" The Rough Edges"--July 12, 2019
“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full statue of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:11-13)
Sometimes I hear people say, “I think Jesus is great—but I just have no place for organized religion.”
Of course, my first impulse is to say in response, “Well, good news—we’re really not terribly organized! See you on Sunday?”
I get where people are coming from when they voice objections, I do. I get it that Jesus is this amazingly gracious, strikingly courageous, brilliantly wise figure, and then in comparison, the dull preacher in the pulpit on Sunday who uses the same stale jokes every week somehow feels like a bait-and-switch. I get it that churchgoers are far too often grouchy wet blankets or pretentious hypocrites. I get that. I am, on my very best days, only a recovering grouchy-wet-blanket-and-pretentious-hypocrite myself, and on my worst days I dig right back into those trenches but without the word “recovering.” I understand the painfully incisive truth Gandhi pointed to when he said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Ouch. That hurts because he has hit a nerve.
Okay, so the big, lumbering, often-still-mired-in-self-righteousness institution called “Christianity” or “the church” makes for an easy target. And often, we Christians give ammunition to detractors by reinforcing all the bad stereotypes there are out there about how Christians are nothing but a bunch of judgmental jerks who hawk their religion like they are spiritual vacuum-cleaner salesmen. We can bicker about the color of the carpeting in the sanctuary. We exclude each other from the Table at the event that Jesus intended to use to bring us together. We get insist we want to grow and welcome new faces but are scared to death if anybody walks in to our sanctuaries on Sunday who didn't come with a long-time member as their unofficial chaperone. We claim to love Jesus but feel free to disregard his insistence on welcoming the stranger, loving our enemies, and owning our mess-ups. We sing hymns that insist, "In Christ there is no east or west," while white-nationalist mass shooters like Dylan Roof are raised going to our services with no voice to redirect them, and then spend the rest of the week railing at each other on social media about the people from "those states" whose political skew the wrong way. Yeah, sometimes, the church is the worst. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel to come up with reasons to criticize organized religion.
But here’s the thing. Paul—one of the earliest Christian leaders, one who witnessed the first generation of the Jesus-movement as it made the transition to become a sustainable, ongoing organism, that Paul—sees the “organized” part as a gift of God, not an encumbrance. To hear Paul tell it, the “organized” part of “organized religion” is meant to be one of the ways that God shapes each of us into the likeness of Christ--so that each of us becomes a reflection of Christ.
And that’s just it—Paul says that God’s goal, God’s vision, God’s dream, if you can talk that way, is to make each of us into reflections of Jesus himself, the same Jesus that Gandhi found so compelling. The fact that none of us are there yet doesn’t mean that this experiment called “the church” is a failure—it’s just that all of us have so far to go to be transformed into the image of Christ. When Michelangelo started sculpting La Pieta, nobody thought the project was a dumb idea just because the block of marble he started with didn’t look like Mary and Jesus yet. Everybody just knew that the masterpiece wasn’t done yet—but they didn’t say, “Hey, Mike—don’t use those chisels and hammers. That’s too organized a way of chipping away the rough edges in the stone.”
And maybe now we have come to the real crux of the matter: all of us followers of Jesus are, even at our best and most faithful moments, rougher than a corncob. We are big, awkward, jagged edged chunks of marble. And God is committed to shaping us, every last one of us, into the likeness of Christ—making masterpieces of us all. But the way you get there, from large rectangular block to lifelike human figure, is by chipping away. And how do you chip away at something? Well, you need something else that has some edge to it. You need friction. You need something that can wear down (lovingly, to be sure, but still wearing down) the obstinate seams of minerals and rough edges. And when you are working with self-centered sinners and trying to sculpt them into the likeness of Jesus, it means you need the rough edge of… other recovering sinners. You need the friction of putting a bunch of rough-edged people together and having them learn to love one another because Jesus has claimed the whole lot of them and refuses to let any of them be voted off the island. You need the presence of other broken, jagged-edged people who will be beloved nevertheless to teach them all about how love embraces us as we are, even if it doesn’t leave us as we are.
In other words, you need other people to shape you. I need other people to shape me. We all need the presence of others who will help us to see what Jesus is like, to remember and retell those stories and hold us accountable to seek to live like him, and to give us opportunities to practice what we are learning in how to love like Jesus, how to forgive like Jesus, and how to speak up like Jesus.
And if this movement of people striving to follow Jesus is going to last for more than just one generation, it’s going to mean you end up with people who help pass on the goal, the learning, the stories, the news to others who join the movement. That means you’ll end up with people in the roles of, well, apostles…and prophets…and evangelists…and teachers, and the like. They’re not there just to perpetuate an institution for the sake of perpetuating an institution (or if they ever do fall into that mindset, they have missed the point). They are there as part of God’s way of shaping each of us into “the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
Call it “organized religion” if you like. Call it “God’s chisel and hammer when it comes to us human blocks of marble.” Call it God loving us with all our rough edges but refusing to leave us as awkward blocks of stone. But no matter what you call it, it will mean that God uses other people to shape us, and uses us to shape others, until all of us become masterpieces, images of the beautiful Christ.
We really aren’t terribly organized. See you on Sunday?
Lord God, make of us what you will, using the tools that you choose, even if we are humbled to see you work through rough-edged people to wear down our rough edges, too. Make Christ out of us.
