The Scandal of the Church Weighs on Me.

         What weighs on me more and more, as I get on in years and consider my faith, is the historic, never-ending, and dramatic failure of the visible church. I wonder how I can hang on to Jesus when the rap sheet of his followers is a never-ending story.

         The cultural genocide of Canada’s First Nations that Canadian churches helped organize and lead, the ongoing revelations of clergy abuse especially by Roman Catholic priests and bishops—though Protestants are not guiltless in this either--and the ugly turn to Trumpism by America’s evangelicals are three current realities that weigh on me.

         But historically, there is much, much more. Shall I list all the ways the church has failed? Impossible—there is too much. But consider this brief list of just ten notable historic abuses: 1) Scapegoating Jews (centuries of it, mind you, around dinner table, as well as in villages tiny and empires great). 2) Happy participation in genocides not only of Jews, but of First Nations all around the world. 3) Blessing the slave trade and slave ownership. 4) The Roman Catholic Inquisition. 

Contemporary illustration of the Auto-da-fe held
at Valladolid Spain in 1559.

5) Crusades. 6) Centuries worth of religious wars in Europe. 7) Blessing and promotion of British imperialism for pride, profit, and pink maps (or Dutch imperialism, or Nazism, or Napoleon, or medieval monarchies, or the Roman Empire after Constantine). 8) Anti-science views from Galileo to today’s defenders of creationism and deniers of climate change. 9) A focus on personal salvation in the by-and-by instead of saving the world, now. 10) From at least the time of Constantine, its adulterous affair with the status quo rather than social justice for the last, least, and most marginalized. 

         Most of these tragedies are global or national. But local congregations and leaders and individual members participated in all of these failures. 

         I am no great exception to the rule. When I look back on my own career as a minister and denominational leader, I see many missed opportunities to do the right thing, to take a stand against the status quo, to be more prophetic, to take risks, to be more like Jesus. But I’ll pass on my personal list of ten-most-notable John Suk failures.

         The thing is, how can such an ongoing avalanche of evils inspire faith? Or, perhaps better yet, how can churches (denominations and congregations, members and related non-profits, etc., etc.) have the gall to proselytize, to suggest joining (or staying) might be a good thing, in view of its record? It would be like putting our trust in Volkswagen’s mileage claims or Donald Trump’s claims he didn’t commit adultery. Why doesn’t “once bitten, twice shy” seem to apply to the church? Especially when the church has been prowling about like a carnivore for thousands of years?

         There are traditional approaches to dealing with the scandal of the church. One is to argue that the only church that really matters is the invisible one, holy, Catholic church which is different than the many scattered, sorry, excuses for a church that are written up in history books and located on street corners. 

         But such a focus on the eschatological church (if you even believe in a second coming and all that) is like a magician’s trick, pulling something pretty and fluffy out of a hat after you first stuffed a dirty rag in. It’s sleight of hand. 

         This eschatological approach makes a mockery of Jesus’ teaching for the nascent church of “now,” as represented by the disciples: “A new command I give you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Do we really think Jesus didn’t mean this, didn’t expect such love, here and now, from his followers? Are all of the New Testament's pleas to be perfect, or to give one another the kiss of peace, or to serve one another, or care for one another, or to love neighbours or turn the other cheek there just to mock us?

         Another approach is to weigh the good against the bad, and say, “on balance, the church is great!” But, “on balance,” doesn’t cut it with me. It’s like suggesting that German engineering prowess or philosophical depth or music or strudel somehow justifies or minimizes the horror of what the Nazis did in Germany.

         Others say that, "of course the church will be a failure. We’re all sinners. The church is for sinners, just as it will be besmirched and spoiled by sinners. But at least we are striving to follow Jesus, to climb the ladder of sanctification." But this is merely a poor excuse for a grade of F. "Johny tried, poor kid. He really did. That's good enough." 

         I love my local congregation. I love the people who go to church there. I am, to be truthful, much more frustrated by regional, national, international, institutional, hierarchal, synodical, confessional, creedal, educational manifestations of the church than I am with my local congregation. 

