the cosmos is watching

When I was about 12, the people I most could not stand in life were other kids my age who acted like know-it-alls. Ironically, I think the main reason they bothered me so much was because I was convinced that I knew it all—or at least knew better than they did—but I didn’t have the skills to assert my voice with confidence. I felt a strong sense of injustice that the people who pretended to know it all were the ones being heard, and I—the one who, in my view, actually knew it all—was being ignored or passed over.

Oh, 12. It’s not an age I miss.

What I do miss sometimes is the certainty of being right. Being sure that my perspective is the best one, that I’m the one who has considered all the contingencies, that I can righteously claim that if Jesus were to come comment on XYZ topic, He and I would be pretty well aligned. The older I get the less space there seems to be for self-righteous self-certainty. I think I expected the opposite.

I recently read this quote from Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

That quote makes my evangelical bones shiver a little. Didn’t I take half a dozen “spiritual gifts quizzes” that told me I had the gift of faith—precisely because of how I answered questions about certainty? It was never hard for me to believe what I was supposed to believe, and to also believe that I was 100% right. Did that make faith my spiritual gift? Or might my certainty have been a spiritual handicap?

To ask the questions differently: Has my spiritual gift atrophied as I’ve grown older—despite the fact that my walk with Jesus has grown in length and depth—because I’m less of a know-it-all at 31 than I was at 12? Or was I mistaking my propensity to take refuge in knowledge as an unalloyed strength, when it is sometimes my Achilles heel?

Looking back across the churches I’ve lived in over the last few decades, my sense of injustice is still a little bit activated—no longer because I’m convinced I’m the one who really knows it all, but because I think we as a collective may have a know-it-all problem.

Like I measured my “gift of faith” by how much certainty I had, many Christians and congregations measure the genuineness of people’s faith by what they factually “know.” Rather than placing the value on knowing Christ and Him crucified (experientially and actively, as well as propositionally), the unspoken litmus tests for these churches sound more like end-of-year school examinations. How well do you know (and can you spontaneously rehash) your specific church’s statement of faith—right down to its stance on the controversial culture war issues of the day? That’s how we know if you’re a real Christian. That’s how we know if you belong here.

Add to this the fact that all different denominations or non-denominational churches will have a slightly different set of these implicit test questions, and a different set of answers to them, and it’s no wonder the know-it-all problem in Christianity has become a unity problem as well. We are a movement shattered into a million shards.

If the goal is Jesus, then what truly matters is knowing Jesus, recognizing His voice, and faithfully following His lead. But if the goal is being right (and displaying how right we are), we will struggle mightily to exercise our faith in a way that makes space for the Spirit of God to do His work in us and in the world.

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

I believe this is one reason why moving into the Anglican tradition has been such a relief for me. We say the Nicene Creed together every week before we participate in communion, and all the rest we discuss amicably, over coffee and snacks or a feast with mulled wine, as the less-than-primary issues they are.

When Jesus was about to face Pilate, and with him the powers and principalities of darkness, His prayer to the Father was “that they [believers] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

Unity within the Church, and between the Church and the Trinity, is our testimony to the cosmos. All of Creation and its inhabitants are watching.

Do we look anything at all like the One we claim to represent?

the Pharisees vs. the Gospel

In the not-quite-nine years of this blog’s existence, I have published 249 posts and currently have a backlog of 99 drafts. So if you’re reading this, this post managed to become the 250th post instead of the 100th unfinished draft. Random fact of the day.

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One of my very first weeks at the Anglican church, a line from Father Joe’s sermon stuck with me: “In my previous tradition, the Baptist church, what we seemed to care about most was how to be really good at arguing.”

I’ve never been Baptist, but I’ve been in a fair number of churches where the primary value was definitely arguing. The “best” Christians were always in a defensive stance, holding onto the Bible as both sword and shield, as if our purpose was to guard God Himself from the people and ideas “out there.” I learned all the tactics and talking points, and I learned the Bible really well so I could make even better moves than most. When I was in it, it was fun, like playing a sport with my “team,” and all the camaraderie and belonging that entails—even though in reality, we were little more than gossips and keyboard warriors, too cowardly to have meaningful discussions with real people about real things that didn’t fit neatly into our categories.

