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Have you noticed how hard it is to belong to the Church? On the one hand, you are baptized, and then your name is on the rolls, and it's as easy as that. But on the other hand.... On the other hand, "from what I've observed," says William Willimon, "the most difficult thing in the world is to join a church. I've seen people show up, declare their intention to affiliate with a congregation, [and] at first the congregation [is] willing enough to have them join.... But then weeks later, after repeated attempts, the new member has not really become a member. No group [in the parish] has adopted her. She made no real friends, despite repeated attempts, [and] a few months later, someone asks, 'Whatever happened to that nice young woman who joined the church last April?' "It can be difficult to join a church. Getting your name on the membership roll is easy. Belonging to the church is another [matter]." Willimon says this is what a friend of his calls "the problem of the back door." People come to church; "they join, coming in the front door. But then, a few months later, they quietly exit out the back door. They joined, but they never belonged." And that may be, Willimon concludes, because nobody can ever really "join" the Church. The only way to belong to Christ's Church is to be adopted. That's what St. Paul says, too, in his letter to the Christians in Galatia. At one time, Paul tells us, we were descendants of Abraham, Abraham's children and heirs of the covenant of the law, but "when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, in order that we might attain the status of sons.... To prove that you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son, crying, 'Abba, Father!' You are therefore no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir by God's own act." In other words, at one time, through the covenant with Abraham, we were related to God as though we were hired hands who tried to live in obedience to God's law as if by rote. But now, through Christ, God has adopted us into his own family, an adoption we acknowledge and receive through faith in Christ. "The law, as Paul sees it, is a human effort to get into God's good graces," Willimon continues, a human effort "to get right with God, to belong. How on earth could sinners like us expect to do that? You can't work hard to become someone's child.... The only way you can join a family [you weren't born into] is by being adopted. [That adoption is what happened on the cross and through the resurrection of Jesus]: 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female, [no longer circumcised or uncircumcised, no longer insider or outsider], for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.'" Here is the way Willimon concludes his sermon: what happened on that Friday afternoon at Calvary was that God chose us. "We who acted like nobodies became somebodies. We were adopted. Jesus stretched out his arms and embraced us, all of us. I'm special only for that reason. I was adopted, made part of the family. And you're special, too, for that very reason, and I ought to treat you as special. You have been adopted. None of us has any special distinction, when it comes to one another, other than that we've [all] been adopted." In Jesus Christ, "God does not anywhere say to us, 'Now if you do this and do that, then I will love you, save you, bring you home.' Rather, in Christ, God says to us, 'I have come to you, have sought you out, have found you, so that I might bring you home, might make a place for you in my house, might set a place for you at my family's table.'" With this good news, with this message of grace, why, then, do so many people come in the front door of the Church and soon leave by the back door? Why does that happen, in this parish church and in so many others as well? Is it because, once we're adopted, we find that being the chosen of God is more than we bargained for? "Some children are just born into a family," the mother told her son. "You are different. You are special. We chose you. You are adopted!" That's what the Cross of Jesus has done for you. All you need to do is acknowledge it and claim it. Everyone else is adopted, too. Not just you, but everyone else is special to God, chosen of God. That is the first and great grace that is ours through baptism. And the second grace is like unto it: Now you have the power to treat everyone that way. That's what the Resurrection of Jesus has done for you. And these two graces, taken together - your own specialness to God, and the power to treat everyone else as special to God - are what Jesus is talking about when he tells us that "anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self, and day by day he must take up his cross and follow me." In his Meditations on the Cross, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about what it means to be adopted into the family of God, what it means to deny self and follow the one who paid the price of our adoption. Self-denial, Bonhoeffer reminds us, is not "individual acts of self-torment, or of asceticism.... Self-denial means knowing only Christ, and no longer oneself. It means seeing only Christ," the One whose denial of self paved the way for our belonging, and holding fast