That's A Lot To Load on a Baby

I once showed up at a Yearly Meeting meeting in a sport coat. I don't remember why. I wouldn't generally do that so there must have been some reason I was already wearing a sport coat or was going to need one later. I probably would not even remember that I wore a sport coat on that occasion except that someone older and more ministerially invested than I am said I was alienating people by wearing a sport coat. His take was that anyone interested in getting people into churches should notice and follow the cue that nobody in our culture wore sport coats or suits anymore.

He might be right. I hear someone in our Yearly Meeting/Annual Conference is doing some kind of Glamis or Dirt Bike church. On Sundays, he's going to meet with people who have opted to go dirt-biking for the weekend and then read the Bible and sing with them for a couple of hours.

I guess.

I suppose, it might look weird to show up to a place like that in a sport coat. The kind of weird monks probably seemed wearing habits, or the weird Quakers seemed wearing gray and dressed without ruffles. M'eh.

I suppose you can't argue with results. Here I am showing up to places in a sport coat, and there my accuser is, well-suited for ministry in our Yearly Meeting.

Nobody wears sport coats indeed.

Every now and then... well actually more often than "now and then" suggests...

So...

Quite frequently I hear about the need for THE CHURCH to be authentic and relevant. I mostly see that is meant in a Church Growth© way and not necessarily in a so the Kingdom of God is seen kind of way. How it manifests itself is in goatees, Hawaiian shirts as dressy, saying dude, kids who look and act like most everybody else but have NOTW branded somewhere on their person... I think it also makes us think we need to incorporate more images, the word "dude", faux-hawks, and flat screens... lots and lots of flat screens into our weekly concerts/affirmations. What's more relevant than that stuff?

The Lovely Elizabeth, like all babies, is as smart as they come. I don't mean she knows how to use a toilet or can make her hands do what she wants them to do. I don't even think she knows she can know it's possible to want at this point. So when I say smart I mean her world is infinite human possibility. She has the capacity to absorb and integrate herself into any mode of human existence that we know or can imagine. That's smart.

It's my job to narrow that. I will teach her that X is in a set with Y but not a part of the set that includes 1 and 2, and that's different from the set of µ and ∆. I'll help set for her the frames of reference and categorization through which she will understand the world. My narrow world. It's my duty to shrink the horizon of her concerns and interests so that she may be well adjusted to one manner of being. It's my job to pass on my pettiness and sinful tendencies. My idols will become her idols so that for her- much of sin will merely be the way "it" is. If I do my job, I will have passed on the ability to overlook the worst of sins- that which justifies our way of being as the way of being.

When we talk about relevance or authenticity I don't think we want to mean we need to get at that but I suspect that's the very think we need to address if a church is really going to be relevant and authentic. I don't think we want to get at that because the very best idols are those to which we are the most loyal, those that offer the most security and comfort, those that let us skirt around the despair that blankets human existence.*

I'm sure at some point she'll lie. She'll steal. At some point she'll feel the pangs of guilt at hurting someone. We've got a world that understands sin as such and have great ways to alleviate that guilt. But there will be no need to feel guilty for participating in the world as it is- no need to recognize any of that as sin.

Unless the Holy Spirit does its** job. I'm looking forward to that. If it wasn't for that anticipation and action I don't know how that despair could be overcome... Well other than by embracing blissful ignorance or remaining in happy denial I wouldn't know how to do it. But it is there, and as I look at my daughter, the person that I call my daughter but know must be her own person, I am filled with a word I don't know in English. I have that waiting, expectant hope that is esperar.

Thank God.

* I'm really much more fun than this suggests.
** The Holy Spirit is an "it". Deal with it.