If I had stopped there with my study of the Bible instead of digging deeper, if my life had stagnated instead of winding through periods of intense pain and change, if God had not proved far more faithful to me than I was to Him, I’d probably still be having fun playing for that team in our imaginary game—while blind to the real war trying to rip God’s Creation apart.

This is the war Jesus came to fight, not as a great arguer or even a great warrior, but as a human baby, a growing boy, a man of sorrows and a suffering servant. He expanded the boundaries of God’s holy kingdom by feasting with the poorest sinners. He rebuked those who weaponized the Scriptures by being the Word of God in the flesh. He seized authority over all Creation by bowing His neck to His accusers, He ascended to the throne of heaven by being crowned with thorns and raised up on an execution tree, and He shattered the power of death by committing His spirit into the hands of God.

And He left us with one job: to take the good news of His kingdom to every corner of the earth, welcoming people from every tribe and tongue and nation to the glorious banquet halls of His communion table, where there is no space for the greed and self-importance of the flesh. This vocation is the continuation of Christ’s mission to sew the world back together, to undo the power structures and value judgments and myriad abuses of a post-Edenic humanity through the abundant hospitality of the Holy Spirit. To usher in the New Creation.

The real war is not the old game of “my church vs. the outside world.” It’s not Christians-who-are-right-about-everything vs. Christians-who-are-wrong. It’s not cultural ideas vs. God, who needs His army of Bible-wielders to shield Him; it’s not conservatives vs. progressives; it’s not men vs. women or white vs. black or rich vs. poor.

In this country, like ancient Israel before us, it’s a lot more like the Pharisees vs. the Gospel of Jesus Christ (see Luke chapter 15).

We can all stand on the defensive around an invisible idol, protecting our small god and his many demands and limitations from anyone’s questioning, or we can lay down our weapons and come together to the table of the bounty of the King of Kings. He is delighted for anyone to repent and return to His open arms—the question is, will we, too, be delighted when even sinners are welcomed to eat at this table? Or, like the embittered older son who did everything “right,” will we resent our Father’s goodness toward the prodigals, and reveal ourselves to be a long way off from the true heart of God?

Jesus said of the Pharisees in His day,

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

Matthew 23:2-4

This was the reality of being on that argumentative “team.” I could tell you all the right things to do and think and believe, and back them up with Bible verses—but never lift a finger to love you through your real-life pain, proving my knowledge to be meaningless.

I’ve grown weary of spending my life on the defensive for a God who does not need my defending. Let me spend it instead throwing open the doors of His love, mercy, and grace for every hungry soul I can find, whether they fall in line with my particular statement of beliefs or not.

together church

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul makes a statement that I’ve always thought somewhat extraordinary: “Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ.” It makes Paul sound either really arrogant or really spiritual. After all, Christ is the perfect Son of God. Who does Paul think he is?

But these last six months have given me a greater appreciation for imitation as a spiritual practice.

In the nondenominational evangelical tradition I am most familiar with, there’s a lot of telling people what they should do to be like Christ. Pray more, read your Bible a lot, love others, go to church, repent often, worship authentically. Those who are enduring trauma, loss, grief, addiction, illness, and other kinds of suffering are often met with “Biblical counsel” that sounds a lot like Job’s unhelpful friends: Have more faith! Confess more sins! Read more Scripture! Claim more promises!

There’s a lot of “Do as I say.” But Paul said, “Do as I do.”

In my migration from that tradition to High Church liturgy for the first time, this is where I notice the starkest contrast.

The Anglican liturgy is built on worship, prayer, and Scripture, and is entirely oriented toward the culminating event of partaking in the Eucharist together. We sing praises together; we stand and hear the Scriptures together; we kneel and confess our sins together; we sit and receive the Word together; we break bread together; we celebrate and rejoice in the God of our salvation together. Some of my favorite moments in each communion service are when we all rise from our knees to hear the priest recite the “Comfortable Words” (which are Matthew 11:28, John 3:16, 1 Timothy 1:15, and 1 John 2:1) and when we all shout “Thanks be to God! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” together after the closing hymn.

