I've heard several people lately say something to the affect that they left the church at some point in their lives because of the way other people in the church behaved. They left because of a pastor, or because of the way members of the congregation behaved towards the pastor, or they left simply because members of the congregation were unkind towards other members of the congregation. And the conclusion of each of these folk was something along the lines of "people in the church shouldn't behave that way." After all, if we strive to follow God, shouldn't that make us better?
I've been sitting with this question for years, actually. It's common that people leave because of the hypocrisy they see in the church: so after a pastor messes up, or after mean people in the church do something unkind, or because of the judgmental stance of some churches or congregations. Shouldn't we who profess to follow a loving, compassionate, gracious God work harder to do right? To avoid hurting people? To build people up and care about those who need our care? Shouldn't our weekly time remembering what we are called to do and who we are called to be make some difference in our lives?
My answer has changed over the years, some, but here it is as I think now: Yes, our time in the church should make us better. But it should not make us better than other people. It should just make us better than we ourselves might have been had we not been in that place of remembrance and support for being the best we can be. None of us will ever be perfect. And I don't think we can ever compare ourselves to other people. The best we can do is compare ourselves to ourselves. Have we grown to be more loving, more forgiving, more gracious than we were before? Or than we might otherwise have become?
I think about what Jesus himself said on this subject, (Luke 5:31-32): "Jesus answered, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do. I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners to change their hearts and lives.”
People come to church for many reasons. But for many of us, it is because we are striving to be the people God calls us to be and we know we need the help and support of the community, of the time of worship and joint commitment to serve the poor and oppressed. We need the time together to both reflect and work together to bring justice and peace to the world. We can't do it on our own, or certainly we can't do it as well on our own. For those who can, more power to them. For the rest of us, our time in community and in church is essential for us to be the best we can be, for us to continue on the journey to be more whole, more caring and more loving. That's all we can do. We will never reach that goal, we will never be perfect. But church allows us to grow towards it, to remember to self-reflect and work harder to be better.
Some of what angers people is how big the mistakes are that some people within churches make. I understand that. But I have two responses to this. First, I don't think God ranks "mistakes" or "sins" (to use a churchier word) in the same way that we do. In the ten commandments, for example, murder is not listed as a worse sin than forgetting to take a day of rest. I want you to think about that for a minute. Murder is not ranked higher in the ten commandments than forgetting to honor the Sabbath. There's no "ranking" of sins in scripture. WE do that. WE rank things and sometimes we really get those rankings off in some very strange ways. Some Christians think that loving someone they have decided is inappropriate is worse than murder, for example. We know this because they will KILL LGBTQ folk and feel justified in doing so. But God wants wholeness for us and that means working for good in every aspect, working towards love and care, compassion and understanding in every way. When we fail, we fail. God forgives and we move on, hopefully having learned from the mistake.
The second thing I want to say about that is that again, we cannot be comparing people against other people: only against themselves. And since we do not know what they would have been like had they NOT been in church, who are we to say that church has made no difference for them? We can't know this.
Churches are human creations. And as such they will be imperfect just as humans are imperfect. They are there to build up, to honor God, to create community, to encourage us to be the church in the world, lifting up the oppressed, empowering the poor. We who are in the church are part of that. But because we are part of it, church will reflect our gifts, and our weaknesses. We continually strive to do better, to make church better. But it will never be perfect just as we as individuals will never be perfect.
I say again, church will make no person perfect. It just won't. But it can help. At least it can help some of us. And that's enough for me.
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