At The Table of Thanks

Trust

What I'm Hearing

Over the past several months, I've been traveling quite a bit. When I am with people, I ask a lot of questions. I'm just a curious soul who wants to understand what is going on in the world that we encounter every day. The tenor and substance of my conversations about the PCUSA are changing.

There are a range of topics that I hear. One is a deep concern about the state of presbyteries and how they will function in the future. Another is the impact that the Fellowship of Presbyterians / ECO: Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians will have on the church. A third conversation is a mixture of topics related to GA overtures this summer addressing the definition of marriage and ordination standards, the response by churches and presbyteries to GA votes, and a call for a moratorium on these issues while the new Form of Government has time to be fully implemented in the presbyteries.

I'm no seer with a crystal ball. I don't know what will become. It certainly appears from the conversations that I am having that we have a perfect storm of institutional change awaiting us on the horizon.

Trust

At the spring meeting of my presbytery, I heard appeals from the floor that as Presbyterians we need trust one another. I agree, wholeheartedly. Trust, however, is an outcome, a result, not a strategy.

Trust is the outcome of our attitudes and behaviors toward people and institutions. It is a product of the active expression of dignity, respect, and honor. When it is missing, some barrier stands in the way of the relationship exhibiting these qualities.

It reminds me of what Machiavelli wrote about ingratitude, that it "arises either from avarice or from suspicion." He wrote these words as advice to rulers and their treatment of the people they serve. If the people feel avarice, it is for the power and privilege that the ruler has. If suspicion, it because the ruler has not acted to build trust and confidence in his or her leadership. In our context, I'd say the issues are about who holds power in the church and the fear of those who believe differently that we do.

When ingratitude is present, trust is missing. When trust is present, then expressions of gratitude are evident. This is why my Five Actions of Gratitude are not just a set of nice sentiments, but rather a strategic approach to relationships in the church, and any institution. 

Here's how the Five Actions of Gratitude build trust.

Saying Thanks establishes a relationship of appreciation and gratitude with a person. To identify a reason to say thanks is to begin to create conditions where trust can be built.

Giving Back completes the circle of giving. I take my cue here from Thomas Merton in the beginning paragraphs of his book, No Man Is An Island.

"A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy."

"There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit.  True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared.  There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit.  Infinite sharing is the law of God's inner life.  He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves.  In disinterested activity we best fulfill our own capacities to act and to be."

For Merton, it is not enough that we are givers of love. Our love is to have a result, a response, an effect that is tangible. To love is more than about our obligation to love. It is about what is to be the impact of our love.

"Yet there can never be happiness in compulsion.  It is not enough for love to be shared: it must be shared freely.  That is to say it must be given, not merely taken.  Unselfish love that is poured out upon a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved.  And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied.  He sees that his love has failed to make the beloved happy.  It has not awakened his capacity for unselfish love."

"Hence the paradox that unselfish love cannot rest perfectly except in a love that is perfectly reciprocated: because it knows that the only true peace is found in selfless love.  Selfless love consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved.  In so doing, it perfects itself."

"The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it.  So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received."

I'd like us to consider the importance of these words not solely in the context of our personal relationships, but also in our professional relationships within the church. If this type of love was characteristic of our relationships in our presbyteries, we would not be asking the questions about why we cannot trust one another.

I am not naive as if I'm simply asking for us all just to get along. Rather, I am suggesting that our attitudes and behaviors are conscious choices we make based on emotional states like avarice and fear. 

Do we believe that perfect love casts out fear and produces magnanimity rather than the need for control?  It isn't a rhetorical question.

Making Welcome opens ourselves up to those whon we may feel are our adversaries. The practice of hospitality is the domestication of reconciliation. Trust builds relationships of reconciliation.

It was in a similarly divisive church context that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians,

"On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it."

How ironic that Paul leaves it to us to decide who is the weaker, less honorable, less respectable member. We make that judgment. Practicing open hospitality is a strategy that creates an environment of trust.

Honoring Others treat people with dignity, respect and care. Of the Five Actions, it is this action I've learned that the other four depend. It is the most difficult because it strikes at the heart of our own weaknesses of our fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness. We can practice the first three actions of gratitude in a sort of detached, mechanistic way. But to place the honoring of others ahead of our own welfare forces our egos  to either give way to humility, or abandon gratitude as impractical and unreasonable. Ultimately, trust results from how we treat one another.

Creating Goodness provides the conditions where trust can grow. Note in these words from Paul to the Ephesian church that God's gifts to us are summarized as kindness and that the goodness we create is the way of life that he has prepared for us to live.

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."  (emphasis mine)

To live the good life that God has prepared is to create an environment where trust is realized. Trust isn't some strategy for working out our differences. It is a measure of how well we are living out God's call.

