The Walls of the Church

I’m taking part in a conversation about the Church with 54  authors over the course of 25 days. Here’s an excerpt from my part of the “At the Lord’s Table” series:

In Augustine’s Confessions, the bishop-to-be describes an exchange between two men, Simplicianus and Victorinus. Victorinus reads and studies Scripture thoroughly, and has just privately confided to his friend that he now believes himself to be a Christian, though he has not said so publicly:

Simplicianus answered: “I shall not believe it nor count you among Christians unless I see you in the Church of Christ.” Victorinus asked with some faint mockery: “Then is it the walls that make Christians?” He went on saying that he was a Christian, and Simplicianus went on with the same denial, and Victorinus always repeated his retort about the walls.

Is it the walls that make Christians?

My answer, when I first read this, was “no.” I was quite pleased with Victorinus’s reply – who is Simplicianus to say whether Victorinus is a Christian or not? The Church isn’t about a building, it’s about the people gathered inside, worshipping God. Bricks and mortar can’t contain worship; if anything, church should be boundless. If Victorinus says he’s a Christian, then the truth of his confession lies between him and God. Christ makes the faithful Christians, not walls.

Is it the walls that make Christians?

The answer, though Simplicianus never utters it, is “Yes.”

To read the rest of my post, go here. To learn more about the “At the Lord’s Table” series and read some of the other entries, go here.

Old Long Since

I was asked last week by my friend Kevin which New Years Eve was my favorite. He was asking to prove the point, I think, that as far as celebrations go, New Years is a bit over-hyped. I offered him a New Years that we had shared about 2 years ago that wasn’t actually that great. I mainly picked it because, well, it didn’t suck.

But I made the wrong choice. I didn’t really remember rightly. There are a blur of New Years in my childhood that are, by far, the best I’ve had. And quite likely will have.

We would meet up with the family of my childhood best friend. Each year we’d alternate whose house we would meet at, but they all kind of melt into each other for me. At his house we were outside the city limits, so those were the years we had fireworks. The hours before dinner, while it was still light, we’d spend either out on their netted-in trampoline, or in the driveway throwing the small white poppers, littering their thin paper and sawdust packaging on the pavement. After dinner, we’d go back onto the trampoline, inventing games or just bouncing and watching the earliest of the fireworks light the air. When the grown-ups were ready, it would be time for the real fireworks – sparklers tracing circles in the air, roman candles, firecrackers, smoke bombs. Finally, we’d try and time both a toast of champagne and the lighting of a “grand finale” as close as possible to when it was “really” midnight. The kitchen would be filled with a song of chinking glasses – everybody had to cheers every other person.

At our house the routine – and so the feel of the entire evening – was completely different. We’d probably occupy ourselves with some game upstairs before dinner (fighting tournaments seemed to be immensely popular). But the thing I remember most about the nights at our house was playing tag in the front yard. Our Christmas lights would still be up. They challenged and enchanted us. We would have to be aware of where the strands of lights marked the perimeter of the yard; where a power chord suspended itself over a stone path. But the whole front yard, and us in it, was constantly illuminated. Everything glowed with the soft and permeating light of a lingering Christmas. We’d leap above the lights – wild-people leaping and dancing around and over a fire; sprites in some mythical dance or play.

These were my best New Years. Taking long drafts of sparkling grape juice, and careful sips of actual champagne. Delighting in the magic of fire in our hands, playing tirelessly by the light beneath our feet. Leaping higher and higher on a trampoline, lit by the greens, blues, and reds glowing in the sky thanks to everyone who didn‘t know to save “the best ones” for midnight. Sure, arguments would invariably arise each year, but they’d be mended within the hour. Once a dog bit my brother in fright, but I believe he recovered from the shock by midnight.

These are the nights I have longed for and missed these past New Years. The lightness, the indefatigable play, the magic and enchantment, the persistence of happiness, the quickness of forgiveness, the prompt passing of hurt feelings. The bizarre and familiar delight of unique and annual lights in the common darkness. I think almost every New Years Eve since I’ve tried in my heart to make like those nights. I’m very fond of them and the memories I have of them.

