Ekklesia Project '07: Day 1.2

I know it's been a few days since I've posted on EP but I felt as though I should really give Sharon Huey's sermon (click for the mp3) some time to digest and work on me before posting a sentence or two of summary and then moving on.

Sharon's sermon spoke deeply to many of us. As clumsy as it may be, I'll try to sum up a bit of what she had to say that's been at work in me of late. Those of us who meet at EP every summer tend to lean towards the "radical" and the "revolutionary" streams within this family called church. Our heroes are people like the Berrigan Brothers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, MLK Jr., Oscar Romero, etc. We tell stories of revolutionary saints, people of God who would not bow to the patriotism of their day but sought to be radically obedient to God and work for justice and mercy in their communities. When we think of Jesus we don't think of a "nice" guy who spoke in sound bytes easily turned into daily calendars by Hallmark. We think of the wild-eyed Son of God, on a mission, ready to overturn tables and smash the status quo.

But the beatitude passage from Matthew 5 that Sharon shared with us reveals the kind of people who showed up for Jesus' revolution. To be blunt, nobodies. Jesus' revolution wasn't made up of the steely and hardened Kingdom fighting crew we sometimes wish the church was made from these days. It was the awkward disciples, who didn't always "get" Jesus, the people on the margins of society, the poor, the sick.

And yet how often do we as pastors, or laity groan because our churches are filled with people who just don't "get" Jesus, people with problems, people with crap in their lives. We sometimes wish for the "lean, mean revolutionary force" for the Kingdom of God and are stuck with these embarrassingly human people. Sharon reminds us that the Kingdom being made of these people is the revolution.

Some of us have been a part of churches that really embodied a revolutionary Kingdom of God kind of life. But then we move on and run into these "embarrassingly human" churches that just don't "get" Jesus like we think we do. And this is what I've been mulling over. Because I feel this frustration deeply for both good and bad reasons. I feel this frustration because I long, like many of us, to see the church shed its allegiances to poisonous civil religion, rampant materialism, and the suburbification of the Gospel. But all too often I allow this frustration to be a form of self-righteousness rather than about a longing for God's spirit to take hold of the church. I forget that if the church wasn't made up of losers who don't come close to being the kind of Kingdom revolutionaries like MLK or the Berrigan bros that I wouldn't be a part of this family either. I forget that discipleship is a long road and not a status of those who "get" it.

Labels: Discipleship, Life, Theology