Recovering

We're all recovering from something. That truth should be the great equalizer in any church, but, sadly, many church members go through their religious motions with a numbing strand of spiritual amnesia. Forgetting what it was like to be lost or impaired or in bondage to anything, we slip easily into the mode of both judge and jury. We carry out our sentences with a sideways glance, a subtle turning away, a dismissive word, a rumor started. How in God's name did His church ever become a place of judgment and condemnation when she was created to be the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament's City of Refuge? Adults behaving badly, and all in the name of Christ. With each passing year, the less certain I become of the importance of much of the pageantry we produce and practice in the name of worship, and the more convinced I am of the necessity of grace as the ground of all true worship. Could there be any clearer celebration of the worth of God than to extend mercy to those who stand or bow or bend in His image, regardless of the beauty or lack there of in the narrative that is their life?

Prayerfully consider the following analogy by Frederick Buechner:

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 building 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, and how, day by day they are trying to go right. 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 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 something like 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” (Romans 7:19). (Listening to Your Life, 1972)