         I don’t see a way around my frustrations either. Go back to calling ourselves “The Way?” Seek a Chuxit for my congregation? Quietism? Withdrawal from the world of politics and institutions and power games and bureaucracies? If I or my congregation tried, we would just have to reinvent a lot of what we left behind if we wanted to carry on or grow or make an impact.

         I don’t know. I guess blog posts don’t always have to have all the answers. 

         This week is Easter. I’m going to preach on Jesus’ words, “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” I wonder if there is something here, in Jesus' way of choosing death that might be a way forward towards an ecclesial resurrection. Anyone remember Morris West's novel "The Shoes of the Fisherman"? It had some of that "choosing death" in it. It was hokey, too. But still. 

         I don’t know what that would look like here and now. I don’t know what it would mean for the people I love and who love others in my local congregation. 

         I don’t know. But it weighs on me more and more.

Where Do I Find My Home?

            I recently listened to Joe Sealy’s beautiful Jazz piece, “Africville Suite.” Sealy wrote it to commemorate how, in the early 1960s, the City of Halifax bulldozed the little village of Africville, home to his grandparents. Africville was a Black community some of whose citizens could trace their origins to British Empire loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. The government followed that up by breaking promises of aid and restitution for the displaced. Fifty years later, the City of Halifax finally apologized and offered some compensation. Sealy’s “River of Dreams,” in particular, is an anthem to the way his ancestors kept hope alive despite homelessness.

Sealy's album cover for Africville Suite.

            The tragic story of Africville got me to wondering, though. If houses can be torn down, and whole communities razed, and families and friends scattered to the four winds, where then, is home? And what is home, really?

            If you asked me ten or fifteen years ago, I’d have said my house was home. That house would have been a two-story red-brick Victorian on Seminole Road, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Irene and I raised our kids there. We have really good memories—the best—of living in our Seminole house. I even got Irene a painting of that house as a Christmas present this year. Eventually, though, the kids grew up and left. As emptynesters the house didn’t resonate with us in the same way it used to. Without the kids, it didn’t feel like home anymore. We moved on.

            Some say home is where the heart is. These days my heart longs for New Haven, in Connecticut or San Francisco, where my kids live now. But my heart only longs for them sometimes. Three or four days of kids is usually a cure. You see, after I visit them, as I did this past week, I realize that a happy visit is a cure for a lonely heart. We helped launch our kids, and we’re good with that, though we miss them sometimes. Besides, I don’t really want to live in the USA right now, anyway. So, maybe home isn’t always where the heart is.

            Perhaps home is where your head is at? The wisest place to make a home? The trouble with that is that we change our minds, or can’t make them up, or realize that there is more than one good answer to a question like, “where would I like to retire?” Maybe on a boat. Maybe near the kids. Maybe where we can afford housing. Maybe a combination of all the above.

            Maybe home is wherever mom—or dad, or both—is. I know that when I go visit my mom at Holland Christian Homes in Brampton, where she has a private apartment, something deep inside of me really relaxes and connects. My mother is always glad to see me. She always treats me like it’s my birthday. Still, I haven’t lived in my mother’s house since I was seventeen. I have never even stayed a single night at her Brampton apartment. So home definitely isn’t where my mom is.

            Could it be that home is where my stuff is? Probably not. When we moved to Manila just over ten years ago, we brought two favorite paintings along with us—to help us feel at home in a strange land. And, to be honest, those paintings did our hearts good. On the other hand, while we lived in the Philippines, most of our stuff was actually stored in an old chicken barn at Irene’s parents’ farm. So no, I’d say that home is not necessarily where our stuff is.

            I also toyed with the idea that home is a spiritual place. For example, maybe the church is our home. The civic leaders of Halifax, in the sixties, knew how important church was to the residents of Africville. Joe Sealy said that the church was the heart of Africville. That’s why the city sent in the bulldozers at night, unexpectedly, to destroy it. Getting rid of the church was supposed to squash Afriville in one fell symbolic swoop. But ultimately, home can’t be church, either. After all, not everyone goes to church, but that can’t mean they don’t have homes. So, whatever else a home is, it must ultimately be a secular place—one of God’s good creations for all his children, whether they are Jews or Muslims and Jain or nothing much at all.

