This morning the cats and son woke me… and I made it down to Grace where the sermon was given by a builder. About Nehemiah 3: a list of people building walls. As a builder, he was counting the number of bruised shoulders and fingers and strained backs. The sermon is not up on their website yet, but… part of what he was talking about was that the wall was built to remove the shame that the Israelites had, for their temple was in an indefensible set of ruins.
That God had not given up on them, despite their sin and their unfaithfulness: he had arranged a time of peace when the pagan emperor allowed to work to occur.
As we have been broken and been restored, so we should encourage others to be restored, and in this work we will not be alone. We must be building with our brother. We must not pretend that restoring the ruins of the church is not our work: it is.
And our generation has been unfaithful and left the church in ruins. There is too much truth in this post, relating to some conservatives in the USA who think God is a Republican.
Dude, you voted for Captain Underoos. You voted for a bloody MORMON. You don’t get to play the “oh, I’m an evangelical, I’m too holy to care about my country, I’m voting for God” card after that. What the fuck is “the witness of the Church in America” anyhow? Lesbian Unitarians performing gay marriages while the gay Catholic seminarians chase the altar boys and women talk about their mutually submitted husbands in the pulpits of the Protestant churches as the only male pastors left are too busy apologizing for slavery to preach the Gospel?
Erick Erickson is exactly the sort of Christian that gave me an allergy to Christianity growing up. All that passive-aggressive, faux-righteous babble designed to justify himself reminds me of every smarmy high school guy who was going to a Bible college to pursue a career in youth ministry because it was the only way he could hang around high school girls.
What many nominally Christian activists forget is that the reformation we need will not happen politically. It is not about virtue signalling, hashtags, or voting for this person or that. It is about reformation and cleaning drains so that the septic system flows.
It is about building the walls that protect others. Making shelter. ##
Making space to heal.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
(Matthew 13:47-50 ESV)
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things.
How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.
(James 3:1-13 ESV)
None of us are righteous, not one. We are all Captain Underoos, regardless of what we are wearing right now. We are all in error. We aer all broken. We all need to restore. We are not going to be doing this with people we like. We are not going to be with people who are as broken as we are.
If we are going to restore our church and the faith, then we will work with people we disagree with. I don’t think women should be priests, and I can argue chapter and verse on that. But there are branches of the Church with female priests and we have to build the church with the rubble we have.
We are, as the preacher said, going to have to build where we are. The cheaper thing would have been to build Jerusalem again on clean ground. But the temple had to be on a threshing ground where David had sacrificed to stop a plague (because he had called a census, against the laws of Moses). So you clear rubble. You get down to the bedrock, which is Christ, and you rebuild.
You don’t build on politicians or people, for we are all fallible. You don’t pull people down because of the imagined sins of this age: you don’t virtue signal.
Instead, you chase virtue.
Further, the attacks on the supposed hypocrisy of prominent Christian theologian Wayne Grudem are beyond the pale, especially given the fact that Grudem made it clear that he did not support Trump in the primaries, just as he didn’t support Giuliani in 2012. However, he most certainly would have supported Giuliani over Obama had he won the primaries, just as he is supporting Trump now, with good reason.
Erickson uses the fact that a fellow parishioner at his church tried to make the argument for Trump based on other flawed men in the Bible God has used, like David, Abraham and Samson, as evidence that Trump has “poisoned” the church from within. He believes that while Clinton will do “long-term damage to the country,” Trump will “do far more damage to the church.”
Ironically, Erickson later writes of the church, “But Christ has already risen, so the true church is in no danger of falling. The gates of hell shall not prevail.”
We need the Pharisees. We need the hypocrites. We also need the converts from the gangs, the immigrants, the thieves, the scoundrels, those who have been broken by illness or events. We ned to all work to build the church. We all need to help.
Which brings me to the final part of the services. They do the notices at the end after the benediction. And the last was a young man, calling the other young men, to help a brother finish renovating his house for his first baby. Because the baby was born at 24 weeks. Because he is in neonatal ICU with his wife caring for it.
And so the church will fix his walls, finish the painting, and get things ready. Because it needs to be done. And because we all at times need the community which is church.