The Incarnation and the church

Painful as it is, this is even more of my continued rambling and thoughts from reading The Holy Longing. I'm in the section on the spirituality of ecclesiology (the church). As Brad shared the other day, he was going to pick this book up again and read it but apparently doesn't have to, since I've basically posted the whole book into my blog.

It's easy to be upset at the church or disenchanted with everything that's wrong about the capital "C" church or your own local church. My church has had it's share of crap and lots of people have been angry with it in their time, myself included. I have friends and family who have had horrible things done to them by the "church" and I read things all the time that embarrass me about the what a church somewhere has done or said. I can relate to St. Augustine's view that:

The Church is a whore, but she's my mother.

Funny and true, but not the whole picture. I like the way Roheiser expounds on St. Augustine:

The church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus, no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It have 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, murders, adulterers and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of the soul... because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

If you hang with my family for a while, you'll soon see that there's nothing we can hide from each other and nothing that is too sacred to be mocked or commented on, mostly in a loving way. For example, thirteen years ago I decided I would try and learn to play guitar. After about six months, i put it on hold and my family (mostly Jon) still enjoys bringing that up to me in various contexts along and bringing up other painful memories at inopportune times. I can try and pretend to be all kinds of things, but my family knows me, knows where I've come from and loves to remind me of who I really am. I think the same thing applies to the church. I can claim to be the greatest guy in the world, but I can't fool my family.

One of the things I love about being connected to a church, and in my church to a small group is the view of myself that I get from it. I've got a group of guys (Brad, Bob, Eli, Matt, Will and Mark) that have a pretty complete view of me, have known me for anywhere from 3 - 15 years and keep me honest. They're imperfect guys, just like me, and we can speak hard truth to each other and ask hard questions and also laugh hard and have a great time together.

Roheiser puts it this way:

The churches are compromised, dirty and sinful, but just like our blood families, they are also real. In the presence of people who share life with us regularly, we cannot lie, especially to ourselves and delude ourselves into thinking we are generous and noble. In community the truth emerges and fantasies are dispelled. What is too painful to deal with is not the church's imperfection but my own fantasies about my own goodness which, in the grind of real community, will become painfully obvious. Nobody deflates us more than does our own family. The same is true of the church. Not all of this is bad.