Africville's church in the 1960s.

            So what’s a home? Theolonius Monk, the famous jazz musician and composer, once said something like, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Maybe coming up with a definition of home is like writing about music or dancing about architecture, both. It is hard to say what home really is.

Home is not where the heart is, home is probably not a house or a state of mind or the place you keep your stuff. And our church probably isn’t our home either.

Which got me to thinking about what Jesus might have said, about home. Ironically, scripture rarely mentions Jesus’s home. He lived an itinerant life, and he once said of himself, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

So, no traditional home for Jesus. But scripture often mentions that Jesus taught his disciples while walking down the road, with them and other friends. That road was Jesus’ “River of Hope,” and he followed it wherever it led, so long as it led him to all sorts of different people.  Lepers. The woman caught in adultery. Fishermen. A Samaritan woman. Tax collectors. Everyone Jesus met on his road through life was his neighbor.

Which suggests that if we asked Jesus where he was most at home I’m pretty sure Jesus would have said something like this.

“Home? Really? Home is wherever we have a neighbor to love.”

The Gospel According to the Blue Jays

(So I wrote this sermon for fun, during the Blue Jays American League Pennant series with Kansas. I got the idea from John Van Sloten, who did the same in Calgary--thanks. Naturally, I wore a Blue Jays uniform to church that day. Several people requested that I post it. So here it is!)

I wrote this sermon on Thursday (October 22), as I almost always do. However, since the theme of the sermon was, “The Gospel According to the Blue Jays,” I was at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.

That Thursday, after all, the Blue Jays were merely behind in the series with Kansas, three games to two. I didn’t know—as I do now—whether they would win the last two games in Kansas City or lose one of them. I didn’t know, as I sat down to write, whether I would be writing about a World Series-bound team, or merely a runner-up for the American League pennant. (Of course, I know now.)

            As I was thinking about my conundrum, I came across a Facebook post that was all about Blue Jay faith. Listen:

             

I have seen a man come back from season ending injury to dominate in September. (Stroman)

I have seen a bringer of rain end a 22-year old playoff drought. (Anthopolous)

I have seen a .500 team fight back and win a championship. (The Jays)

I have seen two 11-game win streaks. (Jays again)

I have seen a 20-year-old rookie shut down some of the best. (Osuna)

I have seen two of baseball’s greatest talents pull on my jersey. (Price and Tulo)

I have seen the 7^th inning of game 5. (Bautista, mostly)

I have seen the bat flip that electrified a country. (Bautista, totally—let’s take a look at that, in fact)

I have see a team come back from a 3-1 deficit. Kansas City did it to us 30 years ago. A little payback is in order.

I have seen an incredible team play an exciting season and I am grateful to have experienced the 2015 Blue Jays.

And it’s not done yet!

Believe!

            So, as I sat there at my desk, on Thursday, I tried to believe. Bautista will come through again! Tulu shall keep hitting! I thought maybe I could make such belief the point of this sermon. Faith should be strong even when times are tough, you know? Believe enough in the Jays and that will make it so. The trouble was, I didn’t believe, whole-heartedly, at least. What if the Blue Jays didn’t win? What if I came to the pulpit with a sermon that insisted, “believe,” but that faith turned out to be totally misplaced? Does God award the pennant to whichever team has the most believing fans? Probably not.

            So as I sat at my desk I was a bit sad that I hadn’t chosen to write a sermon entitled, “The Gospel according to the Liberal Party of Canada.” By last Thursday I knew how that one turned out. I wouldn’t have needed any faith for a sermon on that theme.

            Anyway, this back and forth got me to thinking about being a sports fan—or, at least, what it is like for me.

            The truth is, I’m a bit of a fair-weather fan. Not because I don’t love baseball all the time, but because I can’t stand dramatic tension. Not in movies, not on TV, and certainly not in sports.

            So, for example, if there is a TV-show or movie where the guy is getting up the courage to kiss the girl, I have to leave the room. I can’t stand the tension of “maybe-yes,” and “maybe-no.” Or, if there is some dramatic irony that suggests the hero is going to do something stupid, like make his girl-friend mad, or miss meeting her for dinner—well then, I leave the room. I can’t stand the tension.