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

This isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t wishing to be in the old times, much as I love their memory. We are where we are. I haven’t tried to mimic those nights in the nights to follow, but I’ve sought that same spirit, the same heart to them. And though they’ve passed, let’s take a cup of kindness each for old times long since. Cheers.

“Wreath Kin”

Craft me as the pine, dear Love,
So that I point to sky above.
And by deep root in earth below,
May I stand firm and slowly grow.

In cold and dark stay ever green,
As once I was in happy spring.
When wet, bear needles diamond-strung;
And dry, may cracks of praise be sung.

Should trunk with stone be felled and torn,
May lights my broken limbs adorn.
This sealed heart melt – my resined cone,
So that Love’s seed from me be sown.

From spilled sap-blood and broken pines
May fresh and sweet aromas rise.
And when I am consumed in fire,
May new life in my death find sire.

Look! Over there!

Check out a post I wrote over at the “Next Disciples” blog about non-existent free lunches and evangelism: “We know TINSTAAFL, and maybe TINSTAAFWB. Surely at least TISTAFL?“

I wonder if I like thunderstorms
Because the fear I feel is something like
The fear I’d feel
If I saw an angel.

A love letter

To those who traveled, labored, ate, laughed, cried, and prayed together over the last week at the Group Workcamp in Valdosta, Georgia:

Do you know what joy is? Have you felt it?

We may be using the same word for two different things, so let me tell you what I mean by “joy” in this instance (which is different from the dictionary, I realize). I don’t mean happiness “times ten.” Or twenty. Or even fifty. It’s a feeling close to happiness, but very different. It’s happiness to the point of longing, almost sadness. Sometimes to the point of sickness. I suppose a close feeling is unrequited love – a happy longing that hurts almost. But even those aren’t the same.

Let me give you an example. I feel joy at a number of natural things. Pecan trees planted in rows stretching to the horizon, for example. I want to make the moment of seeing them eternal sometimes, because I love it. I want to, somehow at the same time, be the pecan trees in rows and have them and look at them. I want to experience them more fully than I can. And they stir a longing in my heart that has nothing to do with how they look. They stir my longing for eternity.

You see, God has “set eternity” in my heart as well as yours (Ecclesiastes 3:11). But, being the human beings that we are, we can’t fill that longing; that infinite groove in our hearts. But when we come up against it, we’re stirred. When “Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss” our “hearts turn violently inside of” our chests. And that, right now, is what I mean by joy. I think as Christians we should, and perhaps do, feel a frequent tingling of that greatest unforeseen kiss – Heaven meeting earth as the immortal God becomes the mortal Incarnation.

This last week I was left reeling by joy as I was blind-sided by such a kiss. I was sick with it; happily, happily sick. To be with each of you who sought to serve Christ by giving your hands, your feet, and the sweat of your brows to labor excellently made me very, very joyful. For when our hands take on blisters, cuts, and bruises as we suffer for love they become a bit more like the pierced hands of Christ.  And to the extent that you scraped, primed, painted, hammered, cut, planned, and built for one of those children of Christ, even the least of them, you did it for Him too (Matthew 25:34-40).

I’m struggling to express how thankful I am to have traveled with you to Valdosta. In the past days, I’ve happily cherished the memories of our trip. I think and pray of you fondly, and will continue to do so. For when I see your faces, when I remember, when I think and pray, I feel that longing of joy. I felt it acutely last Friday night when our labors were finished. For being with you, thinking of you, gives me a glimpse of eternity, a glimpse of that eternal love. It inspires that far, deep, mysterious longing. And it stirs up a whole lot of love. You are each “fearfully and wonderfully made,” “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Psalm 139:14, Ephesians 2:10). I’m grateful to have walked this part with you.

With love in Him,

Grant

Resonance

I like this:

“The Feet of Saint Peter,” a spire

Oh Saint Peter
The rock so brave
Who dies his face
Facing the grave
A mirror of
Him who can save
Your cup now flows
Like that He gave.

