The Church — Doing This Together

“I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me . . . .”
Mary Oliver

I once read that when Karl Barth taught, he would write all morning and then read to a class in the afternoon what he had written. I no longer have a class to read to, so I will share with you what I just finished writing. It’s a nice set up. (Responses, including objections, are welcomed.)

God says, “Do this together. You will not do it well, but you will do it better—together.”

Of the three adjective Mary Oliver uses to describe the church, the skeptical believer will most readily identify with the word “difficult.” It is a word with many meanings. The main reason the church is difficult, in the sense of troublesome, is that it is made up of human beings—you and me in particular. Every failing to which we are liable, and they are legion, is also a failing to which the church is liable. Are we hypocrites? Yes, and so, at times, is the church. Are we self-absorbed? Yes, and so the church. Are we liable to be judgmental, short-sighted, contentious, bored and boring, indifferent, culturally captured, obtuse, ad infinitum? Yes, and so the church.

The church is also difficult, in the sense of hard to understand, because it is trying to live out a mystery. Not an “if we investigate adequately we will solve it” mystery, but a “these are things beyond our ability to encompass” mystery. The church lives at the nexus of the immanent and the transcendent, of time and eternity, of the transient and the permanent, the physical and the spiritual, that which is and that which is to be—and that is a place of mystery. It is a place of glimpses and guesses and through a glass darkly. Therefore, difficult.

And therefore also “strange.” If we have been long in the church we may have lost an awareness of how strange it is. It is a gathering together of people who say they are on a pilgrimage with God. Strange. People who call down God to be amongst them. Strange. People who say they love God more than life—and love life because of God. Strange. People who say we will all live forever. Very strange.

All of these synonyms for strange also apply, or should apply, to the church: alien, weird, aberrant, abnormal, bizarre, unconventional, foreign, queer. If we are not queer, we are not the church.

And because the church is difficult and strange and both human and not, it is also beautiful. We are beautiful to God—the bride of Christ. We are good news to the world. We are agents, sometimes secretly, of shalom. We repair the world. We feed the poor, bring sight to the blind, and declare freedom to the prisoner. Sometimes. Often actually. But then, we are also difficult.

I disparage the church less than I used to. It is a gift. It gives me the chance to be—with the help of God and those with whom I gather—strange and difficult and beautiful.