Taste the Soup
Sometimes understanding follows obedience.
[ posted at CT 9/26/2012 11:18 ]
A man goes into a deli, orders the matzo ball soup, and motions the waiter back to his table.
"Taste the soup," says the man.
"Sir, is something wrong?" asks the waiter. "I can get you another bowl right away."
"Taste the soup," says the man.
"Sir, is there something you want me to tell the chef?"
"Taste the soup."
"Fine," says the waiter, exasperated. "I'll taste it. Where's the spoon?"
"Aha!" says the man.
Sometimes you have to do what's being asked of you
before you understand why it's required. You have to be willing to taste
the soup in order to discover the spoon is missing. In religious
parlance: "Understanding follows obedience." It's an axiom every bit as
true as it is vexing. Psalm 111 observes that "all who follow [God's]
precepts have good understanding"—not the other way around.
Lately, for me, the command to "taste the soup" has been about attending church. Trouble is, I just haven't felt like going.
I've been sliding into pews (or modern equivalents) from
infancy; my vocation has taken me to hundreds of churches around the
world. I've met some of my dearest friends and endured some of my
darkest betrayals in youth rooms, foyers, and sanctuaries. I've cried,
sung, prayed, committed, disconnected, recommitted, scribbled sermon
notes, doodled, been wounded, been healed, encountered the Mystery, and
dozed off—sometimes all in the same service.
There are seasons when Sunday can't come soon enough. The gifts church has given me are too numerous to list.
But there are also stretches of disillusionment. Times
when the songs that once ushered me into a profound awareness of God's
presence seem suddenly schlocky and manipulative. Mornings when I can't
find anyone I know during the "greeting" time, and a previously cozy
ritual morphs into a caricature of superficial community. Those are the
Sundays I struggle with the sermon and feel my theological earnestness
hardening into elitism, discernment distorting into self-righteousness.
Like anyone who has logged serious pew time, I've got
reasons to be jaded. I've seen churches split over trivia while they
trivialize glaring immorality amongst their leaders. I've encountered
gossip posing as prayer, and bullying masquerading as "spiritual
guidance." I've watched the realignment and reduction of the gospel into
a business plan for membership growth or personal improvement.
Most damaging of all, I've looked into my own heart and
known that if my pew-mates are anything like me, church is composed of
frail humans, each of us an unreliable, potentially dangerous mess of
conflicting motives and wavering intentions.
People who complain that church is boring have no idea. Church is scary.
So I sell myself the half-truth that church is something we are rather than something we do.
I stay home with my theology textbooks and Bible and enjoy a
dissension-free congregation of one. I console myself with an online
network of enlightened individuals who share both my convictions and my
cynicisms. We satirize the excesses of organized religion, feeling
cleverer than we ought about shooting the fish in our own barrels. We
create a virtual but significant community. And for a while, it's
enough.
There's just one problem. Beneath my rhetoric of
antilegalism, enlightenment, and self-protection there remains a still,
small—but increasingly insistent—voice. And it's telling me to taste the
soup.
The biblical witness indicates that when God gets hold
of people, they almost always work out the implications in groups. This
has never been an easy process. The Israelites praise, squabble, fail,
and repent together in a seemingly endless cycle. The Christians in the
apostle Paul's churches alternately thrill and break their pastor's
heart over and over again. But they keep at it, and with every try Paul
grows more passionate about the ragtag crew of notoriously fallible
humans who so thoroughly are the church that they can't help but do
church together. Striving to convey the profound connection between
Jesus and the people who gather in his name, Paul employs only the most
intimate metaphors—we are Christ's bride, or his very body.
The triune God has always been into community. And
community, I am forced to admit, ultimately requires meeting together
with flesh and blood folks I cannot "block" or "unfriend" should they
become annoying. It means getting close enough to hug and to arm
wrestle, to build (and sometimes hold) each other up, even as we risk
letting each other down.
It is important to remember that "tasting the soup" is
not the same as "drinking the Kool-Aid." We are not required to
unthinkingly remain in toxic or abusive environments, or even to follow a
particular structure or meet on a certain day. Obedience in this area
is simply intentional proximity with a group of people who love Jesus
and each other. It is coming together to his table, if only because that
is what he asks us to do. And it is trusting that he'll show us not
only the spoons we're missing, but also the feast he has in store.
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1 comment:
I should have told you this the FIRST time I read this, but here 'tis anyway...thank you.
Being a child of the 70's, I've done my share of poo-pooing Established Religion and Just Being Into Jesus, but Derek Webb was right when he put these words into Jesus' mouth in his song "The Church": "If you love me, you will love the church."
No such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian...besides, even the LR had Tonto.
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