“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full statue of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:11-13)
Sometimes I hear people say, “I think Jesus is great—but I just have no place for organized religion.”
Of course, my first impulse is to say in response, “Well, good news—we’re really not terribly organized! See you on Sunday?”
I get where people are coming from when they voice objections, I do. I get it that Jesus is this amazingly gracious, strikingly courageous, brilliantly wise figure, and then in comparison, the dull preacher in the pulpit on Sunday who uses the same stale jokes every week somehow feels like a bait-and-switch. I get it that churchgoers are far too often grouchy wet blankets or pretentious hypocrites. I get that. I am, on my very best days, only a recovering grouchy-wet-blanket-and-pretentious-hypocrite myself, and on my worst days I dig right back into those trenches but without the word “recovering.” I understand the painfully incisive truth Gandhi pointed to when he said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Ouch. That hurts because he has hit a nerve.
Okay, so the big, lumbering, often-still-mired-in-self-righteousness institution called “Christianity” or “the church” makes for an easy target. And often, we Christians give ammunition to detractors by reinforcing all the bad stereotypes there are out there about how Christians are nothing but a bunch of judgmental jerks who hawk their religion like they are spiritual vacuum-cleaner salesmen. We can bicker about the color of the carpeting in the sanctuary. We exclude each other from the Table at the event that Jesus intended to use to bring us together. We get insist we want to grow and welcome new faces but are scared to death if anybody walks in to our sanctuaries on Sunday who didn't come with a long-time member as their unofficial chaperone. We claim to love Jesus but feel free to disregard his insistence on welcoming the stranger, loving our enemies, and owning our mess-ups. We sing hymns that insist, "In Christ there is no east or west," while white-nationalist mass shooters like Dylan Roof are raised going to our services with no voice to redirect them, and then spend the rest of the week railing at each other on social media about the people from "those states" whose political skew the wrong way. Yeah, sometimes, the church is the worst. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel to come up with reasons to criticize organized religion.
But here’s the thing. Paul—one of the earliest Christian leaders, one who witnessed the first generation of the Jesus-movement as it made the transition to become a sustainable, ongoing organism, that Paul—sees the “organized” part as a gift of God, not an encumbrance. To hear Paul tell it, the “organized” part of “organized religion” is meant to be one of the ways that God shapes each of us into the likeness of Christ--so that each of us becomes a reflection of Christ.
And that’s just it—Paul says that God’s goal, God’s vision, God’s dream, if you can talk that way, is to make each of us into reflections of Jesus himself, the same Jesus that Gandhi found so compelling. The fact that none of us are there yet doesn’t mean that this experiment called “the church” is a failure—it’s just that all of us have so far to go to be transformed into the image of Christ. When Michelangelo started sculpting La Pieta, nobody thought the project was a dumb idea just because the block of marble he started with didn’t look like Mary and Jesus yet. Everybody just knew that the masterpiece wasn’t done yet—but they didn’t say, “Hey, Mike—don’t use those chisels and hammers. That’s too organized a way of chipping away the rough edges in the stone.”
And maybe now we have come to the real crux of the matter: all of us followers of Jesus are, even at our best and most faithful moments, rougher than a corncob. We are big, awkward, jagged edged chunks of marble. And God is committed to shaping us, every last one of us, into the likeness of Christ—making masterpieces of us all. But the way you get there, from large rectangular block to lifelike human figure, is by chipping away. And how do you chip away at something? Well, you need something else that has some edge to it. You need friction. You need something that can wear down (lovingly, to be sure, but still wearing down) the obstinate seams of minerals and rough edges. And when you are working with self-centered sinners and trying to sculpt them into the likeness of Jesus, it means you need the rough edge of… other recovering sinners. You need the friction of putting a bunch of rough-edged people together and having them learn to love one another because Jesus has claimed the whole lot of them and refuses to let any of them be voted off the island. You need the presence of other broken, jagged-edged people who will be beloved nevertheless to teach them all about how love embraces us as we are, even if it doesn’t leave us as we are.
In other words, you need other people to shape you. I need other people to shape me. We all need the presence of others who will help us to see what Jesus is like, to remember and retell those stories and hold us accountable to seek to live like him, and to give us opportunities to practice what we are learning in how to love like Jesus, how to forgive like Jesus, and how to speak up like Jesus.
And if this movement of people striving to follow Jesus is going to last for more than just one generation, it’s going to mean you end up with people who help pass on the goal, the learning, the stories, the news to others who join the movement. That means you’ll end up with people in the roles of, well, apostles…and prophets…and evangelists…and teachers, and the like. They’re not there just to perpetuate an institution for the sake of perpetuating an institution (or if they ever do fall into that mindset, they have missed the point). They are there as part of God’s way of shaping each of us into “the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
Call it “organized religion” if you like. Call it “God’s chisel and hammer when it comes to us human blocks of marble.” Call it God loving us with all our rough edges but refusing to leave us as awkward blocks of stone. But no matter what you call it, it will mean that God uses other people to shape us, and uses us to shape others, until all of us become masterpieces, images of the beautiful Christ.
We really aren’t terribly organized. See you on Sunday?
Lord God, make of us what you will, using the tools that you choose, even if we are humbled to see you work through rough-edged people to wear down our rough edges, too. Make Christ out of us.
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