            Baseball is full of this sort of tension. I love watching a home run. I love watching the bust-out inning. I love a Tulowitzki-Goins-Smoak double-play. But I can’t stand to watch a game where Toronto is one run up and Osuna is pitching in the ninth. I turn it off. Too much tension.

            So when it comes to the Jays, I’m always on the knife-edge. I can’t stand it when they’re failing, or threaten to implode, so much so that I turn my back and try to ignore them.

            And living with this uncertainty, this ambiguity, this two-sidedness is really what faith is all about.

            Do you remember that Facebook post I read at the beginning of this sermon? It finished with one word, “believe.” It was almost as if the post was saying, “if you have enough faith, good things are going to happen. Just believe harder and the Jays will go all the way.” But that is exactly what faith isn’t. It isn’t a tool for getting what we want.

            Real belief, real faith recognizes that there are some things we cannot know with certainty. Faith recognizes that there are some umpires who will make lousy calls, that there are some days the bats will go cold, there are some days that pitching arms turn to rubber—and we can’t change that. Faith recognizes that life is lived on a knife-edge, where both good and bad things happen to people who may or may not deserve it.

            So faith—even large amounts of it—can’t make the Blue Jays winner, or Kansas City losers. But then, what’s the gospel according to the Blue Jays if it isn’t “have more faith if you want to win?”

            Well, I think I’d put it this way. Baseball is a spectator sport, mostly. There are only 25 guys—they are all guys—on the Blue Jays playoff roster, but 49,000 fans in the stadium, and millions more in TV and Internet Land. It’s a spectator sport.

            And, we can actually learn good things from watching this sport. We learn about teamwork, as in a double play; about sacrifice, as in a sacrifice bunt or fly. We learn from watching baseball, about leadership, about taking hiring risks, and about what it takes to succeed at something we love.

            And while we watch, we have fun. We cheer and laugh and groan and do the wave and jump in our seats and shout while, hopefully, not throwing beer cans on the field.  But it’s a spectator sport. And there is nothing wrong with that.

            On the other hand, life itself, a life of faith, is not a spectator sport. It is, rather, a long race, one for which the Apostle Paul says we need to train to succeed. He uses very strong language to describe the race of life: “So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disquailified.” Life is a race, full of any race’s uncertainties, something we train for, that we spend ourselves on, that we work hard at in order to win. Baseball is entertainment, but life is not a spectator sport.

            So what is it that we’re really training for? Well the Bible—and every religion, really—is absolutely clear on this. The game we play is love. The purpose of our lives is to love neighbours, fellow Jays fans, even Kansas city fans—but more to the point—the least, the last, the most needful in our society: our children and parents, our first nations and immigrants, our nannies and environment. Life is not a spectator sport—it consists of loving others whenever we can, whatever our job is. That’s real faith, lived on the knife-edge. We don’t know whether or not what we do for others will make them winners or not, but we do it because Jesus said this is what we do when we really live, rather than watch from the sielines.

            So the gospel according to this blue Jays fan, is this: believe, as the Jays poster says—but don’t believe by sitting in a recliner in order to be entertained. Believe to do, do the right thing, by way of your neighbours.  

            And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying so to take the fun out of life. You see, the secret of the gospel according to this blue Jays fan, is that if you live like Christ and for your neighbor—well, it’s an adventure. It’s a blast. There’s no life like it! Even given the uncertainty.

            I wrote this sermon on Thursday night. I didn’t know how the Jays series would turn out. But in a way, that’s how it is with life. We’re all in the middle of the series, and we don’t know how it is going to turn out, humanly speaking. But unlike fans of the Jays, who can really make very little difference in the outcome of the Kansas City Toronto plays by believing, we can all make a huge difference for how our lives—and the lives of our neighbours—turn out. Because when it comes to Biblical faith, we’re not spectators, we’re in the game, however it turns out. We’re lovers.

