I woke up at 6AM wide awake, so I came down, got coffee, updated my blog and sat down to continue reading The Holy Longing: The Search for A Christian Spirituality. I came across this picture of church:

The crucifixion scene is a good image of church. Jesus dies between two criminals. Anyone at the time, looking a that scene, would not have amdee a distinction between who was guilty and who was innocent. There was just one landscape - God on a cross between two thieves. That is the perennial ecclesical image. Grace and sin, sanctity and pettiness, and fidelity and betrayal, all a part of a single horizon.
The church is always God hung between two thieves on the cross. Thus, no one should be suprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It has never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth. To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulters and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic sould within every time, country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both teh worst sin and the finest heroism of soul...because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original curcifixion, God hung among thieves.