to him who makes his own path possible for us. "The cross is not adversity, nor the harshness of fate, but suffering coming solely from our commitment to Christ. The suffering of the cross is not fortuitous, but necessary. The cross is not the suffering tied to natural existence," not the difficulties that just naturally attend to life in this world. The suffering of the cross is the "suffering tied to being Christians...." "The first suffering we must experience," Bonhoeffer says, "is the call sundering our ties to this world. This is the death of the old human being in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Whoever enters discipleship enter's Jesus' death, and puts his or her own life into death. This has been so from the beginning. The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ.... "Individual Christians would collapse under the weight of [the cross], were they not themselves borne by him who bore all sins. In this way, however, they can, in the power of Christ's own suffering, overcome all the sins that fall upon them by forgiving them. Thus do Christians become the bearers of burdens: 'Bear one another's burdens,' and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.' (Galatians 6:2) "Just as Christ bears our burdens, so also are we to bear the burdens of our brothers and sisters. The law of Christ which must be fulfilled is the bearing of the cross. The burden of my brother and sister that I am to bear is not only that person's external fate, that person's character and personality, but is in a very real sense that person's sin. I cannot bear it except by forgiving it, in the power of the cross of Christ in which I, too, have a portion." So says one who bore the burdens and sins of many, and forgave them, when he bore the cross of Christ and lived out his adoption as a son in the concentration camp in Flossenburg in 1945. What kind of Messiah do we identify with? What does Jesus mean when he says that if we want to be his disciples, we must take up our crosses, day by day, and follow him? What he means, I suggest, is that there really is no back door to his Church. "Few Christians of our acquaintance are looking to die," Craig Anderson confesses. "We come to our churches for comfort, not to die. We've grown accustomed to the cross. It is no longer a burden on our backs. It is worn as a decoration on our chests and to spruce up our liturgical garb." But the cross Jesus talks about is a cross of suffering, a sign of the power of evil, sickness, and death, but a cross on which Jesus was nevertheless willing to lose his life for the sake of his real self, and for the sake of those he loves and their real selves. Anderson notes that "in one of Alan Paton's novels, one of the characters, speaking of heaven, says, 'When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, "Where are your wounds?" And if I say, "I haven't any," he will say, "Was there nothing to fight for?" I couldn't face that question,' the man says. "Where are our wounds?" Anderson asks. "Is there nothing to fight for? No causes, great or small? Nothing to lift a finger or voice for? Wherever the Apostle Paul went, there were riots. Wherever I go, they serve tea. If the Church is the Body of Christ, [who died on a cross], shouldn't we have some wounds?" Shouldn't we show some of the scars of the Cross of Jesus, scars of an active love lived for those we are called to love? Frederick Buechner, like lots of people, has observed the similarities between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Church. "Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, is the name of a group of men and women who acknowledge that addiction to alcohol is ruining their lives. Their purpose in coming together is to give it up, to lose one life in order to save their real lives, and [to] help others do the same. They realize they can't pull this off by themselves. They believe they need each other, and they believe they need God. The ones who aren't so sure about God speak instead of their Higher Power. "When they first start talking at a meeting, they introduce themselves by saying, "I am John; I am an alcoholic," "I am Mary; I am an alcoholic," to which the rest of the group answers each time in unison, "Hi, John," "Hi, Mary." They are apt to end with the Lord's Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. Apart from that, they have no ritual. They have no hierarchy. They have no dues or budget. They do not advertise or proselytize. Having no buildings of their own, they meet wherever they can. "Nobody lectures them, and they do not lecture each other. They simply tell their own stories, with the candor that anonymity makes possible. They tell where they went wrong, [the story of the life they now seek to lose], and how day by day they are trying to go right, [the story of the life they seek to save]. They tell where they find the strength and understanding and hope to keep trying. Sometimes, one of them will take special responsibility for another, to be available at any hour of day or night if the need arises. There's not much more to it than that, and it seems to be enough. Healing happens. Miracles are made. "You can't help thinking that this is what the Church is meant to be, and maybe once was before it got to be Big Business. Sinners Anonymous. 