The Myth of Jesus' Return

            When Jesus walked from Galilee to Golgotha, he and his followers hoped that the end of the world was just around the corner. That is, they believed that God would one day soon tear open the heavens, come on down, judge both the living and the dead, and bring history as we know it to an end. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Mark 13:28-31).

            Of course, Jesus got it wrong. Perhaps sensing that Jesus’ words were a bit bold, years later the writer of the Gospel of Mark has Jesus temper hopes for his speedy return by having Jesus add, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (13:32).

            Nevertheless, the earliest Christians continued to hope that Jesus would soon return. To give one of the more humorous Biblical examples, the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians concerning virgins considering marriage, “in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are . . . for the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:25-31). Unfortunately, his advice probably made for some very old bachelors and maidens. Jesus did not return in those virgins’ lifetimes.

            The last 150 years have seen a huge upsurge in predictions about the immanence of Jesus’ return. The largest wing of Christian Fundamentalism, Premillennial Dispensationalism, is committed to reading the Bible and newspaper headlines about the Middle-east as if they were secret codebooks that reveal how Jesus will return any minute now.

            Of course, all of such predictions, whether they are found in the Bible or are being made by TV preachers, are wrong. For all their Bible studies on Revelation and their adding and subtracting of millenniums to dates for the State of Israel; for all their book, TV and Christian radio warnings of the end-time battles at Armageddon or Aleppo, for all their Left Behind novels and YouTube movies of Jesus floating down from the clouds, so far, Jesus has not returned.

It is no wonder, really, that from day one Christians hoped for Jesus’ return. Life was tough. From job loss to imprisonment, from slavery to—in some cases—being fed to the lions, choosing Christianity meant choosing for membership in the bottom rung of society. So early Christians directed their hopes towards escape by means of a deus ex machina—the god who sometimes suddenly appeared on a crane at the end of Greek dramas to save the hero. Early Christians hoped for a similar sudden, liberating reappearance of Jesus.

            And many people still hope for Jesus to save them from the trials and tribulations of this world. In a way, we understand. Terrorism. Crime. Taxes. Deficits. The chaos of the Arab Spring, North Korea and Afghanistan. New public values when it comes to sex, being gay, abortion, and on and on—no wonder the world seems out of control to some people. They put their hope in a belief that Jesus will return on the clouds and save them from all this. Soon! Maybe this year!

            The trouble with putting your hope in a miraculous return of Jesus to earth is that instead of trying to do something here and now to make the world a better place, you are mightily tempted to wait for Jesus to do it for you. If Jesus is going to return to judge the world and cleanse it from all evil, then why should we bother to do anything ourselves? The kind of Christianity that focuses on Jesus’ return makes for a week-kneed Christianity that has no energy for social action, unless it is the sort of social action that calls sinners to repent and be saved before the Day of Judgment.

But all such hope for the future is vain, based on wishful readings of the Bible. Whatever mysterious way Divinity works with and among us to make the world a better place, it won’t be Jesus returning on the clouds that seals it. Like the story of Adam and Eve, Biblical texts about Jesus’ return, whether in the gospels or Revelation, are all written in the language of myth. They're important texts, full of meaning and insight, but they're nothing like history.

            So what ought we base our hope on? Well, according to 1 Corinthians 13:13, "And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” What this text suggests is that we’ll never really understand hope until we understand that love is the greatest. Hope is love's legitimate child.

I don’t mean to be simplistic here. I’m offering a sort of “think global, act local” solution to our feelings of hopelessness. Our hope for overcoming this world’s woes is, naturally, partly rooted in the mysterious presence of God in and among us. But if God is present, much of the mystery of God has to do with how God inspires us against our baser instincts to nevertheless root our lives in love for neighbor. Whether you are a parent, a pastoral care worker, a money manager, a nurse, a CEO of a company that produces useful widgets, each of us can find ways appropriate to our position for putting our neighbors—our children, fellow church members, customers—in a better place tomorrow than today.

It is as the Apostle Paul said, more wisely than with his words of advice for virgins: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing . . . Love never ends. But as for prophecies they will come to an end . . . for now we see in a mirror, dimly. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

(For more on this theme, see the entry for June 4, 2011, "The End of the World." Feel free to leave a comment, too!)