Pentecost is often called “the birthday of the church.” But if we are born “not of flesh, but of water and the Spirit,” (John 3:5), then this church body is a spiritual body and it simply cannot have had a natural birthday on which it was plopped into the daylight of history a blinking wet chick.
“You are doing it all wrong,” Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. “Not everything–but the main thing: your celebration of communion—why, it’s not really communion. You’re doing it all wrong. ” Are we doing it right? In his book “Rabbi Jesus”, professor Bruce Chilton argues that what we’re doing is not at all what Jesus was up to at his last supper.
A lot of people do not want their crown. They want their religion to tell them what is true and what to do. The church has often colluded with its people to persuade them that the main purpose of the church is to rain down guilt and self-reproach for ourselves, honor and glory to Thee . . . Yet I defy anyone to find one word from the gospels where Jesus himself demands such of the faithful.
My study of history and anthropology and the Bible does not settle for me the question, whether there was a man named Jacob who fathered twelve sons who became each in turn father to a tribe secured within certain domains all contiguous and all honoring one God. I don’t know. Much tells against that simple tale, and heavy sands are blown across the pages of time. But of this we can be certain. In time, twelve tribes came to tell one story of their great fathers and mothers. In time, twelve tribes came by one name to praise and to fear God. Therefore, the telling of that one story is the irreducible fact with which we have to do. That telling—the willingness, the hope, the need to be bound together telling of God with one name only through one story—this is the mortar with which the Lord builds the house.
“Martha, Martha!” We must hear ourselves addressed. “You are worried and distracted by many things—but only one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen it. It will not be taken from her.” There is a priority in the two great loves. You might call it “soul service before social service.” Not: soul service more important than social service; just, soul service first, then social service, in a virtuous cycle, every round going higher, higher. Return to learn to love God with your all in all, and you will see your neighbor in ways ever-renewed . . .
Let us turn to the city of Corinth, A.D. 50. What news? Bad news. The church of Christ has been behaving badly from the beginning. There is a good news side to this bad news, however. The fact that we tell the story that then and now and throughout history, our churches have failed to grasp their purpose proves that some ships have been righted from grave wrongs and sailed on after the storms, guarding their treasures and handing them on for the living. That, and only that, is what is worthy in a tradition.
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