They weren’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
“When we share the bread and the wine, Christ is here, right now.” I said. “We don’t have to wait until death to share the gifts of the kingdom of God. It comes near to us when we gather, when we share, and when we go.”
Our prayer and worship aren’t seminars in controlled environments where we talk about God. When we pray, we are coming into intimate, close relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And don’t let us dare to gather in community. That’s where it really goes down. Jesus tells us about the power of assembling in Christian community. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt, 18:19–20). This statement echoes an excerpt from Ecclesiastes where the teacher says, “Though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccles. 4:12). There is power in numbers and something very real happens when we dare to gather in community and recognize Christ in our midst.
I long deeply for community, especially community that is bigger than itself. Understanding Christian community as subversively powerful and purposefully understated has reshaped my relationship to Christ and his Church. As we navigate the shifting tectonic plates of rapidly changing religious landscape, I have gained solace from the realization that we never need armies to accompany the gospel. We never need wealth, and power, and prestige to aid in our evangelism. All we need is a heart keenly aware that the Son of the Living God is present here, that this community gathered in humility around prayer and sacrament is the vanguard of the reign of Christ, that we are actively participating in the tearing down of oppressive power structures by affirming the sovereignty of God over every earthly power.
This message is clear in Exodus, but that message got lost somewhere in the centuries.
The moment the Roman Empire found out that there was a benefit to co-opting the community of disciples gathered around the Risen Christ, the message of movement began to become distorted. Before long, armies bore the cross of the Prince of Peace into battle, killing others in Christ’s name. This only grew worse as the faith spread and more and more people in power took on the name of Jesus Christ without committing to one of the principles of his movement—love. Soon, the message of Christianity was almost indistinguishable from warfare, colonialism, and oppression. All over the world, the Cross of Christ wreaked havoc among unsuspecting peoples and cultures. Far from being a movement of perpetual liberation—a never-ending Jubilee—the community of faith around Jesus of Nazareth became a principality, a power-broker, the very thing the reign of Christ came to dethrone.
And yet—by the sheer power of the of the Holy Spirit—the message of the Crucified and Risen One still managed to be told and lived. By mystics in deserts, monastics in communities, slaves deep in the woods of the American South, the earth-shattering truth of Christ continued to be proclaimed and shared. These individuals and communities fell in love with Jesus Christ and—against all odds—preserved a faith that had been distorted beyond recognition by the allure of power and wealth.
As a young disciple of Jesus Christ—one who will likely be alive to see the Church in the West forced to reform itself—I actually believe that we are being given a gift. Our wider culture, having discovered it no longer needs us to be an avenue of power, is tossing us off to the side. We no longer have pride-of-place in the public square, Sunday’s aren’t just for church anymore, and most people are apathetic to the Church. All we are left with is Christ and, to borrow from C. S. Lewis, the one who has Christ and everything has no more than the one who has Christ alone (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 34).
In short, we are set up for revival.
The Pentecost story tells us that in the days immediately following the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the disciples were trapped in a cyclical pattern of locking themselves in rooms. They had just experienced the greatest trauma of their lives coupled with witnessing something so wonderful, they struggled to find words to speak about it. They were afraid of sharing the news of the resurrection, afraid of openly proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, and uncertain about their future. They went through the formalities of ensuring the future of the movement by electing Matthias—the Church is very good at formalities—but deep down, there was a deep, saturating fear.
And they dared to gather in the real world. They were just waiting for something to happen.
When 110 of them were altogether, the Holy Spirit came and blew them into action. Peter preached a sermon so powerful that thousands of people were brought into the body of Christ. The Church was set on a course that day that—though it may have stumbled over the centuries—it remains on to this very day. We are the Church of Jesus Christ, a mystical extension of his body in the world, called to go where he went, say what he said, and hang out with the folks he hung out with—the misfits, the outcasts, the struggling, the lost, the lonely, and the hurting. If prayer and worship bring us close to Jesus, it should bring us close to those who are suffering. If is isn’t, we might be guilty of idolatry, worshiping a projection of ourselves instead of worshiping the “stone the builders rejected.” My experience shows me that idolatry is seductive because fidelity to the living God actually requires something different from us than we are wont to give. That might explain why people are so apt to walk away from faith the moment they are asked to behave differently. When we’re used to doing whatever we want with divine approval, being told that God might require conversion feels like death.
And that might just be the point.
Jesus tells his disciples that those who would be his disciples are to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. This is nothing short of an invitation to die—die to a world that is itself dying in order that we might be born anew in a world that is coming. Personal prayer and public worship are part of that process, bringing us close to the consuming fire of God and giving God more and more of ourselves to refine and purify.
Our worship and prayer is also something else. When we pray individually or worship in the context of Christian community—whether we use a set of texts or not—we are not only swept up in God’s liberating love of the world, we are swept up in God’s very self. That we are referred to as the “body of Christ” throughout much of scripture is neither accidental nor inconsequential. When we pray and worship, we become aware of our connection to Jesus Christ who is at the same time “one with the Father.”
When Jesus’s disciples came to him, seeking wisdom on how to pray, Jesus tells them, “When you pray, say ‘Our Father . . .’” At face value, referring to God as “Father” represents a particular ancient worldview where men were seen as the “fountain of life,” which has since been debunked by modern science. Setting aside for the moment the patriarchal effects of the word, the analogy is meant to draw a distinction between “Creator,” which assumes that what is created is fundamentally separate and disconnected from the creator, and “Father,” which assumes that what is begotten is fundamentally connected to the parent, even if that begetting is through adoption.
The analogy goes deeper than this, though. By inviting his disciples to refer to God as “Father,” Jesus is inviting them into a deeper, more profound, more intimate relationship than simply “Creator.” Jesus didn’t come merely to make us better. Jesus came to make us new. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that,
a world of nice people, convinced of their own niceness, looking no farther, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save. For mere improvement is not redemption . . . God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. (Lewis, Mere Christianity, in The Completely C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 170)
Understanding Lewis’s use of “sons” and “men” as patriarchal language that reflects his time, words that within his context would have been understood to be inclusive of all people, his