February 2 2022.
It’s a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrew 10:31)
A TERRIBLE TEXT: WHY?
Animal carcasses litter the land in areas where the rains have failed, as millions go without enough food and water in a country already grappling with civil war.
That’s Ethiopia today. Not enough rain, also the case in South America, a region China depends on for its soybean supply to feed the millions of hogs, whose porkchops are the staple for its people.
The first month of the year 2022 has come and gone, and everywhere weather records have been broken. What will the other 11 months bring? If January is any indication, we are in for more of the same: more rain where it is not needed, more heat where it is already hot, more drought where the soil is already sheer powder and the forests not timber but tinder.
Where is the church?
Where is the church in all this? Does the church have any business in global affairs? What is the church for anyway today? Does it still have a purpose in the world? Remember: Jesus did not start the church: we did. He simply taught us how to live in and with creation in a loving relationship, a perfect symbiosis. John 3: 16 plainly tells us that Jesus died to restore the cosmos, including us. Have you ever heard that in church?
But how about those synagogues? Weren’t they churches? No, the Old Testament synagogues were religious schools. In Yiddish they are still called ‘Schule’. And the temple? That’s so Old Testament. The temple then is creation now. Even that temple had numerous depictions of trees and flowers and animals. Just as salvation then was for God’s Chosen People, the offspring of Israel, and the temple its exclusive place of worship, now the Cosmos is our object of love, as John 3: 16 unambiguously proclaims.
The ECONOMIST, that prestigious weekly, in its January 9th issue, has a two-page article, featuring a picture of an old – fashioned church sporting a FOR SALE sign with as subscript, “Follow us online!” Its heading: God, Mammon and real estate.
The ECONOMIST, being the economist, writes from a dollar-and-cents point of view, not questioning the church’s purpose in society. It does mention that there are 1200 denominations in the US, most of them struggling.
I am a member of such a struggling church. Last year we amalgamated with a nearby Presbyterian Church counting on its existing members to increase attendance and revenue. Before the uniting it contributed 35% of the budget. After the unification it dropped to a fraction of that. People are more attached to ‘home turf’ than confessions. Apparently, they care little about the ‘communion of saints’ with strangers.
During the last five weeks of the pandemic, our church, now without a minister, and with a person in charge adverse to technology, online became offline. An attempt to start an online Bible Study attracted only 20 percent of the listed members, a meagre 7-8 persons.
All this makes me question the entire ecclesiastical ‘enterprise’.
I have long opposed the church’s monologue approach to explaining the gospel. I have pleaded for person-to-person interchange of faith experiences, made impossible by the ‘sermon’ delivery, a custom dating back to the Middle Ages when people could not read: sermons breed ignorance and complacency. Also, by exclusively dealing with the written, indirect, secondary, WORD, and by preaching ‘a heaven-oriented’ Gospel, the church has become alienated from God’s direct, primary, Created Word.
There are advantages to online meetings, imperfect as they are: they save driving long distances, save heating a building used for one hour out of 168 weekly hours. Online people, in the comfort of their homes, may feel freer to open up to other ideas and opinions. Also, we do well to take to heart Augustine, one of the earlier Christian leaders: “Many whom God has, the church does not have; and many whom the church has, God does not have.
It’s a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
I agree: That is a terrible text.
How do I explain it? In my opinion a sin against creation is a sin against God, is taking God’s name in vain. We, the so favored West, do this 24/7. We all know the first line in the Lord’s Prayer is, “Hallowed be Thy Name”. It tells us that God’s signature on Creation makes the world we live in ‘holy’.
Our persistence in shying away from God’s Holy Created Word, and taking the road traveled by the majority, has caused the travail we are in, increasingly earning us God’s wrath. We should read that text differently:
“It is dreadful to fall into the hands of the living Creation!”
That’s what we are experiencing.