Maybe it’s time to smile back.
Sometimes I think the biggest challenge in talking about the church is telling ourselves the truth about it—acknowledging the scars, staring down the ugly bits, marveling at its resiliency, and believing that this flawed and magnificent body is enough, for now, to carry us through the world and into the arms of Christ.
Perhaps there is more to the church than mother and whore. And perhaps we might learn this from a woman.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Kingdom
Faith comes from listening to the right stories.
—Michael Gungor
JESUS DIDN’T TALK MUCH ABOUT THE CHURCH, BUT HE talked a lot about the kingdom.
The kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed, he said, that grows into an enormous tree with branches wide and strong enough to make a home for all the birds. It is like a buried treasure, a delicious feast, or a net that catches an abundance of fish. The kingdom is right here, Jesus said. It is present and yet hidden, immanent yet transcendent. The kingdom isn’t some far-off place you go when you die; the kingdom is at hand—among us and beyond us, now and not-yet. It is the wheat growing in the midst of weeds, the yeast working its magic in the dough, the pearl germinating in a sepulchral shell. It can come and go in the twinkling of an eye, Jesus said. So pay attention; don’t miss it.
In contrast to every other kingdom that has been and ever will be, this kingdom belongs to the poor, Jesus said, and to the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst for God. In this kingdom, the people from the margins and the bottom rungs will be lifted up to places of honor, seated at the best spots at the table. This kingdom knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture. It advances not through power and might, but through acts of love and joy and peace, missions of mercy and kindness and humility. This kingdom has arrived, not with a trumpet’s sound but with a baby’s cries, not with the vanquishing of enemies but with the forgiving of them, not on the back of a warhorse but on the back of a donkey, not with triumph and a conquest but with a death and a resurrection.
And yet there is more to this kingdom that is still to come, Jesus said, and so we await a day when every tear will be wiped from every eye, when justice will roll down like a river and righteousness like a never-ending stream, when people from every tribe and tongue and nation will live together in peace, when there will be no more death.
There is nothing Jesus talked about more than the good news of this kingdom. He speaks of it more than a hundred times in the Gospels, and only mentions church twice. And yet as nearly every astute reader of Scripture will notice, the opposite is true in the book of Acts and especially the Epistles, where ekklesia—the Greek word for assembly we translate into church—appears hundreds of times with direct references to the kingdom all but absent. Wilhelm Dilthey puts it rather starkly: “Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, but what appeared was the church.”
There are of course good reasons for the literary discrepancy. The Epistles are, after all, letters, and so they have a pastoral emphasis rather than an evangelistic one. The authors of the epistles are less concerned with announcing the reign of Jesus to the world and more concerned with working out the details of living together in community with those who have already embraced that reign.92 The letters of Peter, Paul, James, and John may not speak often of the kingdom, but they speak often of Jesus Christ—the embodiment of that kingdom—and they give us a glimpse into what it was like for the first followers of Jesus to try and apply his teachings to their specific circumstances. (It was, by all accounts, a messy, wild, and beautiful process, riddled with ups and downs and mistakes.)
Still, when we consider all the messes the church has made throughout history, all the havoc she has wreaked and the things she has destroyed, when we face up to just how different the church looks from the kingdom most of the time, it’s easy to think maybe Jesus left us with a raw deal. Maybe he pulled a bait and switch, selling us on the kingdom and then slipping us the church.
When I was debating titles for this book, I asked for help on social media, and one reader suggested this: Jesus Went Back to Heaven and All He Left Me Was This Lousy Church. That one got a lot of “likes,” and I have to admit I can relate.
And yet Jesus made a point of telling Peter—you know, the guy who convinced himself he could walk on water and then sank, who tried to talk Jesus out of his Passion and was rebuked for channeling Satan, who took a sword to the ear of a Roman soldier even after Jesus had been preaching peace for three years, who pretended he didn’t even know Jesus when things went south, and who denied Jesus not only once but three times, you know, that Peter—he was just the sort of person Jesus wanted use to start his church (Matthew 16:18).
This word for church, ekklesia, was used at the time of Jesus to refer to the “calling out” of citizens for a civic meeting or for battle, and is employed in one form or another in both the Old and New Testaments to refer to the people of God, assembled together. So church is, essentially, a gathering of kingdom citizens, called out—from their individuality, from their sins, from their old ways of doing things, from the world’s way of doing things—into participation in this new kingdom and community with one another.
I’m not exactly sure how all this works, but I think, ultimately, it means I can’t be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we’re supposed to do together. We might not always do it within the walls of church or even in an organized religion, but if we are to go about making disciples, confessing our sins, breaking bread, paying attention, and preaching the Word, we’re going to need one another. We’re going to need each other’s help.
