Picture this. Out in a desert wilderness two strangers, traveling side-by-side in a chariot, share an ancient sacred scroll into which they are enfolding their own questions and stories. The Ethiopian’s chariot is, for me, a perfect metaphor for church. Neither a steeple, nor a pulpit, nor a pew speaks to me about the church, ancient or modern, like this particular chariot. Even a baptismal font is not the church’s best symbol—though today’s story culminates in a baptism. No, my favorite symbol for the church is this chariot. I think our job, new church, is to travel with one another in side-by-side mutuality and love as we hold the scroll between us, share our questions and stories, and mark moments of transcendence and transformation with ritual. Church is primarily, for me, a vehicle for a story sharing community that is moving out into a hurting world and moving into God’s hopeful future.
Two Sundays ago we started listing things we as a new congregation have been learning and becoming. We may have thought the children weren’t paying attention, but of course they were. Soon they chimed in. We listened respectfully when 6-year-old Stella shared that when Open Table began worshiping in this particular space, she arrived here with her family that first Sunday last October expecting a different congregation would be inside. We hadn’t thought to explain to her that we would ALL be moving together to a new worship place. So she was relieved to realize, as she stepped into this beautiful sanctuary, that we were the same church, just in a new location. As she put it, “I learned we are the church everywhere we go!” I shared that story last week with the group of UCC pastors who were meeting through a conference call. They loved Stella’s phrase. Someone closed our conference call with that very phrase: “Let’s remember: ‘We are the church everywhere we go!’” I won’t be surprised if “We are the church everywhere we go” becomes the next slogan of the UCC. We’ll make sure Stella gets credit!*
Let’s look closer at that chariot, first to appreciate its most obvious characteristic: its mobility. Unlike this stationary pulpit, a traditional symbol of the proclaimed Word, the wheeled chariot’s purpose is forward movement. Followers of Jesus are impelled to move out into the world with care and compassion. Certainly Jesus ministered nomadically as he traveled from village to village. And even reading the Bible or praying, seemingly stationary spiritual disciplines, requires figurative movement, mental and soulful meanderings. Though “going on a journey to find spiritual meaning is nothing new,” Diana Butler Bass suggests that the question shaping 21st century spirituality is not “Who am I?” but “Where am I?” (p. 178). The Christian journey is just that—“a pilgrimage to the self, and ultimately to God” (193).[i] The church must itself be able to respond with agility to the needs and understandings of rapidly changing times. And the times, they are a changin’.
Culture watchers have observed that Christianity is undergoing a seismic shift the likes of which have not been seen for 500 years. For Christianity to survive, it must take into account the last century’s scientific theories, technological advances, horrific genocides, globalization, interfaith conversations, and postmodern perspectives that have been chiseling way at the church’s doctrinal foundations. In response to these perceived threats, Fundamentalists have fearfully transformed their churches into fortresses. Meanwhile, many postmoderns have abandoned the church entirely. But some Jesus followers understand that the church is always being re-formed, and it is possible for the church to be faithful to the essence of the Christian faith while incorporating postmodern values of pluralism, ambiguity, shared authority, mystery in tandem with reason, science in concert with art, spirituality in the service of social justice. Many follow in the way of Jesus without claiming Jesus is the only way to a harmonious oneness which is the aim of all spirituality. As the UCC is fond of saying, “God is still speaking.” So some Christians have set out in their chariots.
Other Christians have meanwhile been stirring together values of intolerance, biblical literalism, and hierarchy, but they will find that this mixture will set up around them like theological concrete. In yesterday’s Press-Register one local minister invoked the Church’s “immutable moral laws” to condemn homosexuality.[ii] But the one immutable law Jesus named was love. Our understandings of what is moral do sometimes need to change.
The forward motion that Christianity needs will come from neither reinforced nor even reformed doctrine but from a revived appreciation for the community of God and the revised version of the Jesus Story, a version actually more authentic to its origins. Which takes us back to the chariot metaphor.
The chariot pictures well not only the forward motion of the church but also another important aspect of the church: its communal quality. That side-by-side relationship required in chariot riding symbolizes a nonhierarchical type of ministry I admire. As we return to the passage in Acts, note that the ambiguous status of the Ethiopian makes him a fit symbol of a leveled, inclusive church.
On the one hand, the owner of the chariot is the wealthy, literate, and powerful treasurer of an African realm—but he humbly deigns to pick up a hitchhiker whom he invites to travel side-by-side with him in the chariot as an equal. Thus, the Ethiopian levels the power differential. He even admits to needing help understanding the sacred text of another faith tradition he has been reading. I would not be surprised if this privileged male were humble enough to stop his chariot and ask for directions if he got lost! And in fact that is what he’s doing.
On the other hand, the Ethiopian’s foreignness might have relegated him below Philip’s status and his asexuality as a eunuch would have, according to the Deuteronomic law, prevented him from entering the Temple. Since the Ethiopian is on a return trip from Jerusalem, it’s likely this man had attempted to enter the Temple to worship Isaiah’s God, whom he’s been reading about in the scroll--but was denied admittance because his sexuality was not “normal.” Even the Ethiopian’s oddly-worded request for baptism-- “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” suggests he fears, based on past experience, that some rule or prohibition will prevent his type from being included in the family of God. However, Philip disregards the religious codes of exclusivity. He also does some leveling. He tells the Ethiopian that God’s realm does indeed include him.
