This is not to deny that many people fail to experience this quality of community within any particular church. Far too often they experience being dismembered from the Body of Christ. Even those who remain faithful to the church can recount many shameful tales of petty, narrow-minded and hurtful behavior. Yet these very shameful experiences offer an opportunity through which Christ can speak to the faithful.
When Paul is talking to the Philippians, he is urging them to have the same mind as was in Christ Jesus and in that context to work out the implications of their salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12) The suggestion is that the salvation is offered in the context of the Body of Christ but the implications of that saving experience have to be lived out. The place to explore the meaning of salvation is in the “God community.”
This is not because it is safe in that community. Jesus was betrayed by his own disciple and abandoned by all of them. Rather, it is because God promises you that if you will “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit” and “look not to your own interests but to the interest of others,” God will bless you in the same way that he blessed Jesus who did not try to exploit his position with God but rather emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the humiliating death on the cross. (Philippians 2:3-8)
When you consider that admonition, it puts a different light on the person who says, “I’m leaving the church because it offended me.” The implication of the Gospel is that there are no conditions of obedience or disobedience in which Christ cannot address us if we are open to the Word that is set before us. The difficult part is having the trust to listen at the very time when we most would like to be offended. Matthew’s explanation of the parable of the seeds (Matthew 13:18-23) is lived out daily in the life of the congregation. Again, the result is the bearing of fruit.
Walter Bruggeman in his commentary on Jeremiah speaks of Jeremiah looking on the destruction of Jerusalem and hearing “the faint beginnings of new laughter in Jerusalem.” (Jeremiah; Walter Bruggeman; ITC Commentary) When we have a bad experience in the church as pastor or member, can we have the faith of Jeremiah to listen for the faint beginnings of new laughter? When we see so much damage done to the integrity of the Body of Christ and we are both terrified and in mourning for what the church is and might be, do we have the faith to also perceive the “faint beginnings of new laughter?” Can we indeed perceive the new thing that God is doing in the Body of Christ and begin to join in the anticipated joy of new birth?
