Slow Boat from Adramyttium

Two weeks ago, the senior pastor of my church asked me to preach on Christ the King Sunday (Nov 25th). I was thrilled that he asked and also surprised. One week ago, that pastor resigned immediately from the church. Now factions are forming and what was an opportunity to simply preach to a happy Thanksgiving crowd of families rejoined for the holidays has become an opportunity to be a prophetic voice in the midst of chaos. What a collosal mess.

As a coincidence to all this, I have a paper due the day following my sermon on the presence of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments of the church and how the Holy Spirit provides insight into the ministry and mission of the church. Faced with the material, present particulars of my home church and the theological ideals of my seminary education, the gulf couldn’t be wider and as I contemplate my paper, I cannot conceive how the gulf is to be bridged.

I was thinking about all this with regard to my involvement in the business world. I have been fired, asked to resign and been in messy situations that came to the brink of lawsuits. In the business world, I consider it par for the course and presume that the motives of capital and power trump compassion and deliberation. Why does it look worse in the church, even though the same things happen there? I think two things: the expectations are that those cultural drives will not be present in church and people care that much more about the relationships in church. I haven’t thought it out, but based on my present experience, the reaction to the resignation of the pastor suggests such a situation is not becoming of a Christian church and therefore the expectation from within and without is that we are somehow capable of doing it differently. That is questionable. It is also hard to know the nature of relationships in church during conflict. The concern appears to be who is right and who is wrong, which seems to be, lowly seminary student that I am, the wrong focus entirely. The paradox being that the focus on rightness and wrongness is divisive and wrong; the truth being that the focus should be on Jesus, which means a desire for relationship and reconciliation. But that is just me. I could be wrong…but I don’t think so.

I saw a show on the Discovery channel about great engineering disasters. It was about a high-speed train wreck in Germany where the train left the track at some outrageous speed and slammed into a bridge abuttment, making an accordian of about 12 cars with people in them. The accident was the perfect confluence of unavoidable, yet preventable, events that all conspired at a single moment in time. It is a shame how easily we as a church lose focus of another singular moment in time 2000 years ago that conspired to reverse such confluences of disaster.

What do we pray for when there appears to have been no other possible outcome based on previous decisions made; where all the choices lead to divisiveness, conflict and pain? I think of Psalm 44, which I paraphrase to “You were there, God, in the past, but it sure seems you are not here now, so all I have to rely on is what went before, which really doesn’t help me now much. So now would be a good time to act again. Amen.”

Peace to all!

Seth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.