Sunday, January 29, 2017

Dumbo

Sunday 1/29/2017 5:17 AM
Today my scripture reading seemed dominated by the theme of peace, something that has been absent from my life and mind over the course of the past year or so. I long for the absence of strife in the world and, more importantly, within the body of Christ, so we can model the kingdom values of Christ to our broken world.
Much of the angst I feel personally is driven by strife within my church. We are attempting to be a church that reaches out to our community but there is resistance to that idea by some who want to keep things the way they have always been. It is more comfortable to deal with the familiar than to move into unchartered territory. Today I read an excerpt from Opening the Bible, by Thomas Merton. He writes, “There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible – until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves. But then we are perhaps too used to it and too at home in it. Let us not be too sure we know the Bible … just because we have learned not to have problems with it. Have we perhaps learned … not to really pay attention to it? Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it?”
I wonder how many within our church see the Bible as being uncomfortable. We like to quote verses about the peace and joy we can experience in the presence of God but we also like to ignore the calls to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, to seek after justice while walking in humility before God or, heaven forbid that we should give up our own rights for the good of others or to love our enemies by doing good to them. As a whole, we prefer the bubble of familiarity with like-minded people compared to the uncertainty of confronting or interacting with those who think, and live, differently from us.
I believe God wants us to experience life fully and to do that we must live with abandon. If life were Disneyland, I believe God would want us to enjoy the heart-stopping thrill of California Screamin’, a rollercoaster that goes upside-down and in corkscrews, rather than the safety of Dumbo the Flying Elephant, that travels slowly, and in circles. There are times I feel like we are on Dumbo.