You who once walked
On stormy wave
Heaven-set feet
Washed by no slave
But by fair hands
That tore the grave
Such feet now grace
Our glass-lit nave.

May we follow
The steps you trod
Across the sea
And to our God
Should we deny
Before cock’s crow
May Christ pull us
From sea below.

Baptismal ties

This goes a bit against my natural grain, but here’s a bit of “poetry.” Today in French Art class we, to take part in a Surrealist practice, wrote uncensored free verse in response to a painting. That is, we just wrote whatever came to pen for a couple of minutes without much thinking. I thought I’d share, just for kicks. I was responding to “The Man in the Bowler Hat” (1964) by René Magritte:

Half winsored ways do little these days
to ease my half-bowled angst.
Is this my Pentecost?
Can you really weigh what’s lost when
you face your baptizer in a suit of pounds of bread?
With such obscuration I may lose my head,
but all will be well if riding the swell
of wing-beaten wind-words towards far
away men with 8, 9, or 10 different types of paisley.

But now all I choose to be is a down turned up dressed choleric cleric.

The next step

Those of you on or around a college campus today surely witnessed an intriguing sight this past Tuesday. Barefoot students are, especially in April, not together an unusual sight. I had the urge to go barefoot in the grass today. A best friend of mine and his buddy went barefoot for about a week their freshman year, just for kicks. But Tuesday there were hundreds of them – barefoot in class, barefoot trying to get into the dining halls (and being denied), barefoot all day. For last Tuesday was TOMS Shoes’ yearly “One Day Without Shoes.”

In case you didn’t watch the linked video, the concept is summed up in this picture from TOMS.com:

The idea is this: bare feet generate conversations which generate action (namely, buying TOMS so that one pair of shoes goes to a developing country) which changes the life of somebody in that country.

 

I own two pairs of TOMS. I went barefoot last year. Honestly, I did it out of peer pressure. This year I was a bit more cynical. I had problems. I know for a fact others did too. People’s first objection is usually along the lines of “It doesn’t actually do anything” – nobody’s life is made better directly by some bare feet. The response to this is obvious: awareness is raised, conversations are had, therefore more people will buy TOMS or donate or something.

Fair enough.

But there was another side of this that interested me far more. There was a sense of participatory suffering. That in baring feet for a day we can empathize with those who do so daily. I actually take this a bit more seriously.

But I still had issues. This was my thought pattern on Tuesday. It was cynical, mean, judgmental, and perhaps unfair (though it may be quite fair. I don’t know). But I think something good is coming out of the bad: “So a bunch of students who are able to attend classes at a very good university, have access to dining halls, can go up to little silver boxes to get fresh, clean, and cold running water, are going to get the lives of those in developing countries because they aren’t wearing shoes? Come on. I bet half of the folks are the sort of hipsters who quite possibly wouldn’t be wearing shoes anyways. Being barefoot is trendy as is. I’d like to see them try and just eat rice for a few days. That’s far less cool and far more of a sacrifice.”

 

Once I had cooled down a bit, what had started as bitter cynicism turned into a real idea. And the idea remained. Why not?

 

So here’s what I’ll be doing on April 18th and 19th: eating rice. Or some sort of simple grain (I’ll probably do plain oatmeal or grits for breakfast). That’s it. And I invite you to join me in this fast. At each meal, whenever you’re hungry, whenever you long to eat something else, offer a prayer not only of thanks for your food, but that those who go hungry around the world will be fed. For here is something that I do believe: prayer is action. Prayers are answered. Then pray that your own heart would be moved as to your role in answering these prayers.

 

And then take a step in that role. With the money you save on those 6 meals (after all we live in a country where rice is plentiful and fairly cheap) donate to a hunger relief effort. I’ve linked a page form worldhunger.org that has a bountiful list of charities. Poke around for some facts while your at it.

 

(Of course, this sort of sacrifice isn’t for everybody. People with diabetes, for instance, probably shouldn’t participate. Stay safe, folks. But keep a heart and say a prayer for those who can’t.)

So, if you went barefoot on Tuesday to suffer in some small part with those who do so daily, will you go hungry now? If you didn’t, will you take this step?