#156 The Church: Christ's Broken Body

Forgiving the church. It isn't easy. She's a wreck, broken. Her solution seems to be to keep breaking the pieces. It grieves me. I'm not sure how God feels about it. Does it matter if the church we invented to imitate God's son grinds itself into powder? Maybe not. There does seem to be something inevitable about it. We destroyed Jesus: at least for a time. How could we expect to treat the church any better?

Maybe we should let her die. Maybe the tower of Babel should come down. In the end, only the cornerstone will be left. The church will be broken apart and the children of god will finally know the lonely cost of serving the Creator: the loneliness of the cross. Without classes and meetings and projects and programs, we will have to seek other forms of fellowship. We will have to choose discipleship to the living God, or bondage to a dead institution.

Perhaps the cross does not deliver us from sin, but from death. Suffering alone on the cross, Christ showed us the way. We have to die to live.

This is a mystery to me, one that I can not comprehend, only imitate. The church may be doing just that. Like Jesus, the church may finally be delivered into life through her death, or maybe her death will make salvation possible for each of us.

I write all this because I feel the need to forgive the church. I asked too much of her once. I expected her to be better than the humans who made her up, and was disapointed. That is not fair, but that is what I feel. Like a child discovering there is no Santa Claus, my heart was broken. I don't know if I can ever love the church again, but in order to heal myself, I have to forgive her for the hurt I felt. Ultimately, it was my choice to feel it. Maybe today I can choose differently. Maybe that's what forgiveness is: God's choice to think differently about us.

Peace, Y'all.
Pennsy