Moving into the Next Era of Trust

I don't know what will happen this summer at General Assembly. I don't know how churches or presbyteries are going work together in the future. I don't know what the next two years much less the next 50 years will bring to our church.

Here's what I do know. The future of the church is not determined yet. I'm certain that it will not look like the church of our past. Virtually everyone I know admits that the present structure is not sustainable.  The larger question is how do we change while preserving the best of our Presbyterian tradition. How do we prepare for the next generation Presbyterian church?

Given time and opportunity, maybe the new Form of Government will spark an entrepreneurial grassroots rebirth of the church. If it does, then trust will grow.  New models of mission will develop. New worshipping communities will emerge. New ways of designing presbyteries will grow.  We will thne see the present as a moment in time rather than the end of time.

Trust is a key outcome and measure of our future. If trust is present, the church will grow. If not, it will continue to lose membership and churches.  It is a choice that we individually make, that is expressed through our churches and councils of the church.

How do I make this choice?  I choose to act, as one colleague has graciously shared with me, as a bridge. A bridge between people. A bridge between the past and the future. A bridge between the church as it has been and what it will look like in the future. A bridge between those who represent different sides of issues. A bridge for those who are afraid, angry and disaffected.

My offer is to any person, church or presbytery who is willing, to let me be in conversation with you about the future of the church.  Let us together ask these questions.

What should the church to look like in the future?

What new forms of the church do we need to develop?

How can those forms be structured to create trust?

How can we live into “the good works that God prepared to be our way of life?”

Let's talk, and may God build trust and kindness as the hallmarks of our future life together as Presbyterians

What Unites Us Makes Us Whole

There is a term that has become very popular for describing the future. It is emergent. As you can see from this listing in Wikipedia, emergent is applied in many different ways and in many different contexts.

I use the term in a very specific way. For me, it is a scientific term that identifies how something has become a whole-ly different thing through the interaction of its parts. In this sense, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And once it has become this new whole entity, it cannot be broken down into its collection of parts again.

The problem is that in virtually every field of knowledge and society, including the church, we have lost our ability to understand what something whole is. Our analytical approach to knowledge and truth breaks down wholes into parts, and then decides which part is the essential truth of the whole.  This reductive way of thinking has led to the divisive nature of almost every segment of our society, including the church.

The Whole of the Church

For the church, the experience at Pentecost was the catalytic act that changed the church from a collection of followers of Jesus Christ, into a global movement of the incarnation of Christ's grace and love in space and time.  We are not the same as any other institution, organization, association or ethical, or religious system of belief.  It is a difference that matters.

Of course, if you look at our denomination, you'd would be hard pressed to see it. We are just as divided and disunited as everyone else.

For us the future church isn't emerging. It is already emergent as something wholly different. Yet, we live in the in-between-times. For most of us, this emergent reality has yet to become our own emergent experience. It may be because our faith has yet to become whole within us. It is part social, part intellectual, part cultural, political and tradition. When it becomes whole within us, we are changed into something new and whole.

Without using this language, this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer is trying articulate in the essay, The Love of God and the Decay of the World, from his book, Ethics.

In my previous post, What Divides Us, I reflected on how Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the knowledge of God that determines all that we know and understand about ourselves and the world, and the knowledge of good and evil which places us in the position as judge of what is good and evil. In the latter, we become the ultimate authority of truth, and within our union with God, we are at best a penultimate one, if one at all.

This means that our answer to the division and disunion in the world and the church is not to take sides, but to be different. This is what Bonhoeffer shows us in Jesus' encounter with people.

Bonhoeffer's understanding of Jesus

Bonhoeffer begins the section, The World of Recovered Unity, by examinning Jesus' encounter with the Pharisee.

The Pharisee "... is the man to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life; in other words, he is simply the man of disunion. ... The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbor to the honor of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowlege."

This is the description of most of us. We are earnest, committed, devoted followers of Christ. We group together with those who are like us, as we see those who are not like us to be strangers or worse outside of the faith.  These are the kinds of people Jesus encounters. Their tactical approach to encountering Jesus is to ask questions that are essentially binary traps, either-or questions that are intended to force Jesus to pick sides.

And so, even when they come face to face with Jesus, they cannot do otherwise than attempt to force Him, too, into conflicts and into decisions in order to see how he will conduct Himself in them. It is this that constitutes the temptation of Jesus. ... The crucial point about all these arguments is that Jesus does not allow HImself to be drawn in into a single one of these conflicts and decisions. With each of His answers He simply leaves the case of conflict beneath Him. ... Just as the Phariees cannot do otherwise than confront Jesus with situations of conflict, so, too, Jesus cannot do otherwise than refuse to accept these situations. Just as the Phraisees' questions and temptation arises from the disunion of the knowledge of good and evil, so, too, Jesus's answer arises from unity with God, with the origin, and from the overcoming of the disunion of man with God.

