The following is from the second chapter of For All God’s Worth by NT Wright, Bishop of Durham. It resonated in my heart Saturday as I was the tourist and photographer in two of New Orleans’ lesser-known cathedrals: St. Alphonsus and St. Mary’s in Uptown. I also think it’s appropriate in light of recent comments regarding the SBC and churches.
The reason why Chad came to Lichfield, and the reason why an ancient scribe lavished such craftsmanship on those priceless pages, is quite simply that the message in those Gospels is even more priceless: the message, that is, that the true God takes our brokenness and in Christ makes us new; that he picks up the pieces of our life, yes, even of our muddled attempts to follow him, and sticks them together again in a new way; that he heals those who are broken in heart, and gives the medicine to heal their sickness; that he promises new life, resurrection life, beyond all our sickness and death. To celebrate precisely hear is to celebrate not the wonderful achievements of the church but the healing power of God to build his church with battered and broken building-blocks; including people like you and me. Celebration and healing; it is all God’s work.
And what if the seams are still visible? What if the stitching still shows? What if we carry about with us the pains of being half pt back together and half still in pieces? What if we have identity crises, if we live with ambiguities and face problems we can’t fix overnight? Is that no what being a Christian is all about? As Paul continues, we are taken for imposters, and yet are genuine; dying, and behold we live; in pain, yet always full of joy; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing everything. Paul is not describing an occasional unfortunate lapse from the norm. This is the normal Christian experience.
It is because people forget this that much nonsense is spoken and written today. From time to time in the UK certain journalists enjoy mocking the Church of England for having lost its nerve. We are hopelessly divided, they say, heading for ruin, going round in circles like a rudder-less ship, with our leaders in disarray and our people in confusion. The evidence they cite consists, often enough, of quotations from each other, and from a suspiciously short list of would-be spokesmen (they’re usually men) from the church.
I wonder which world these people live in? Where is it written in scripture that we can expect the church to be free from financial problems, from doctrinal controversy, from difficulties about leadership, from deep personal and corporate anxieties? Where is it written in history that there ever was such a church? Where is it written in theology that God demands such perfection? Go back to Paul’s second letter to Corinth and you will find that it concerns exactly these issues. And Paul addresses his readers in Corinth, not with carping criticism, but with the power of love; not with sneering put-downs about what a shabby lot they were in Corinth, but with the gospel of Jesus; not with cynicism, but with the cross.
And the cross – as the very shape of the cathedral, like so many churches, reminds us – the cross is the be-all and end-all of the gospel. It is the cross that generates celebration and offers healing. It is all God’s work: the cross speaks of the God who didn’t send someone else to do the dirty work but came and did it himself; of the God who lived in our midst and died our death; of the God who now entrusts us with that same vocation. Because of the cross, being a Christian, or being a church, does not mean claiming that we’ve got it all together. It means claiming that God’s got it all together; and that we are merely, as Paul says, those who are overwhelmed by his love. A cathedral is not the triumphalistic sign of a careless power and prestige; it is the covenant sign of a suffering love, the symphony in stone in honour of the Servant King.
And if the seams are still visible – if the stitching still shows – so what? Those journalists of whom I spoke should leave their comfortable metropolis for a moment and come here; come and worship with us, share our life for a few days; then come round the diocese and see the new green shoots that are growing through the secular concrete; look where the blind are seeing, and the lame are walking, and the dumb singing for joy. … Let them come and see that at the heart of England there is a building whose very stones speak of God’s healing love; that at the heart of that building there is a book whose every page is a work of art celebrating that love; and that around that book there is a community of people committed to the one whom that book speaks, who know themselves called to live not for their own sakes but for his sake who died and rose again. This is our God, the Servant King; he calls us now to follow him.
And if we are to make such an invitation, our immediate task is to consolidate what this community is already good at. No one comes into this cathedral, or into any church, without some pain or fear, without some guilt or grief. But the testimony of many is that when they have come here they have felt welcomed, loved and sustained. That is wonderful, and I thank God for it. People have learned elsewhere today to expect rudeness and even violence as the norm. They are thirsty for gentleness, for kindness, for the sense that they matter. They need to be shown that there is a different way of being human, that the true God embraces them as they are, with the healing power of the cross and the life-giving breath of the Spirit. That welcome is our work, because it is all God’s work, and he invites us to share in it.
We are therefore, in Paul’s words, to be ambassadors for Christ. We don’t have to be perfect in ourselves. On the cross he dealt with our sin so that he could then work through us, so that we in turn might embody the saving faithfulness of God to all those whom we meet, all those who enter here. And the real mystery of that is that we do it not so much in our triumphs as in our tragedies; not in our strength but in our weakness; not in our success but in our failure. In the real world it is the wounded who heal. That is why the chequered history of this cathedral forms such an eloquent statement of the gospel. Celebration and healing; this is to be a place where eyes are opened to truth, where ears long deaf hear their name spoken in love, where those who had forgotten how to sing discover a joy which refuses to remain silent. And when we live by that gospel, then tourists may find themselves becoming pilgrims; photographers may stop clicking for a moment and glimpse true beauty; musicians may hear undreamed of harmonies; and historians may come face to face with the one who is Lord of the dead and the living. And so, as celebration leads to healing, healing leads back to celebration. It is all God’s work; and those who find themselves called it must, quite simply, ‘serve God and be cheerful’.
NT Wright, For All God’s Worth, pp. 18-22.
by Joe Kennedy
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