March 30 2022.
THE CHURCH REVISITED.
Augustine – who was not a saint – once said,
“Many whom God has, the church does not have; and many whom the
church has, God does not have.”
I was reminded of this truth while writing my daily (500 words) impromptu comments on a text from the lectionary – now in my 30th year – when I was struck by a passage from Romans 2: 14-15,
“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”
The above passage suggests both indigenous and personal – by nature! – thinking and action, seeing everything created as ‘holy’ and divinely ordained, which brings me to Luther’ s views on the word ‘church’, found in McGill professor, Douglas John Hall’s book, WHAT CHRISTIANITY IS NOT.
There I read how Luther clearly did not like the word ‘church’: “Kirche”. Said he, “If (instead of the word Church) the following words had been used in the Creed: “I believe that there is a holy Christian People”, it would have been easy to avoid all the misery that has come in with this blind, obscure word ‘church’; for the word ‘Christian Holy People’ would have brought with it, clearly and powerfully, both understanding and judgement on the question, “What is and what is not a church?” But because we use this blind word ‘church’ in the creed, the common man thinks of a stone house which we call a church.”
“The word ‘church’ itself is derived from the Greek ‘kuriakon’, meaning the dwelling place of the Lord (kurios), but ‘kuriakon’ does not appear in the New Testament. It should go without saying that the habit of using the word church to refer to buildings and ecclesiastical properties is not biblical. Christians during the early period did not have their own buildings; they met in the homes of members or in public places.”
So far, the quote from a foot note in Dr. Hall’s excellent book.
He writes that the church is incomplete in itself and quotes Bonhoeffer: “The church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.” Dr. Hall continues, “Such a mission – to exist for humanity – demands on the part of the church, a new and radical orientation towards the world (cosmos); for, as the most familiar of scriptural texts, John 3: 16, asserts, it is the world that God ‘so loved’ in Jesus Christ.
I am glad to say that my ‘church’ has an environmental team that does what both Hall and Bonhoeffer recommend: we are using the grounds around the church to grow produce for the local foodbank and have plans to convert the remainder into community meeting places, as the property is beautifully situated in the very centre of the village, across from the supermarket and beer store on the main thoroughfare midway between Toronto and Ottawa.
I should add that ‘kuriakon’ meaning,’ the dwelling place of the Lord’, from which ‘Kirche’ in German, ‘kirk’ in Scotland and ‘kerk’ in Dutch have been derived, refers not to ‘church’, but to creation as Psalm 24 clearly indicates: “The Earth is the Lord’s and all it contains.”
All this makes me wonder: have we been wrong about the place of the church in Christianity? Many parishioners are more wedded to the ‘sanctuary’ or denomination than to Christ’s message. Revelation 21: 22 clearly indicates that in the New Creation there is no temple, no physical church, no special place of worship: the entire creation is God’s Holy Place: there’s where ‘worship’ should take place.
I believe strongly that we now face the “Wrath of God”. It is becoming more evident by the day that God-Creation is exacting revenge for our indiscriminate injuries inflicted upon its holiness.
“How then shall we live?”
That is the perennial question facing God’s Holy People, the ‘church’, if you like. We must prepare for a new, totally new world, in which ‘righteousness dwells’, a state where holiness percolates everything. Our every thought, our every action, our entire life, must be dominated by the perfection of the New Creation, and, even when it is impossible to live that way, our thoughts, prayers, intentions, mode of existence, must be pre-occupied with that lofty, even impossible, goal, always remembering that our life today is a proving ground for eternity.
This goes far beyond the church: it concerns ALL of life.