Rev. Dr. Elaine Heath writes a letter to the church today:
Dear church, God’s one holy, catholic, and apostolic church: …
Let’s get on with our work. You know the parable of the wineskins [see Luke 5:37–38]. For goodness’ sake, you taught that parable to me! We are in a time of wineskin change. Let’s celebrate that instead of wringing our hands. Let’s thank God for the old wineskin and the grace it carried to us. And let’s celebrate the new wineskin with its expansive fermentation. Let’s do both. We don’t have to choose.
So what if we are losing our privileged place in society? We never did our best work there anyway. We’re always our best on the bottom or the edge. This is a great time to remember the saints and mystics who founded our traditions, the ones who did their work from the margins.
Because—and I say this with more love than I can name—we can’t afford to keep squabbling about things like buildings, budgets, pews, stoles, handbells, praise bands, and carpet…. We must stop that at once. God needs all hands on deck. We cannot continue operating as if we are a private club with members, dues, and privileges. Why? Because Jesus never acts like that. Our neighbors need us. God needs us. We need us too.
I know it’s hard to play and be creative when we feel fearful. Anxiety takes the spring out of our step…. We don’t have to be afraid. That is the wonderful news. God’s love casts out fear. God is with us. With us! God orchestrates systems change. Change happens all the time so that every generation, every community, every person can experience God in their world, their context, their time.
Heath imagines the possibilities on the other side of our anxiety:
Beloved church, can we agree to let God have our anxiety? God knows how hard it is for us to let go. We simply have to be willing to be made willing. Just a tiny degree of openness allows God to work with us—like dandelion seeds. They blow on the wind, fall into every crack … and before you know it a parking lot is in full bloom. Church, do you realize we are on the cusp of a new Great Awakening? And it looks like a spiritual dandelion explosion as far as the eye can see. God’s new thing is networked, exponential, Spirit-breathed, decentralized, a vast planting of small communities of faith…. It is very much the work of laypeople, and it is emerging as a natural progression out of the church that used to be….
I know if we will say yes to God, we can rely on God’s already having said yes to us. So let’s go together, all of us, in the direction that God leads. When that happens, the world will know that Jesus spoke the truth, that God’s love is for everyone. People will encounter the real tradition, the tradition behind the tradition, because they will experience it in us.
Reference:
Elaine A. Heath, God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church (Upper Room Books, 2016), 97–100.
Image credit and inspiration: Earl Wilcox, Untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a potter creating a bowl out of clay, this moment shapes us.
Story from Our Community:
I volunteer for a program that provides emotional support and respite for caregivers of loved ones suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia. We provide therapeutic art activities, movement, music, socialization. After a difficult day, my fellow volunteers and I joke about deserving a raise for our work. It makes us laugh, because, well, 10% of nothing is still nothing. Our true reward are things like sharing a simple smile with someone who has been struggling. My work here sometimes feels like a good example of paradox. It’s both difficult and so very easy. We don’t get paid and yet we are rewarded profoundly. Kindness and humor feel like the threads that hold us together.
—John M.