This perspective of Bonhoeffer's rises out of his experience with the German church's relationship with Hitler's National Socialist Party. Here the church finessed the knowledge of good and evil by saying, the Nazi's can promote the cause of the church in Germany. (To better understand this reality, read Bonhoeffer's essay After Ten Years, from Letters and Papers from Prison.)

The picture Bonhoeffer presents is of a person who is in union with God, and the person who is disunited with God and himself. Here's what Bonhoeffer sees.

Jesus often seems not to understand at all what men are asking Him. He seems to be answering quite a different question from that which has been put to Him. He seems to be missing the point of the question, not answering the question but addressing Himself directly to the questioner. He speaks with a complete freedom which is not bound by the law of logical alternatives. In this freedom Jesus leave all laws beneath Him; and to the Pharisees this freedom necessarily appears  as the negation of all order, all piety and all belief.  Jesus casts aside all the distinctions which the Pharisee so laboriously maintains; … Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all. All this means that, for the Pharisee, He is a nihilist, a man who knows and respects only his own law, an egoist and a blasphemer of God. On the other hand, no one can discern in Jesus the uncertainty and the timidity of one who acts arbitrarily, but His freedom gives to Him and to His followers in all their actions a peculiar quality of sureness, unquestionableness and radiance, the quality of what is overcome and of what overcomes.  The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumerable possibilities; it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all action.

 When I read this recently, my thoughts were drawn to the disunion within our Presbyerian body. I realized that each side of every debate is certain in their claims. Certain that they have discerned what is true and right for the church. But the divisive nature of these ecclesiastical positions shows us that we are all Pharisees, working the ethical boundaries of the knowledge of good and evil. 

In the very first paragraph of Bonhoeffer's essay, he states that the aim of Christian ethics is to invalidate the knowledge of good and evil. It seems to me that we are caught in cycle where we are constantly validating our disunion from God, rather than the church's distinctive place in society.

There are two questions that are thrust upon us.

How can we live well as followers of Jesus Christ if we do not make judgments of good and evil?

What does it mean to live by the will of God?

These questions are important for us, because without understanding them we don't grasp the freedom and radicalness of Bonhoeffer's perspective.

There is a spurious activity of man which is itself a judgment, and there is also, astonishingly enough, a judgment which is true activity of man, that is to say, a ‘judging’ which springs from the achievement of union with the origin, with Jesus Christ. There is a ‘knowing’ which arises from the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Reconciler. … This judgment and this knowledge spring from unity, not from disunion. They therefore create not further disunion, but reconciliation.  Jesus Christ’s judgment consisted precisely in His having come not to condemn but to save … and likewise men who are reconciled with God and man in Christ will judge all things, as men who do not judge, and will know all things as men who do not know good and evil. Their judgment will consist in brotherly help, in lifting up the falling and in showing the way to the straying, in exhortation and in consolation, … and also, if the need arises, in a temporary suspension of fellowship, but in such a manner that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.  It will be judgment of reconciliation and not of disunion, a judgment by not judging, a judgment which is the act of reconciling. No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God.

The implication is that it is not within our power to bring unity to the church or society because the impetus at the heart of the knowledge of good and evil is to divide. Only God can bring unity, and only when we turn from being the ultimate authority, to see all things as God sees them. This is not some skill that we develop. It is the gift of grace that comes when we come to the realization that the way we have been living as people and the church isn't working.  This is what it means for that which unites us makes us whole. We become whole persons when we emerge from our attachment to a world organized around the principle of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Body As A Whole

The body imagery in the Scripture points to this truth. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 12:22-26 points this direction.

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it. 

Here is a picture of this reconciled union between God and the church, and of the people who are members of its communion.  So there may be no dissension. No division. No disunity. 

It needs to be said that this reality is first a spiritual one that then is reflected in the social, economic, political and organizational world. It is an inner connection that frees us from being the ultimate authority, to be a person who brings reconciliation. This is the will of God.

When it is happening, there is a whole-ness that emerges to show us what it means to be the Body of Christ as the church. 

So What Are We To Do?

First, we must recognize our sin of division, and our responsibility for creating the divisions within the church that are representative of our disunity with God. 

Second, we probably should make a list of all those people in whom we sit in judgment. Then, begin to pray that God would bring reconciliation between us. This is true at all levels, personal, congregation and denominational.

Third, be less quick to judge, and quicker to pray for wisdom in understanding what God sees in any given instance. Be patient, observant and open. Look at how Jesus handles conflicts. He didn't so much ignore their questions, but transform them into ones that would reflect upon their disunity with God.

Reconciliation is not a path towards uniformity or consensus, or validation of our own correctness, but peace and union with God in Jesus Christ. This is the emergent reality that distinguishes the church from other institutions. It is the unity that makes us whole.