I am learning that the church is at its best when it is underground, subversive, and countercultural. It is the quiet, humble, stealth acts that change things. I was just talking to a woman named Michelle who decided to move into the roughest neighborhood in our city to try to help people get out of the cycle of poverty and despair. She was telling me about the kids she is tutoring and the families they come from and how great the needs are. Some other women in our church heard about Michelle and asked her for lists of what exactly the families in her neighborhood need. (One of the families wrote on their list “heat.”) They then circulated the lists until they found people who could meet every one of the needs. It’s like an underground mom-mafia network. Michelle told me at last count they had helped 430 families, and they are making plans to expand their network.
“Jesus lives; here’s a toaster.”
These are the kinds of people who change the world. They improvise and adapt and innovate and explore new ways to get things done. They don’t make a lot of noise, and they don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.
Difficulty, Suffering, and Hope
To be this kind of person—the kind who selflessly serves—takes everything a person has. It is difficult. It is demanding. And we often find ourselves going against the flow of those around us. Which is why we are reclaiming the simple fact that Jesus said the way is narrow.30 We are honest about this, especially to our friends who wouldn’t say they are Christians. Very few people in our world are offering anything worth dying for. Most of the messages we receive are about how to make life easier. The call of Jesus goes the other direction: It’s about making our lives more difficult. It is going out of our way to be more generous and disciplined and loving and free. It is refusing to escape and become numb to and check out of this broken, fractured world.
And so we are embracing the high demands of Jesus’s call to be one of his disciples. We are honest about it. We want our friends to know up front that the costs are high, which is what is so appealing about Jesus—his vision for life takes everything we have.
In the accounts of Jesus’s life, often the larger the crowds get, the more demanding and difficult his teachings get. In John 6 he gives a teaching that is so hard to swallow, everybody but a few leave him. He is constantly trying to find out who really wants it. And so he keeps pushing and prodding and questioning and putting it out there until some leave and the diehards stay. We never find him chasing after someone, trying to convince them that he really wasn’t that serious, that it was just a figure of speech. He didn’t really mean sell your possessions and give to the poor. If anybody didn’t have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.
This is what we are all dying for—something that demands we step up and become better, more focused people. Something that calls out the greatness that we hope is somewhere inside of us.
Not only is the way narrow, but it involves suffering. To truly engage with how the world is, our hearts are going to be broken again and again. Just this past week, I met a woman who is terrified her husband is going to beat her, and another woman who has a degenerative muscle disease that is causing her face to freeze up, and I can think of at least five couples who are splitting up, and . . . you get the picture. It is your world too. And so we are learning how to suffer well. Not to avoid it but to feel the full force of it. It is important that churches acknowledge suffering and engage it—never, ever presenting the picture that if you follow Jesus, your problems will go away. Following Jesus may bring on problems you never imagined.
Suffering is a place where clichés don’t work and words often fail. I was at lunch last week with a friend who is in the middle of some difficult days, and I don’t have any answers. I just don’t. I can’t fix it for him. I’ve tried. And we sat there and talked and ate, and I let him know that I’m in it with him. It isn’t very pretty and it isn’t very fun, but when we join each other in the pain and confusion, God is there. Sometimes it means we sit in silence for a while, not knowing what to say. And it is in our suffering together that we find out we are not alone. We find out who really loves us. We find out that with these people around us, we can make it through anything. And that gives us something to celebrate.
Ultimately our gift to the world around us is hope. Not blind hope that pretends everything is fine and refuses to acknowledge how things are. But the kind of hope that comes from staring pain and suffering right in the eyes and refusing to believe that this is all there is. It is what we all need—hope that comes not from going around suffering but from going through it. I am learning that the church has nothing to say to the world until it throws better parties. By this I don’t necessarily mean balloons and confetti and clowns who paint faces. I mean backyards and basements and porches. It is in the flow of real life, in the places we live and move with the people we’re on the journey with, that we are reminded it is God’s world and we’re going to be okay.
Central to reclaiming creation and being a resurrection community is the affirmation that when God made the world, God said it was “good.”
And it still is.
Food and music and art and friends and stories and rivers and lakes and oceans and laughter and . . . did I mention food? God has given us life, and God’s desire is that we live it. It is the job of the church to lead the world in affirming and, more important, enjoying the goodness of creation. We are not going somewhere else at the end of time, because this world is our home. And our home is good.
One of the most tragic things ever to happen to the gospel was the emergence of the message that Jesus takes us somewhere else if we believe in him. The Bible ends with God coming here.31 God, in the midst of all the people who can imagine nothing better, celebrating the life that we all share. The images Jesus used were of banquets and feasts and celebrations.32 What do we do at parties such as these? We eat and talk and dance and enjoy each other and above all else, we take our time. What does Jesus do almost as much as he teaches and heals? He eats long meals. As Christians, it is our duty to master the art of the long meal.
If you find yourself wanting to take me less seriously, let me ask a question: What was the ritual the first Christians observed with the most frequency? Exactly. The common meal, also called the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper. And what did this meal consist of? Hours of talking and sharing and enjoying each other’s presence. Food is the basis of life, it comes from the earth, and the earth is God’s. In a Jewish home in Jesus’s day—and even now—the table is seen as an altar. It’s holy. Time spent around the table with each other is time spent with God.
My wife and I threw a party last summer and we called it “An Epic Celebration of All That Is Good.” We had a band playing in the backyard and food everywhere, a DJ set up in the living room, all the furniture was pushed against the walls, and there were cars up and down the street—and it was just the best. And what was the occasion for the party? I was hoping you’d ask. There wasn’t one. That’s the best reason you can have. Relax. Slow down. Quit having a purpose for everything. Eat more slowly and enjoy it more. Ask people how they are doing—and mean it. Take more walks. You will get more done anyway.
She
One of the central metaphors for God and his people throughout the Bible is that of a groom and his bride. God is the groom; his people are the bride. I like this because it makes the church a “she.” We need to reclaim this image.
The church is a she.
She’s a mystery, isn’t she? Still going after all this time. After the Crusades and the Inquisition and Christian cable television. Still going. And there continue to be people like me who believe she is one of the best ideas ever. In spite of all the ways she has veered off track. In spite of all the people who have actually turned away from God because of what they experienced in church. I am starting to realize why: The church is