I hope you find this next section from Mount Shoop (Dispositions of Adventure: Embodying Ambiguity) to be interesting.
Perhaps the most profound error of conventional Christian belief is that our faith brings with it certainty. This grasping for certainty has a variety of faces in the Body of Christ. Biblical literalism, moral rigidity, political polarization, church splits, and the condemnation of other faiths are just a few of these faces. Another face of this grasping is the unbalanced intellectualism in worship and theology in mainline Protestantism. Many Christians fear that living in ambiguity without finding some certainty is a slippery slope to moral relativism, structural chaos, and erosion of Christian identity. And many mainline Christians fear that living with ambiguity hastens a dumbing down of our Reformed heritage. These fears are often soothed with moral absolutes or bulletproof intellectual arguments. Motherhood models a different mode of living with ambiguity. Its proximity to the mess, muddle, stress, constant needs, wants, missteps, and steep learning curves of children steeps motherhood in ambiguity. But here indeterminacy and unknown find relevant and substantive expression not in certainty, not in relativism, but in adventure. In the middle of this angle on motherhood comes a wonderful word of promise. The Church can make it through the messes that come up and spread out. We can and we will be able to "bend and bow" and not lose the life that is the organic body of Christ becoming new to the world each day. I'm hearing a sharp critique of all sides of the Church. Some I can see in others and then - wham - she's writing about me. And yet, it fits. At Redeemer we have used the expression 'an adventure for life' as one that will be the experience of the congregation as we come together to follow Jesus. I really find that this image of motherhood speaks to that statement and makes it much more accessible - I shall keep this image! Connection: Maybe this is finally the reason to call it "mother church" - ambiguity that has a living power to it all. When you draw us into the faithful adventure of life, O God, be our guide so that we do not turn from you to the ways of the world that are afraid of the living ambiguity that is life. Amen. |
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