What It's All About

Here's a quick but important reminder that is becoming more and more prominent as we work together and plan our way into the future.  I've found myself saying this in multiple venues in conversation with individuals and groups.

Church is about the relationship between God and his people.  Whenever you say or do anything in relation to your church faith consider that first, last, and always.

It's awfully easy to reduce church to a building or lot, rituals and traditions, a list of tasks to be done, a code of morality, or a series of judgments to get right.  Those things all play a part in church life, but they're just a part...subservient to the claim above.  The relationship between God and people--and through him the relationship between people and their neighbors--is the first concern of a faithful church.  If you get that wrong, none of the rest matters.

Jesus himself showed this through his life.  He never had a building to call his own.  He actually told people to leave their homes to follow him.  He prophesied that their grand temple would be torn down, not one stone left upon another.  Jesus chastised the empowered religious people of his age, warning them that their rituals and riches meant nothing because they used them to cement their own power instead of demonstrating God's love.  Dying on the cross wasn't a just act.  Had justice and rightness prevailed Jesus would have been the only guy living in that scenario.  He would have jumped down off the cross to smite everyone around him who had condemned, abandoned, or mocked him (which was everybody there).  Instead he forsook right judgment in favor of mercy and grace.

That's our pattern for "doing church".  It starts with that same mercy and grace as its highest values and patterns everything else accordingly.  Things don't have to get done perfectly.  Relationships have to be lived out lovingly, with charity and forgiveness.  That's walking in the Spirit.  Every other attempt at perfection is just idolatry in pretty clothes.

I hope our church tends to the relationship between God and people, between people and people, well.  Keep that highest priority in mind the next time you think about, talk about, plan or do anything in a church setting.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)