifices would be offered only on the national altar.

The tribes were not attempting to be their own nation.

But why was it such a big deal to the Israelites for tribes to make their own altars? Wouldn’t more altars in a country make for a better nation?

Well, yes. However, sacrifices could only be made at one altar, so that every Israelite, of whatever tribe, would have to make pilgrimages to a common place to worship God. That would ensure the national and spiritual unity of God’s people despite their tribal differences.

In normal times, God’s people thought of themselves as Danites, Benjaminites or Levites. Each tribe had its own dialect, dress and customs. However, God intended that the people remember that they were members of a common nation. Allegiance to the nation came first. Allegiance to the tribes came second. What a separate altar seemed to threaten was a division of the nation into rival sects. This would not be tolerated.

As Jesus told us (and as our sixteenth president reminded us) “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

When a tribe sets up its own altar and fails to see its need for the nation, it commits the sin of sectarianism. If the rebellion becomes deeply entrenched and removes those who embrace it too far from the common altar, the rebellious tribe may find itself cut off from its roots.

This is why orthodox Christians view the so-called Christian cults (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons) to be outside the boundaries of Christendom. We don’t have the right, and we should not have the desire, to judge whether a particular individual in any such group is or is not God’s child. That is His business. However, we can say, indeed we are required to say, that such groups and the teachings they espouse, are heretical. We can also say that such groups lack apostolicity because they have broken the essential links that connect Christians with the apostles. In such a case, we say, with sorrow, that they cannot be regarded as legitimate Christian assemblies.

Of course, it is not only the Christian cults that have abandoned the apostle’s doctrine in our times. Great portions of the so-called mainline Protestant churches have also abandoned the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints.” They no longer confess or practice what C. S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” Therefore we must sadly conclude that these groups too have broken ranks and have set up their own private altars.

The Church of the Ages is due a higher level of allegiance than our local church or denomination. The local church is where we live, learn and grow in Christ. It is dear to our hearts. Our denomination represents the customary ways in which we express our faith in Jesus and we grow to love it. However, local churches and denominations earn the right to call themselves “Christian” only to the extent that they hold fast to that core of faith which has been passed from Jesus and the apostles through all generations.

In the last few years, such denominations as the Episcopal Church U.S.A have built their own altars. They have set up doctrines and practices that endanger their Christian identity.

Christian churches around the world of all sorts have responded by pleading to such groups to to recognize the mortal danger of their growing apostasy. The new altars must not stand. Either these churches will repent and return to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, or the other tribes will disown them, allowing them to continue their long descent into liturgical Unitarianism.

The Body of Christ is amazingly broad and diverse. Copts and Baptists, Lutherans and Marionites, Pentecostals and Quakers may appear to have little in common. Indeed, most days they don’t even think about one another. However, they have a common altar. Something flows from a single source to their people. That stream enriches the diverse soil of the peoples of God. When that common source is threatened, then the Church will and should rise up to define its borders.

Fortunately, in the Joshua passage, the tribes explained to their brothers that they had no intention of offering sacrifices on a separate altar. They intended to make their descendants aware of the common heritage they shared with the other tribes.

The nation was satisfied. It left the tribes free to express the covenant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in their own unique way.

A hundred and forty years ago today, a man who had just attempted to rekindle the newly concluded conflict between the peoples of the United States, met justice. The nation – North and South – did not mourn his passing. Americans were busy grieving the loss of a odd, gangly man in a tall hat who had called for a new birth of freedom; so that the “government of the people, for the people and by the people would not perish from the earth.”

The conflict had tested whether this nation or any such nation “could long endure” and it had passed the test.

Last week I drove from my home in Nashville, Tennessee to visit Springfield, Illinois. I crossed no border. I needed no passport.

That is what happens to the descendants of those tribes that honor the nation and do not erect separate altars.