From the Pastor

April 2010

One of my friends on Facebook linked to an article on the Alban Institute’s web site that I found quite interesting. Here is the first paragraph of the article, entitled, “A Word for Lay Christians” by Wesley J. Wildman and Stephen Chapin Garner.

Your pastoral leaders and your churches would be lost without you. Without you there is no community. Without you "Jesus" is an empty word rattling about in the corridors of history. Without you the church is a lifeless shell. The measure of the church's success is directly related to how you, the lay members of your community, love one another and live out your faith in your daily lives.

The whole article, which is about the tendency for people who have developed questions or doubts about faith to feel out of place in a worshipping community and so often leave or dramatically reduce their par-ticipation, can be viewed at www.alban.org and I commend it to you.

But what especially caught my attention in this paragraph was the sentence: Without you "Jesus" is an empty word rattling about in the corridors of history. To me, this sentence starkly captures the biblical concept of the Church as the Body of Christ that gathers, worships, learns, serves, and lives together as a community of faith, and what happens to the concept of “Jesus” when we choose not to do so.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the 20/80 rule. In any given volunteer organization, 20 percent of the people carry the weight of 80 percent of the organization, or in business that 80 percent of the sales come from 20 percent of the clients. It is even suggested that this principle is true in nature, with the Italian devel-oper of this principle noting in 1906 that 20 percent of the pea pods in his garden contained 80 percent of the peas. Not surprisingly, this principle has also been observed as the reality of church life and accepted with a shrug as “that’s just the way it is.”

Maybe it’s foolhardy and naive of me to question what appears to be a natural law, but I don’t think this is what Jesus anticipated in his vision of the Kingdom of God.

My understanding of Easter is that, in raising Christ from the dead, God broke all these rules and princi-ples that we think have to guide our lives – the norms and accepted wisdom of the day like “there is no free lunch,” for example. To be a part of the Body of Christ is to flout the perceived rules and norms by which the world lives, and to live together as a community of faith living by faith in spite of them. For-giveness doesn’t abide by the 20/80 rule. Neither does justice or compassion or hope or resurrection, and certainly not faith.

The world would rather have Jesus become an empty word rattling about and safely contained in the cor-ridors of history. Those of us whose faith is an Easter faith will not let it be so.

See you Sunday.
Peace, and Happy Easter,
Pastor Brian