24 July 2006

You can expect that I will stay with Douglas John Hall for some time now as he writes of "The Church and the Cross" in The Cross in Our Context.

...I think it behooves Christians today to admit finally that if some of us have at last begun to grasp this reality of our identity and our mission (a suffering community), it is because the whole people of Israel has suffered so excruciatingly in our own time - and, what is worse, has suffered on account of a climate of spiritual suspicion created by Christendom itself. On account of the Holocaust of the Jews, sensitive Christians have
had to ask not only how their faith could have contributed to such an event but also why the Christian faith could have contributed to such an event but also why the Christian faith in its established form has been so conspicuously devoid not only of any sustained suffering but of the very contemplation of that biblical theme.

It is our history to be intolerant. It has been a part of our history to be oppressive. The Church as institution has had its way since it was blended with imperial structures and then the structures of states. We cannot separate ourselves from this history and it is most obvious in the role Christendom played in the Holocaust. What I find of some interest today is how looking back at the Holocaust for some Christians is done in a way to show how the Church is being persecuted, somewhat like that, from the government of our country. In that same conversation is the talk that Christianity is being wiped out or disregarded among us. That seems odd. Don't folks understand that the Church cannot be wiped out by persecution. Do they have no hope beyond hope? Cannot they see beyond their own wants into something more the Church can be? Have we forgotten the suffering of the way of the cross - just as Hall notes? Have we developed amnesia again so that we cannot remember how in the years before we were aligned with the Empire, Christians continued to go out and become a contrary community in the middle of whatever was the atmosphere of the day? There is much to much whining going on among us in the name of Jesus. It is as though we have become so comfortable in the halls of power we can only see ourselves in a dominant position and nothing else. What happened to images of the suffering servant...who suffers on behalf of the welfare of others...who suffers for standing with the beaten and rejected? I think we sometimes want our faith to be a ticket to the "good life" however we define that.

Connection: We would do well to listen closely to the movements of our society. Hidden in the making of rules and the rhetoric of the prevailing powers is the hint of intolerance and special interests. Who will we be interested in as the Church alive today?

When we face this day, O Lord, we see little of the Church on the way of the cross. Rather, we are privileged and use that privilege for ourselves rather than the for the care and healing of a broken world that is lost in its self-concern. Remind us of your way of love that pulls us out to serve rather than to rule. Praise to you, O Compassionate and Just God of New Life. Amen