A few more days from Stanley Hauerwas on "The Church is a Social Ethic."
...calling for the church to be the church is not a formula for a withdrawal ethic; nor is it a self-righteous attempt to flee from the world's problems; rather it is a call for the church to be a community which tries to develop the resources to stand within the world witnessing to the peaceable kingdom and thus rightly understanding the world. the gospel is a political gospel. Christians are engaged in politics, but it is politics of the kingdom that reveals the insufficiency of all politics based on coercion and falsehood and finds the true source of power in servanthood rather than dominion.
We really are not to be something other - that is a people who try to be separate from the world. The church being the church is to be right in the mix of things. By being there - as the church - we bring to light what the world is within the Reign of God. In that sense, we will always be turning heads simply by being who we are. The strangeness in our living will not be some strangeness that comes with being stuck in certain place in time and never changing our "look" or our worldview. Rather the strangeness is that we take on a path in the world that is a living witness to how the Christ is alive within the everyday movement of the world. That is a political movement because we will not be a people who go along with how the politics of the day and the mechanism of states and governments attempt to rule when they do so in ways that are contrary to the Reign of God. We are political because we continue to live within this world community with a strangeness that will ruffle feathers and witness to other ways to be the world.
Connection: This day awaits the presence of the church and how we will bring light and life to the world.
Within your Reign, O God, you are inviting the world to re-view itself and come to see the life you have set up within the power of our humanity. Within that life comes the possibility to re-shape how the world goes about living toward a vision of peace. Guide on on that life journey. Amen.
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