The relational aspect of the chariot tells us that the Gospel should come at the invitation of a fellow traveler, not as doctrine or diatribe but rather as dialogue. Jesus’ hopeful way is understood in community and put into practice in community. Reading scripture—or interpreting the texts of our lives—should happen collaboratively. In reading the Bible together we are not so much engaged in a process to see truth in the Bible as we are seeing through the Bible, as if it were a shared lens on the world. You and I see through the Bible together to the world beyond. Church is a Spirit-led community that learns and loves and sees together as our individual lives and our culture are transformed.
Which brings me to a final observation about this forward moving, relational chariot: it contains a scroll. Chariot riding is an occasion for a community to read and understand the Jesus Story through an ancient text while moving that story into the future. During our last book study, one of you asked an important question: “If the Bible requires so much effort to interpret it in healthy ways, why keep reading it?” Another way to ask that question is “Can we still be the Church without the Bible?” Or, in terms of today’s Bible story, “Must we travel with the scroll? Why not chunk it from the chariot, or find another, or compose our own as we travel? Can we journey together as a church without the Bible?”
I don’t think so. I answer somewhat tentatively because I love studying the Bible, so I recognize my biases. But I think I need both the freedom of the chariot and the rootedness and connectedness of the biblical scroll. Certainly you and I may bring additional books with us on our journey. But the church-as-chariot needs the biblical scroll, not to serve as a road map that tells us literally where to go, but to function more like a dictionary that offers us a common language and heritage, as a book of liturgy to shape our worship life, and as a storybook that grounds us in narrative frame that has been richly meaningful for thousands of years. Individuals can move forward spiritually without the scroll, but if we as a community are to move together in the way of Jesus, we need a shared lexicon and a common story of how others have experienced the Sacred. Besides, we have permission to argue with some of the Book's perspectives when the Spirit guides us to do so.
The Ethiopian and Philip see Jesus through a particular scroll that they hold between them: the book of Isaiah written hundreds of years before Philip and the Ethiopian were born. While our standard Christian gloss on that ancient Hebrew text is to identify Jesus as Isaiah’s “lamb…who opens not his mouth,” that was not the original writer’s referent. But hundreds of years later the writer of the book of Acts took Isaiah’s well-known poem and engrafted onto it the story of Jesus. We see how Philip uses the text to connect with the Ethiopian and to bring the text forward into relevance for his time and place. We can do that, too.
Verse 35 reads: “Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” Here we often “begin with scripture” but then ask, How does this passage point toward Jesus and GOOD news? If our interpretations don’t add up to the Good News of God’s love and grace, of reconciliation and resurrection, perhaps our scriptural inquiry is just shoring up unhealthy theology. One way to keep biblical study focused on Good News, not bad, is through collaborative interpretation. We need to test the Story’s goodness together.
Unfortunately, Christianity’s story has not always seemed good. Brian McLaren writes, “The failure of the world’s religions, especially the two largest religions, is to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the world’s current environmental, economic, and political crises.”[iii] As scandalous as it sounds, Christianity’s story needs revision to do just that. Progressive Christians are retelling the Christian story afresh.
Progressive Christians, rather than bemoaning the decline in church attendance and religious affiliation, are instead seizing this moment in the history of the church to unlearn some damaging parts of the story and to rewrite the ever-evolving Jesus Story. Christians cannot simply chunk from the chariot an unhealthy version of the Jesus Story. We must reframe the story as some have told it. We must make sure we tell it with compassion and healing and unity. And we have to add our own stories to the foundational story of Jesus.
That’s what Kenny did last week. He wove his own story of hope and love into the Jesus Story. Now is the time and the church is the place to jettison the misguided versions of the Jesus Story, to unlearn those, but to do more than that, to rewrite that story with words of hope and healing. Parts of the Jesus story have been distorted to exclude or demean or control, but we can reclaim them for healing and peaceful purposes.
I believe Christians can reframe the Jesus story "for the healing of the nations." Certainly other spiritual paths are also worthy and healing. Indeed, the exclusive version of the Jesus Story I grew up with no longer works for me. Yet my appreciation for pluralism in no way diminishes my conviction of the power of the Jesus Story to bring in God’s reign of peace and love. To me, everything depends on this. Not just the future viability of the church. The future of our planet depends on whether or not people can follow in Jesus’s way—whether they attribute that path to Jesus or not.
Our version of the Story we tell needs to capture this urgency. Our planet is in peril, and this is a saving story. I know of none better. But I won’t be able to explore it and then live into it without fellow pilgrims.
Our version of the Story we tell needs to capture this urgency. Our planet is in peril, and this is a saving story. I know of none better. But I won’t be able to explore it and then live into it without fellow pilgrims.
The story we read and interpret together has an urgent, saving, timeless message. But the story needs to be reframed and carried forward in the communal chariot we call the church. That's what we at Open Table are trying to do.
Thanks be to God for traveling companions like you!
*After the service, Stella told me that her sister Chloe may have been the one who came up with the words "We are the church everywhere we go!" She thinks she started the story but Chloe may have helped tell the story and added the final sentence--as sisters sometimes do. Stella wanted Chloe to get proper credit. I apologize for not remembering Chloe's additions to the story. We want to give her proper credit. Thanks, Stella and Chloe!
[i] Bass, Diana Butler. Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. New York: Harper One, 2012.
[ii] Shields, Bry. “Who Is It That Really Discriminates?” Mobile Press-Register (5 May 2012) 1D.
[iii] McLaren, Brian. Everything Must Change. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007.
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