The church is not the same as the kingdom. As George Eldon Ladd explains, “The Kingdom is God’s reign and the realm in which the blessings of this reign are experienced; the church is the fellowship of those who have experienced God’s reign and entered into the enjoyment of its blessings.”93 The purpose of the church, and of the sacraments, is to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom, to point in its direction. When we put a kingdom-spin on ordinary things—water, wine, leadership, marriage, friendship, feasting, sickness, forgiveness—we see that they can be holy, they can point us to something greater than ourselves, a fantastic mystery that brings meaning to everything. We make something sacramental when we make it like the kingdom. Marriage is sacramental when it is characterized by mutual love and submission. A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility.
In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others. The kingdom is like the church that would rather die than cast two of its own out the doors because they are gay. The kingdom is like St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where you are loved just for showing up.
And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way.
All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.
EPILOGUE
Dark
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
—Emily Dickinson
WE HAVE COME TO THE FINAL CHAPTER, AND I WRITE IT, appropriately enough, just before dawn on a Sunday morning. The house is quiet and the windows are dark. Dan snores in the room across the hall while I patter away at the keyboard, one last all-nighter before I finally send this book to the publisher. There’s this mockingbird that’s been singing from about midnight to three in the morning like she’s got the New York Philharmonic behind her, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s up with her, if singing loud into the night while the rest of the world roosts means she’s got some sort of malfunction of the brain or if it means she knows something important about the darkness that the rest of don’t. I wonder what she sees.
But even the mockingbird has grown silent at this dark, heavy hour when the night stretches out like an inky ocean and it’s hard to remember the colors of day. I find myself wondering if perhaps every generation of Christians has felt itself at the edge of this precipice, waiting for resurrection and worrying it might not come. Perhaps every pilgrim in search of church has wondered if it’s a lifetime of feeling his way through the dark, longing for light.
But if I’ve learned anything in this journey, both in writing this book and clumsily living its content, it’s that Sunday morning sneaks up on us—like dawn, like resurrection, like the sun that rises a ribbon at a time. We expect a trumpet and a triumphant entry, but as always, God surprises us by showing up in ordinary things: in bread, in wine, in water, in words, in sickness, in healing, in death, in a manger of hay, in a mother’s womb, in an empty tomb. Church isn’t some community you join or some place you arrive. Church is what happens when someone taps you on the shoulder and whispers in your ear, Pay attention, this is holy ground; God is here.
Even here, in the dark, God is busy making all things new.
So show up. Open every door. At the risk of looking like a fool buried with his feet facing the East or like a mockingbird singing stubbornly at the night, anticipate resurrection. It’s either just around the bend or a million miles away. Or perhaps it’s somewhere in between.
Let’s find out together.
Sample; A Year of Biblical Womanhood:
How a Liberated Woman Found Herself
Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head,
and Calling Her Husband Master
by Rachel Held Evans
Introduction
* * *
Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?
1 CORINTHIANS 11:14–15
I STARED BACK AT MYSELF IN THE SALON MIRROR, WONDERING whatever happened to the woman who sat in this same hydraulic chair just a year ago.
After 368 days without a haircut, I looked like a character from Willow, or more precisely, a character from Willow in the process of getting eaten by a character from Spinal Tap.
I’d also gained thirteen pounds, developed a mild addiction to unleavened bread, turned thirty, and settled far too comfortably into a dress code of oversized T-shirts and peasant skirts.
A pretty, blond stylist stood over me, running her fingers through my monster hair, her nails catching in its mousy-brown tangles. “And what can I do for you today?” she asked with a sweet, East Tennessee twang that I could only assume masked her abject horror at the scene.
“Well, it’s been a year since my last haircut,” I said. “And as you can see, my hair’s a little too thick to grow out without some . . . consequences. So, I guess I just want you to, you know, fix it. Maybe take five or six inches off?”
“Now, why in the world would you go a year without cutting your hair?” the stylist asked with a playful laugh, totally unfazed.
“Why?”
It was the question people asked each time I pulled a scarf over my head to pray or addressed my husband as “master,” the question they asked after I spent an afternoon perched on my rooftop, adopted a computer-baby, camped out in my front yard during my period, and left eight pounds of dough to rise in my bathroom. It was the question they asked when they wondered what brought me to an Amish schoolhouse in Gap, Pennsylvania; a pig farm in Cochabamba, Bolivia; and a Benedictine monastery in Cullman, Alabama; or what inspired a thoroughly liberated and domestically challenged woman like me to suddenly take up baking and knitting and needlework.
