To Live {why the church.5}

He felt…another kind of awake. {Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin}

Jesus is our shalom…creating within his body a new humanity, a new way of being human. {St. Paul}

In these bodies, we will love / In these bodies, we will die / And where you invest your love, you invest your life. {Mumford and Sons}

Perhaps the plainest way to say it is this: the church exists because Jesus rose from the dead.

Easter happened, and Easter is the prototype for all God’s intentions for the world. God did not raise Jesus into the spiritualized psyches of his followers. God did not raise Jesus by enshrining Jesus-ideals into an ethical philosophy for cultures to emulate. God raised Jesus’ rotting, blood-crusted flesh from a dark, musty cave. Dead Jesus lay in the tomb, but alive Jesus walked out.

So now, whenever we hear the prophets and the apostles speak of God’s cosmic project of New Creation, we know what they are talking about. Dead things coming back to life. Old things restored, new. Not ideals, but a reality. Physical. Present. Body, God’s Body.

The church is what happens when resurrection gets to work. Humans are communal creatures. I feel a bit silly pausing to make this obvious point, but… Without friendships, we are lonely. Without a love or a child or an intimate relationship, we are not whole. When we call someone a hermit, we aren’t passing a complement. We are hardwired for committed, intentional, sustained, I’m-with-you-even-when-I-don’t-like-you relationships. Against this, though, we all have horror stories and vast mounds of disappointment. Maybe we’ve given up. Maybe we’ve settled for something shallow or cheap, imitations. Maybe we’ve grown cynical – perhaps the most damaging turn of all.

But resurrection happened, and now we’re discovering what it means to be alive. In other words, we’re learning anew what it means to be truly human. And to be human means, at least in part, to live a physical, particular, embodied life within God’s physical, particular, embodied community, the church. If God were only trying to elevate disembodied souls into distant heaven, perhaps the church wouldn’t matter much (other than to organize, strategize and get this work done efficiently – but I think I’ve sufficiently run that horse into the ground). However, if God is reconstituting (resurrecting) the whole of his good and beautiful creation, well then, the church (the physical, embodied people of God) becomes ground zero.

Knowing this, we could never act as though the community of God is merely a means to something God is doing. Rather, the community of God rests at the heart of what God is doing. And God is doing a heck of a lot. God’s mission is to rescue and love and remake and welcome and forgive and embrace and basically overrun this whole sorry mess with the wonder of resurrection. The old Hebrew word works best: shalom. Wholeness. Well-being. Utter, comprehensive goodness.

This is God’s mission. Not ours. God is doing resurrection. And God will resurrect in a God-way, a Trinitarian way – forming a people who begin to live in Trinitarian love and begin to embody resurrection in the tangible spaces, the streets and dining room tables and nursing homes. It’s slow. It’s messy. Most days, it looks like an absolute disaster. But if relationship and communities, if each and every individual story, matters – then this is the only way.

Here’s the crux of why I need church. I need church because I’m selfish and cynical and proud and a shadow of my true self. I’ve lived among death for too long, and I want to live. I want to be a human alive, a human resurrected. And true humanity is physical, relational, with others, over the long haul. I need the church because Jesus rose from the dead, and I want to rise up from among the dead too. I want to learn “another kind of awake.”

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So, I’m not sure when I’ll return to this series. Might be done. However, I would love to interact to any questions this raises for you – especially if you are struggling with finding your life and place within a physical community, a church. Why do you struggle with this? What questions do you have? Why do you think that maybe it isn’t important? Email me (winn [at] winncollier.com) or post here. If it’s the sort of question I could interact with on the blog, I will. If it is more appropriate just for email dialogue, fine too.


[further why the church? posts:part one, two, three, four]