01-17-24

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
January 17, 2024
If a church is an idea (what was discussed on Sunday and in yesterday’s Etching), and we believe it is an idea inspired by God, then don’t you imagine that God is already at work in bringing together the necessary components to see this idea grow into into greater expression? If we say the church is an idea that has found a body, it begins to remove individual personalities and those personalities’ individual like and dislikes. I am not suggesting we lose sight of the beautiful and unique expression that is each person, but when those individuals bring their unique gifts to the common task (passion, purpose, mission, vision, idea), it is about what we are doing together for the sake of all those individuals who have come to believe that they are undeserving of love, that they are not worthy of mercy, or that God does not care about them. Often, they did not come to that conclusion alone. There were people or groups that reinforced it, leaving many people painfully lost. If the church, which is the very entity God has called forth to embody an idea, is consumed with individual likes and dislikes, it will never be the cohesive and singular body of Jesus Christ in the world. As the Apostle Paul says in 1st Corinthians 12, “ Christ is just like the human body—a body is a unit and has many parts; and all the parts of the body are one body, even though there are many. We were all baptized by one Spirit into one body, whether Jew or Greek, or slave or free, and we all were given one Spirit to drink (vs.12-13).

May the idea of your love, O Lord, a love that first loved us, continue to be the spiritual energy that binds us together for the work of love in the world. Amen.