These centuries-old liturgical practices, rooted in Scripture and bathed in a long history of the prayers of the saints, provide a framework for us to actually do what we say, not merely say what to do. Strip them away, and it makes sense that in my previous tradition, so much time on Sunday mornings is devoted to hearing from a man rather than meeting with God.

I don’t think everyone needs to become Anglican or return to High Church liturgy, even though I love it and wish I could share my love for it with everyone. But I do think all churches would benefit from giving people a model to imitate, not just sermons to hear.

For example, I do not remember a single time in my 30+ years of churchgoing that we were prompted in church to confess our sins (outside of an altar call, of course). I do remember hearing plenty of sermons about how confession should be part of my prayer life. But most people learn far quicker by doing something than by being told what to do—especially if they get to practice it together, week after week.

What if we modeled confession by actively including confessional prayer? What if we modeled unity by reciting the Apostles’ Creed together? What if we modeled the importance of prayer by weaving it into every portion of the service, instead of just the beginning and the end? What if we modeled spiritual quiet time by inserting periods of silent contemplation? What if we modeled the authority of Scripture by speaking it directly to the powers of sin and death that threaten us, rather than just telling our suffering people to read more of it and move on?

I keep thinking of that old cliche, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” A model is a picture. As any parent who’s paying attention knows, children do what they see us doing, not what they hear us saying—and it’s no different with the children of God.

I know that liturgy and practice and doing-together is no cure-all. No tradition is immune from legalism or moralism. Plenty of people have made an exodus from liturgical traditions into nondenominational ones the very same way I’ve left nondenominational evangelicalism for liturgy—and we are all just searching for the freedom of Christ, with His easy yoke of grace and mercy.

Personally, my life in evangelical traditions was marked by an individualistic pressure to do it all, and do it alone. Everything came down to my faith, my sinner’s prayer, my fruitbearing, my testimony, my prayer life, my quiet time, my sin, my gifts, my service. Every sermon could be distilled down to applications for me, what I needed to do to be a better person, wife, mother, disciple, church member, or what have you. It even shaped how I studied and read the Bible, looking primarily for practical principles that were peppered with a lot of the word “should,” and leaving very little room for the kind of slow, agenda-free meditation that actually lets the Scriptures do the work.

We still have sermons in the Anglican church, and I love them. But more importantly, we have an hour and a half composed of marinating in Scripture readings, Scriptural prayers, Scripture-inspired hymns, and the Scriptural sacrament of communion. Together.

The burden is much lighter together.

I am not the Body of Christ, and neither are you. Only we, together, can be the Body—only we, together, can be what He intended His disciples to be. And it has to mean something more than being in the same place at the same time one morning a week, because we can do that with anyone.

It has to mean more than a set of worship songs and a great sermon, because we can get that on YouTube.

It has to mean more than a creed and a set of moral expectations we all adhere to, because we can get that in any religion.

What is “more”? It’s the kingdom of heaven. It’s new creation. It’s Isaiah 11 modeled in real life. It’s the living proof that Jesus really did conquer sin and death and the powers of evil that would leave us otherwise lost in our natural human state of greed, hatred, self-preservation, and lust for power.

“The wolf will live with the lamb.” The rich will sit at the table with the poor. The women will be on equal footing with men. The children will be as valuable as the adults. The outcast will be welcomed in. The powerful will kneel down to serve the powerless.

There really is no passable counterfeit for this. We’re either living it or we’re not.

In the Anglican liturgy, I get to live it: There is no difference between how I participate as a woman and how everyone else does. The same is true for my children, and for anyone else who walks through the door, no matter who they are or where they come from. No one preaches from several steps higher than the congregation or performs worship from a stage. There’s no distancing or dividing over differences on secondary issues. I felt more like family on my first Sunday there than I had in 6 years of attending my previous church every week.

That’s “more.” That’s everything.

Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!