I wasn’t sure how to explain to my unsuspecting hairstylist that the reason I hadn’t cut my hair in a year was because two thousand years ago, a Jewish tentmaker wrote a letter to his friends in the city of Corinth in which he mentioned that “if a woman has long hair, it is her glory” (1 Corinthians 11:15).
But because small-town hair salons represent the last remaining vestiges of a storytelling culture, and because you can’t exactly make a run for it once someone’s wrapped you in a plastic cape and clamped a dozen butterfly clips in your hair, I figured I might as well start from the beginning.
So, over the roar of hair dryers and the prattle of gossip, as little clumps of my “glory” fell to the floor, I told her about my year of biblical womanhood . . .
My husband, Dan, and I had a long-standing agreement that we would start a family as soon as we became independently wealthy or I turned thirty, whichever happened first. This arrangement suited me just fine until my twenty-ninth birthday, which happened on June 8, 2010, four months before this experiment of mine began.
It was a few days after my birthday that I sat on a living room floor crowded with toddlers, wrapping paper, inflated balloons, and deflated moms, wondering to myself if this was it—my last year of freedom. A teary young mom had just recounted in excruciating detail the suspicious contents of her two-year-old’s diaper, when, as always seems to happen after a group of moms exchanges horror stories about parenting, someone asked in that familiar, cajoling voice, “So when can we expect a baby from you, Rachel?”
I’ve come to welcome this question as a compliment, an invitation of sorts. But pushing thirty left me with fewer acceptable responses, and the truth—that I’m absolutely, inexplicably terrified of motherhood—was too embarrassing to speak aloud. It crossed my mind that I could get away with a lie. You know: shrug my shoulders, conjure up some tears, and say something about God’s perfect timing to imply that we were trying, because, really, who’s going to conduct a thorough investigation into that? But instead I found myself saying, “I think I’d like to write another book first,” which came across a lot more smugly than I intended.
Dan certainly wasn’t pushing parenthood. He’s the kind of guy who values efficiency above all else, and after seven years of marriage, our two-person family unit moved through the world like a SWAT team. We communicated mostly in code and with hand motions, tackling everything from chores to road trips to our two home businesses as a highly organized team. Tasks were silently assigned to whoever could finish them first, so we wasted little time talking about division of labor or “roles.” When it was time for dinner, someone made it. When the money dried up, someone took on another client. When the sponge next to the kitchen sink started to smell like death, Dan threw it out.
We’d seen what a few diaper bags and car seats could do to this situation, so whenever I brought up the issue of children, Dan shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’re in no hurry.” I’d quickly agree and then change the subject, pretending that the rhythmic gonging reverberating throughout my entire body was something other than my biological clock going ballistic on me.
But it wasn’t just my friends pushing procreation; it was my church.
I was raised evangelical, which means I spent a good part of my life feeling sorry for the rest of humanity on account of its certain destiny in hell. This was not something my parents taught me directly, j
ust something I picked up from preachers, Sunday school teachers, and Christian playmates along the way. After hearing time and again that “wide is the path that leads to destruction,” I just assumed that Buddhists went to hell for worshipping Buddha, Catholics went to hell for worshipping Mary, and Al Gore went to hell for worshipping nature. I didn’t even think to have a faith crisis about it until college.
The first time I saw Joyce Meyer preaching on TV, I figured she was going to hell too. I was about nine years old at the time, and I remember she wore a fuchsia suit, a short haircut, and massive gold earrings. Pacing back and forth on the stage, with a microphone in one hand and a Bible in the other, Joyce spoke with a conviction and urgency I’d never witnessed before. Her confidence frightened me. I wondered how she could be so brazen in the midst of her sin, how she could go on speaking about “the favor of our Lord,” when everyone knows ladies aren’t supposed to preach from the Word of God. According to my Sunday school teacher, that was a job the Bible reserved for men.
By that time, I’d received a lot of mixed messages about the appropriate roles of women in the home, the church, and society, each punctuated with the claim that it was God’s perfect will that all women everywhere do this or that. In my world, women like Joyce Meyer were considered heretics for preaching from the pulpit in violation of the apostle Paul’s restriction in 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent”), while conservative Mennonites were considered legalistic for covering their heads in compliance with his instructions in 1 Corinthians 11:5 (“Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head”). Pastors told wives to submit to their husbands as the apostle Peter instructed in 1 Peter 3:1, but rarely told them to refer to their husbands as “master” as he instructed just three sentences later in 1 Peter 3:6. By the time I was twelve, I learned I could single-handedly ruin a boy’s relationship with God by the length of my skirt or the cut of my blouse (Matthew 5:27–28), but that good looks and pretty clothes weren’t all bad, because that’s how Queen Esther saved the Jews.
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Page 21