It's Just a Bus Ride

There are things I have hated to admit over time. One: I battle envy on a fairly regular basis. Two: I really like control. The first one has seen enough ink. The second one has some energy to it today.

Over the course of the past several months (a year already... how time flies), our church has been taking a good hard look at ourselves and at our community to see where we need to invest in our growth and in the shalom of the Glen Lake area. And so we saw in ourselves a need to grow in the areas of spiritual formation/disciplines (who doesn't?) and that our community was one where isolation was becoming more of a "thing." Isolation is a regular experience for people living in the most beautiful place in America. What a good way to encourage spiritual discipline than to commit ourselves to ending isolation? Spiritual disciplines, after all, open ourselves to God and neighbor, effectively ending isolation from both.

Then it got personal. I committed myself to understanding public transit in a rural community. Whereas I would think that I would embrace public transportation in an urban area, I tend to think of my car as a survival skill in Glen Arbor. My inner dread increased as I began to think about the things I would need to cope with in order to make the bus part of my life.

I am a couple miles from the nearest bus stop.

The bus only comes a couple times a day.

The places I need to go can be a mile or two from the bus stop.

I have to be prompt and carry cash (even exact change!).

Confession: I feel entitled. I feel entitled to my car. I feel entitled to my schedule. I feel entitled to do what I want when I want. The rural public transportation system defies my entitlement.

Entitlement is a dirty word nowadays, particularly in a time of sequestration. Entitlement has gone from a feeling to a code word for government subsidy. Nobody wants to admit to feeling "entitled." So allow me to say it again, allow me to bring that demon out of the shadow and into the light, where it belongs.

I feel entitled to controlling my own life.

I wish the bus system was the only place this entitlement shows up. But it isn't. My entitlement shows up in how I respond to interruptions. My entitlement shows up when I work really hard and it doesn't go according to plan. My entitlement shows up in how I expect the social systems of the world to work for me all the time, even when I hear my neighbors and friends lament how the systems seem to be arrayed against them. And so I show up with a degree of entitlement. And I don't like it. I like to think of myself as a justice-minded, shalomy type of pastor. And still, I sit in my office grumbling over the fact that my bus stop is a one mile walk from the my target.

Richard Foster would not list "bus riding" as part of the new edition of "Celebration of Discipline," but that's just what it will be for me as I seek to make the bus part of my life. It's a chance to challenge my own model of how the world "should be" and embrace the way God would have it be. It may be just a bus ride, but for me, it's a prayer.

Does Jesus Live in a Church?

Very few theologians would state that the answer to the above question is "yes." Despite my hyper-awareness of every sound in the church building after the sun goes down, I don't expect to find Jesus taking cookies out of the freezer or anything. I do that. Jesus doesn't.

So why do I ask the question about where Jesus lives? I think we functionally understand that Jesus lives inside the church walls, looking out at a broken world and hoping people will come to Him for solutions. It sort of reminds me of the psychiatric stand in the Peanuts cartoon strip. We hold this view when our outreach strategies and programmatic endgame is to get people within the walls of a church building so that they can meet Jesus. This plan, however effective it may have proved in the past (even this is disputable, this plan has created the current reality of the US Church), has significant drawbacks. Those drawbacks are as old as the book of Genesis.

When God created, God formed a Temple worthy of God's beauty and majesty. This Temple was called the universe, or Creation if you want to use more Church-language. Within that Temple, God created a smaller temple called Eden. God moved about the temple as a smaller version of the big thing, but with one notable exception- the presence of human beings. But human beings thought that God was confined, and so they opted for "wisdom" and instead received shame. They hid in the mini-temple from God. A place which had told the story of God's beauty suddenly didn't. It now told the story of hiding. And so that mini-temple was abandoned.

The second mini-temple was the tabernacle, culminating in the construction of a physical temple in Jerusalem. This temple also reflected the cosmic Temple with the exception that there were now steps of entrance so that human beings could be in the temple space with God as well. But the problem came when the people of Israel thought that God was confined to the mini-temple, and not the Temple. So with a version of God neatly confined to the Jerusalem temple, the Israelites trashed the cosmic Temple with waste, denial of sabbath, injustice and idolatry.

The New Testament introduces a new mini-temple- the Church. Not the building, the physical bodies of the people. Now the cosmic Temple unites with the mini-temple. And the Holy Spirit resides in both.

And so now we come to the dangerous theology of Jesus living inside the Church structures. Church buildings, in my estimation, are good. They can house worship services, community functions, and provide resources for ongoing ministry to the most vulnerable and marginalized in the community. However, they also run a particular risk of believing that Jesus is waiting on us to minister before He will get involved.

The New Testament seems to say that Jesus wants to partner with us in ministry, but not to wait for us. Indeed, it seems that we inherit Jesus' ministry, which means that Jesus is already outside the walls and working. Jesus is on the streets and sitting in the homes of the lonely. Jesus is in the eyes of the starving and providing encouragement to those in despair. In fact, when we meet Jesus in Revelation 3, Jesus is trying to go to church but has been locked out. The people inside are too busy caring about other things than getting involved in Jesus' work of love, justice and reconciliation. For those who are wondering, it is the Church of Laodicea, who famously get called "lukewarm" and have been the subject of intense sermons for centuries.

Friends, we have been hiding since Genesis 3. We have been trying to rest on our own "in-ness" since the Old Testament. Jesus is already at work in the great Temple of the universe, and the Holy Spirit has been flitting about creating since Genesis 2. Our choice is to let Sunday morning be our encouragement to move out into the world and join Jesus out there, or to stay in the walls and wait for Jesus to find the spare key in order to get back in. Let's go.