What is the Church – Practicing Resurrection
Eugene Peterson book Practice Resurrection, A Conversation on Growing Up on Christ
Ephesians 4:1-7
Beth Henricks
As many of you know, I am finally finishing my masters in divinity degree from Earlham School of Religion next month. It’s been nine long years of working towards this and I am thankful that the journey is nearing its end but also reflecting on the importance of my seminary experience on my ministry here.
The final class a seminary student takes at ESR is called Comprehensive Seminar and it is kind of a culmination class of the seminary experience. Each week we have looked at the question What is the Church and What is its mission today? We examined the question from a personal, theological, Biblical, denominational, church historical, cultural, and ethical perspective. I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the Church and just read Eugene Peterson’s book Practice Resurrection, A Conversation on Growing up in Christ, examining the Church through the lens of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus. I also asked this question of many of you during one of our fellowship hours and heard from you that the Church is community, the incarnation of God’s flesh, a body of seekers, embodiment of the Word, a collective group to live out faith in the world, and a place to wrestle with questions and doubts. For me, the Church (and I am speaking about the universal Church) has been the air that we breathe that allows our beings to have meaning. Also at times, it has been the blockage in our air waves that has had us gasping.
Many churches might have a different answer to this question than what I heard from many of you. They might say, The Church is a place for its members to accept Jesus as their personal savior, learn right beliefs and theology, study the Bible, share the good news of salvation and bring new converts into the Church. Many churches feel their mission is to identify the human depravity, that Jesus died for our sins to appease a God that requires justice and a substitution for our sins, and that we must accept Jesus as our personal savior to save us from eternal damnation. This was the Church that I grew up in and while bothered by some of this for a number of reasons, thought that this was Church.
Part of my spiritual journey has been to study and live a different type of Church. The Religious Society of Friends and this Meeting has opened my eyes to the possibility of a different Church. It is one that is based in Scripture and the life and teachings of Jesus. But it is radical in how we seek the call from Christ and how we listen for the voice of Christ within directly – a voice and essence that has always been there and always will be.
Paul describes this radical kind of church in Ephesians. It is the only letter that Paul writes to a church where there isn’t a big problem that he is addressing. He is outlining how the church and the universal Christ are intertwined , of the same substance, and encourages a person to become mature in Christ, becoming alive to God and practicing resurrection in their lives and the life of the Community.
Peterson’s book examines how the apostle Paul encouraged the church to keep growing in their maturity in Christ and live out resurrection every day.. To become wholly integrated into the stature of Christ. While there are some parts of Ephesians that have bothered me over time such as the admonition for wives to submit to their husbands (and there is much debate among Biblical scholars that Paul wrote this and that it was likely added later from another author), Peterson has opened my eyes to the benefits of examining the totality of this letter as Paul’s encouragement to a thriving Church and what the Church should be and how to live in this world.
In Peterson’s introduction to the book of Ephesians in his Message Bible, he says “What we know about God and what we do for God have a way of getting broken apart in our lives. The moment the organic unity of belief and behavior is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created. Pau’s letter to the Ephesians joins together what has been torn apart in our sin-wrecked world. Once our attention is called to it, we notice these fractures all over the place. There is hardly a bone in our bodies that has escaped injury, hardly a relationship in city or job, school or church, family or country that isn’t out of joint or limping in pain. There is much work to be done. Paul shows how Jesus is eternally and tirelessly bringing everything and everyone together. Now we know what is going on, that the energy of reconciliation is the dynamo at the heart of the universe, it is imperative that we join in vigorously and perseveringly.”
Friends, the Church is not about programs, initiatives, numbers, statistics, giving and many other quantifiable measures that our secular world demands and determines value. Paul’s idea of church is none of this. A lot of the church is invisible. The church isn’t what it does or doesn’t do – It is – the essence of being God’s temple. It’s what happens to us not what we do. Growing in the maturity of Christ is quiet, reflective, obscure and not an outward process. The Church is a plunge into grace. Peterson writes, “Christians worship a crucified Savior – to all appearances in every and all cultures a rejected, humiliated, and failed Savior.”[1] And yet this crucified savior is the basis of our church – Jesus is Church and Church is Jesus. But not necessarily how we have domesticated Jesus and either denied his humanity or his divinity. The Church is both human and divine just as Jesus was – just as all of us are. And Paul in Ephesians really understands this idea and writes about it. Peterson continues with “Resurrection defines Jesus life; resurrection defines our lives. We were sin dead; we are resurrection alive.”[2] It's all about grace which is defined as something freely given with nothing expected in return.
Jesus was a part of the community of God’s chosen people the Hebrews. He didn’t come from the outside but worked within the church that he was a part of. And it was from within his community that he was silenced as he challenged the traditions, rule, requirement, forms of his faith community. Jesus saw that his church was sinful, connected with the Roman govt, and the establishment, seeking prosperity and power.
Maybe many people today see the church in the same way. Church membership has declined dramatically in all denominations including the Religious Society of Friends in the last 50 years. Why is that? Some suggest it’s the moral decline of society but I think the answer is much deeper than this pronouncement as all generations experience change Many see the Church as Peterson describes as full of “chaos; hostility, injury, brokenness, church fights, church sleaze, church grandstanding, religious wars.”[3] There is a tension with individuals that want the church to be stable, orderly, taking care of business, maintaining traditions and something that we need to control. But Is church a place to be measured in its effectiveness, by numbers, programs and financial giving? While these things are important I don’t think they define the essence of church.
Will there still be a church 50 years from now – I think yes. The Church is never going to be obsolete. Paul says “someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious.” Quaker Rufus Jones has written many books about God always being present among us. And Church is a place to experience this presence. The church is the opposite of the concept of individualism that dominates our American culture. The church is not about individualist achievement, rather it is a community that loves, shares burdens, supports, lives out the teachings of Jesus and helps each community member/attender to move into maturity in Christ.
During this time of the pandemic it’s become clear that the church is not the buildings that we have erected. As writer Walker Percy said, we have become lost in the cosmos during this time. This might be the best thing that has happened to the church. All of our outward expressions of church were disrupted. We had to turn inward. And I think we began to understand that this is a community of saints. That is how Paul defines the church within all of its messiness and conflicts and failings. This is a group of saints and this is God’s expression of the embodiment of the Word in all its flaws. It is a community all about resurrection. And wisdom is the practice of that resurrection.
I close with these two lines from the Mary Oliver poem Moonlight- “Take care you don’t know anything in this world too quickly or easily. Everything is also a mystery and has its own secret aura in the moonlight, its private song.”
We now enter into a time of waiting worship where we settle into our souls and listen for the voice of God. Here are some queries to consider.
How am I the embodiment of the Church?
How do I need to grow in maturity of Christ?
How do I need to practice resurrection in my life?
[1] Eugene Peterson’s, Practice Resurrection, 93
[2] Eugene Peterson’s, Practice Resurrection ,89
[3] Eugene Peterson’s, Practice Resurrection, 123