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Meet Father KempThe Second Sunday after Trinity – 13 June 2010
This past school year one of our educational objectives was to teach some of our students the concept and value of money. The first step was to teach these students how to recognize coins. This step should have been the easiest step, but it proved to be rather difficult, because each coin has two sides. Our students learned how to identify coins when they were face-side up, but when the face-side was down, they could not label the coins. I was not expecting this difficulty, to me a quarter is a quarter no matter which side I see, but to our students a quarter was a quarter only if they could see George Washington’s profile. For our students, two different sides meant two separate and distinct objects.
I think the church is like God’s coin, a visible sign of God’s currency of grace. The church, like any coin, has two sides. One side shows God’s acts and action in the world and the other side shows human acts and actions in the world. These two sides are apparent in St. Luke’s description of the early apostolic church: They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. The human actions or acts of the church were devotion or steadfast fidelity to the apostles teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread (which is to say the Eucharist), prayer, and generously giving their money and possessions to poor Christians so that everyone had what they needed. The God’s action was to undergird all of the churches activities and use them as a means to add more Christians to their numbers. When God’s acts and human acts are united like two sides on the same coin, the church looks like and functions like a tight-knit, intimate community. The early church was a community that resembled June Cleaver’s kitchen (or my Grandmothers for that matter); it was a place that people were loved, accepted and cared for because of who they were in all their strengths, hopes, weaknesses and failures. The church was a community that was joyfully willing to sell their possessions and give the money they made to poor Christians in need. The church was a community held in lofty awe by outsiders and was a community that many people desired to join. All churches should resemble the church St. Luke described. How many churches are held in awe by non-Christians today? How many churches are communities so full of love and grace that people want to join? Rather than revealing the value of God’s grace through our fidelity to the apostolic teaching, we argue and bicker over what is and is not apostolic teaching and most of our arguing is motivated not to find the truth, but to make our opponents look stupid. Rather than revealing the self-sacrificial love of the triune God in our fellowship with one another, we usually spend our time gossiping, back-biting and complaining. Rather than revealing Christ’s perfect atoning sacrifice in the Eucharist, we argue, divide and excommunicate over how God’s grace mysteriously works in the Sacraments. Finally, rather than revealing God’s loving providence and care through our prayers, our prayers are often senseless demands that God should give us whatever we want.
Maybe I am being to harsh and maybe I am speaking in hyperboles, but few Christians today would say that the Church looks like the tight-knit intimate community that St. Luke described. This is unfortunate because the word ‘community’ is a cultural buzzword. Many people have noted that our culture is composed of people who are rootless, flighty and shifty, like the sands of a desert. Those who understand their rootlessness long to find a community that will love and accept them and they look for these communities on social networking websites, in athletic teams, in automobile clubs, in gymnasiums and so on and so forth. These different cultural communities are all parodies or pastiche of the church, the last place people will look to find a loving community. Christians should heed the words of Graham Tomlin: “[The church is] a community in which, individually and together, people are being transformed to being more like Jesus. It means becoming more generous, humble, joyful and alive, and less marked by those features that diminish us as people, whether arrogance, jealousy, bitterness or cruelty.”[1]
If the church is like a coin, some Christians have tried to increase the value of the church by emphasizing the human actions of the apostolic church: doctrine, fellowship, the Eucharist, prayer and generosity. However, these acts are only signs of God’s graces. These acts cannot transform people into being more loving, kind and generous, rather they spring from a transformed heart. Furthermore, a community cannot be created by mere human action or external pressure or demands of conformity. The communities are created by organic unity, or in the case of the church the unifying transformative work of the Holy Spirit. Other Christians have sought to add value to the church by emphasizing the work of the Triune God and indeed without the work of the Holy Spirit, without the atoning sacrifice of the Son and without the love of the Father, there would be no church. However, God works through people. The work and presence of the Holy Spirit is visible through transformed humanity, through the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, humility – and these fruits are all human actions. Therefore just as it is necessary for the Holy Spirit to transform the lives of Christians, so it is just as necessary for Christians to live transformed lives. Thus, the human acts of the church and the divine work of the Holy Spirit in the church are two sides of the same coin, a coin that finds its value in the invaluable grace of God.[2]
If the coin of the church is to hold its value, its value must be based upon the standard of God grace that is found in Jesus. In other words, the more the church looks like Jesus to more valuable she becomes. Indeed St. Luke description of the early church is similar to St. Luke description of Jesus. The apostles teaching the church steadfastly held on to was about the life, actions and implications of Jesus. The fellowship of the church was based upon the freedom Christians had found in Jesus’ forgiveness. In the Eucharist, the early church proclaimed the joy of communion with the present risen Lord on account of Jesus’ passion. Finally, the church prayed to the Father, in the Spirit, through the Jesus, the Son. All the actions of the church were centered upon the grace of God found in the person of Jesus Christ and through this grace, the Holy Spirit worked both individually and communally to transform the church so that she resembled her Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Churches are like coins and when coins become separated from their source of value they either become inflated or deflated. The church’s source of value is the grace of God found in the person of Jesus. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, the grace found in Christ transforms us to resemble Jesus and creates a loving, caring, gracious and kind community. Communities that resemble the apostolic church that radiated the valuable brightness of Jesus love, it emanated the brilliance of the Holy Spirit’s transformative work and it emitted the blinding luminous grace of the Father. Therefore, heed the words of J.C. Ryle, “Oh, that every true Christian would recollect that he is set as a lighthouse in the midst of a dark world, and would labor so to live that every part of him may reflect light, and no side be dim!”[3] I might add “Oh that every true Church would recollect that she is set as a valuable coin in the midst of a dark valueless world, and would labor so to live as valuable communities reflecting the eternal value of God’s grace.”
[1] Pg 113.
[2] What does this coin look like? What does this Christian community called the church resemble? She resembles Jesus, in whom the church is held together. Jesus is both divine and human. As the only begotten Son of God he is the picture of God’s actions in the world and as the first born son of Mary he is the picture of proper human action in the world. He thus, holds both sides of the coin together. Therefore, the Spirit works to transform us to be like him and we live in such a way as to resemble him. Thus in Jesus we see, in the words of Graham Tomlin, “the more like God you become, the more fully human you are.”[2] Tomlin continues, “So, the church is to be an arena in which people can be transformed into full humanity, the image of God, which means to live like Jesus, fully under the rule of God.”[2]
[3] J.C. Ryle, Old Paths, “Alive or Dead”, [Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1999], 91.
