Full of Stars

Full of Stars--December 1, 2017

"From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." [2 Corinthians 5:16-20]
Every year about this time I come back to a few lines of T.S. Eliot:

"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from..."

And then a bit later in the same poem, Eliot says, 

"And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

The church-nerd in me, the part of me that keeps time, not January through December, but Advent-through-Christ-the-King, sees this day as the end and the beginning of a year.  And with it, this is the end of a year's worth of devotions, the end of a year-long project we have called "Mercy Moves Us" in the places and congregations where I live, and the end of a twelve-month-long arc that has tried to, well, move us somewhere.  Today is the end of something... but Sunday will bring the beginning of something new.

And yet...

And yet, it's hardly like we have gotten everything all resolved.  There is no final big red bow to slap on this day or this year, as though the work of Jesus' people were done, just because we have come to the turning of the odometer on the liturgical calendar.  We are still just as much in the midst of the mess as ever.  Maybe even more so than usual, because this past month we have turned our focus toward mercy moving us... into the mess.  And it would seem to me that until Jesus comes, that is precisely where we shall stay--in the mess that is myself, in the mess that is the church, in the mess that is the world.  

That is to say, as long as I live, I shall forever be a mess, a bundle of contradictions, of sin and righteousness, of bitter self-centeredness and joyful self-giving, of fear and privilege and envy and resentment and arrogance and truth and justice and humility and honest seeking.  And for whatever progress I make in this life, I will also still always be that mess of both, in whatever degrees I may grow or deepen or bend out of myself.

And that is to say, too, that for as long as it remains on God's green earth, the church will be nothing but a band of forgiven sinners trying to make sense of being precisely that.  We are cantankerous and ornery, fearful and stubborn, sometimes cowardly and sometimes brash, sometimes selfless and sometimes stingy, sometimes gracious and sometimes shamelessly graceless.  The association of struggling recovering rebels and sinners we call "Church" will always be a mess because that is all we can ever be--people who are broken but beloved, people who regularly fail but are also perennially forgiven, people who quite often miss the point but who are never outside of the grip of grace, people who, as Frederick Buechner once put it, "have at least some half-baked idea of Whom to thank."  The Church is a mess--not in some curmudgeonly sense that is upset at the contemporary church in particular, expressed with a nostalgic, "Back in my day, the Church was pure and got it all right!" kind of way, but in the sense that the Church by definition must always be a mess, because its only constituents are messes individually themselves, and put all together are an even bigger mess of disagreements on politics and morality, on tax policy and musical style, on theological questions and the matter of which color the carpet should be.

And to zoom out one level further, the we are in the mess because the world itself is--and always has been, and always will be, this side of glory--a royal mess.  You didn't need me to tell you.  We have been increasingly reminded every day on the news how so many seemingly respectable, prominent, and public figures have been brought down low with accusations of shameful treatment of other people.  We are reminded with frightening urgency that there is still the specter of nuclear war on the horizon, just when we thought we could put that fear out of our minds with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  We are reminded that the people we most deeply put our trust in and gave our respect to so often let us down, revealing streaks of hatred or abuse, corruption or bigotry, wickedness and deception, that we rather wish we could have remained ignorant about... and it reminds us that if so many public faces can let us down, well, then, the ordinary people all around us, whom we trust and respect and admire, are just as likely to be carrying around the same wickedness inside them... and that the same wickedness runs through our own hearts as well.  The mess is in me, in my church, and in my world... which includes me once again, too.

We are not at much of an ending, or at least not much of a tying up of loose ends...

...which means, in a very real sense, the adventure continues.  The work continues.  The movement continues.  

And here is the real surprise twist of that mission of God's people, the merciful "movement" of Jesus and his people:  we are sent back into a world that is a mess... but we are sent with the message that God has already reconciled with us.... indeed with the whole world.  Paul says it this way, "in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself... and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us."  God has already done the reconciling.  The forgiving is done. Accomplished.  The bridges we have burned with God have been rebuilt from God's side already, all the way across to our side of the shore.  And yet, we are sent into the world that, for all its messiness, has a hard time believing it is true.  We are sent into a world that is a mess, to tell that world, and every last mother's child in it, that God has already reconciled with them all... and that God has done it while we are all a mess.  

And with that, we are sent, too, to see every last mother's child, as the presence of Christ as well.

Think of that for a moment.  Think of how radical a difference such a practice would make--if our eyes really were conditioned to see every person we meet as the presence of Christ... or at least to dare to regard everyone whose path crosses our own, as we would regard Christ.  It would change everything.  It would begin a movement.

In these days when public figures are being revealed to have objectified, harassed, or mistreated employees or people under their authority, whether with lewd comments or invasive touch or the pressure that comes with their power, and in these days, too, when well-meaning folks may be scratching their heads wondering, "How do I know what kinds of actions are safe, what kinds of words are allowed, and what ways I should treat others?", what if it really were as simple as, "Treat the people around you--men and women, employees and employers, customers and clients, friends, enemies, strangers, and everyone else in between, as you would treat Jesus."  

In these days when there is vile, scurrilous, and downright ignorant garbage being volleyed back and forth across the internet as well as in small talk banter in the barbershop and shopping lines, in these days when it is easy to anonymously make some crass remark, or to bloviate on your personal hobby horse issues without having to actually face someone else with whom you disagree in the same room person to person, what if our commitment as disciples of Jesus was to regard people--including, and perhaps especially, the people we like the least or who seem the most in opposition to us--as the presence of Christ?  What if we were pushed to a civility of discourse because we really acted like the person whose page you were commenting on, or whose memes you were clicking on, was none other than the presence of Christ? 

What if, like Paul says, we no longer regarded anybody else from a human (literally "fleshly") point of view, but as Christ's presence among us?  What if we dared to see the world around us as full of reflections of Christ everywhere we turned? 

There's that moment toward the end of the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where the astronaut Dave Bowman enters the mysterious alien monolith outside of Jupiter, and what seems to be the end becomes the start of a whole new journey into a new kind of existence--and there inside the interdimensional star-gate (or whatever that thing is), Bowman says, "My God--it's full of stars...."  I rather think that the Christian life, this movement of mercy, is something like that--like passing through an ending to discover it is a new beginning and then to see the whole world is full of Christ, from stem to stern.  So... what if that was the way we stepped into this day... expecting to see Christ all around us, and treating the faces we meet in it as Christ among us.

It would be a small dent, perhaps, in the overwhelming mess of the world, and it would not be enough to put things right in a world that feels terribly wrong.  But our calling is not to save the world--our calling is to tell the world it has already been reconciled to God.  And our way of bringing that message of reconciliation through Christ is to act as though the world around us really is full of the presence of Christ, not just in the quiet tranquil places like the early morning woods or the sunset on the sea shore, but in the roiling mess of humanity, in the faces of people who are like us as well as people who are different, in the people who share our faith in Jesus and in the people who do not call on him, as well.

And that is where we are called to spend our minutes and our energy in this day... and in this life.  The work won't be over until the end of this life's adventures... and as Eliot says, the end of those adventures will be to come back to the place we started from and to know the place for the first time. 

If that feels like a beginning as much as an ending, well, maybe that's just about right.

Lord Jesus, here we are in the middle of things--between endings and beginnings and middles, in the midst of messes within and messes without--and we ask you to lead us out into the world around us to bring your news of reconciliation.