'I can will what is right, but I cannot do it,' is the way Saint Paul put it, speaking for all of us. 'For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.' "'I am me. I am a sinner.' "'Hi, you.' "Hi, every Sadie and Sal. Hi, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. It is the forgiveness of sins, of course." [It is the bearing of burdens Bonhoeffer talks about. It is, to put it in Willimon's language, the adoption of others by those of us who have ourselves been adopted.] It is what the Church is all about. "No matter what far place alcoholics end up in, either in this country or virtually anywhere else, they know that there will be an AA meeting nearby to go to, and that at that meeting they will find strangers who are not strangers, to help and to heal, to listen to the truth and to tell it. That is what the Body of Christ is all about. "Would it ever occur to Christians in a far place to turn to a church nearby in hope of finding the same? If not, you wonder what is so Big about the Church's business." (Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized, pp. 4-5) The cross is a sign of our identity. It's a sign of the family we've been adopted into, a sign of our commitment to those we belong to as family, the family of God. I suspect it's the same with you as it is with me, that you don't always feel like being a dentist or a lawyer or a shopkeeper or a mother or father. And I'll bet you don't always feel like being a disciple of Jesus either. You're unsure about what you believe. Maybe you really felt something when you first became a Christian; you really felt very close to Christ. But over the years your enthusiasm has waned, including your enthusiasm for all this adoption business, especially when it involves your share of doing the adoption work for those who are new or different or hurting among us, of helping others to know that they are special because they are adopted, just as you were. But you get up, you put on your Sunday best, you come to church, you open your prayer book and say your prayers, you sing the hymns, you hear once again the story of God's love, the story of how God adopted you, the story of how Jesus walked the way of love and the Cross for you and how he invites you to walk that way with him and with others, and by the end of the morning you know once again that you are a Christian and that walking that way with Christ is the real you, the you you want to be. Piaget says that "play is the serious business of childhood." Children "make believe" they are adults. They dress up like adults, dress up like mommy or daddy, because one day they want to grow up and be adults like mommy or daddy. That's the way it is with our adoption, and with our worship on Sundays and throughout the week, and with all the things we do together as friends and as church. We are baptized; we bring ourselves to church; and, in church, in the liturgy, we playfully, but seriously, experiment with what it's like to "put on Christ," to wear Christ in our lives together. These external rituals of family life, regardless of how we feel at any one point, are an important part of who we really are, an important part of our identity. On Sundays, and then during the rest of the week as well, we go out of our way to say, "Hi, John," "Hi, Mary," whether we feel like it or not. And, like children, we act our way into a new way of being. And, one day, we find that we are a new way of being, and the new person we are bears some of the scars of real, daily, committed life. And we find that the back door of the church is really just an entrance to a family that's larger than we ever imagined! Out there in the world we do what we've learned and practiced at church. We make time for a fellow worker at the office who is down on his luck, whether we feel like it or not. And we make time for some ministry that helps to provide decent housing for the poor, or that struggles for justice for the oppressed, or that brings hope for the mentally ill or distressed, whether we feel like it or not. Or we stand with someone who has been wronged, whether we feel like it or not. And we make time for a friend or a neighbor who is ill or lonely, whether we feel like it or not. And day after day, we take time we don't really feel like taking to be a father or mother; we take time to really listen to our children's lives and to share with them and model what we believe is important, when we feel like we'd really rather be doing something else. And so, day by day, we act out what it's like to "put on Christ," to wear Christ in our lives. This, I suggest, is what Jesus means about losing one's life in order that he might save his life, what he meant when he said that whoever would be his disciple, whoever would be like him, must take up his cross daily. Because love is not a feeling, but a commitment, just as fatherhood or motherhood is not a feeling, but a commitment. Who feels like taking up a cross anyway, any day? I doubt that Jesus felt like taking up his cross that day on Calvary. But that is who he was, and who he practiced being. And the family of the cross is the family he adopted us into, and the life he gave us the power to live, day by day. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |