Where Are We?

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.'

-Lewis Carroll

Or, as the King of Siam was fond of saying, “Is a puzzlement!” Only one thing is certain as pertains to Christianity and The Church: we are fallen and keep falling. After the rains threatened once again to flood our basement, I took to organizing some of my books and things. I revisited an old friend: The Dream of God by Verna J. Dozier (1917-2006). It is one of only two or three books I ever recommend to people who want to know more about God, Jesus and Christianity. A true prophet and mystic in the tradition of Howard Thurman or James Weldon Johnson, she gets what Jesus and the Bible are all about, much to the challenge and consternation of The Church, that institution that ought to know better, but has consistently fallen to the temptation to control the narrative, and in turn control the Good News.

She begins with Howard Thurman’s summary of The Dream of God: “a friendly world, of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky.” One of her many keen theological insights is that in the history of God’s repeated attempts to be in relationship with people there have been not just one, not two, but three Falls. Beginning with the love and vulnerability God. In the words of James Weldon Johnson:

And God stepped out on space

And said: I’m lonely,

I’ll make me a world.

God seeks companionship. As the poem continues, Johnson has God walk around and look on “all that he had made,” and yet, “He looked on his world/With all its living things/And God said: I’m lonely still.

Then God sits down –

On the side of a hill where he could think;

By a deep, wide river he sat down;

With his head in his hands,

God thought and thought,

Till he thought: I’ll make me a man!

-          (God’s Trombones, Viking: 1927)

Of course, despite all the creatures of the Earth, the man, like God, made in God’s image, is also “lonely still,” so God fashions a companion. All is well, but soon comes the First Fall: the first man and woman choose to live another way from the way God had planned for them. Like many such falls, it begins with amnesia and believing a lie. In this case it is that if they would only eat the fruit of the one tree they were instructed not to eat they would be like God. Forgetting they are already created imago Dei, in the image of God, they eat the fruit, are ashamed, and immediately try to hide from God and one another. In Genesis 3, as God’s presence strolls in the the Garden, the primary and really only question for them and for us all comes as God calls out, “Where are you?” It is a question that continues to echo through the ages right down to this present moment in time. Fall number One. We still struggle to answer this one question.

Later, we read in 1 Samuel chapter 8 that the people of God, who have been cared for by God sending them ad hoc leadership as necessary (in the Bible called judges), see that Samuel is grown old, his sons do not follow in the ways of God, and they suddenly demand to have a king like the other nations, not trusting God to provide a new leader. Mistakenly they believe that such a king will not only govern them, but “will go out before us and fight our battles.” Samuel petitions God on their behalf. God points out that contrary to their belief what will really happen is that such a king will conscript their sons to fight his battles, not theirs; he will take your daughters to be perfumers, bakers and cooks; he will take the best of all your produce and land for himself; and take all your servants and animals for himself; and you will cry out, and I will not answer you in that day. But the people insist and petulantly demand a king, and so it is they get Saul, who is endlessly problematic. Then come David and his sons, and it turns out just as the Lord had said. Solomon represents the consolidation of all the goods of the kingdom to support him and his household, and under his son Rehoboham the people revolt. The Second Fall. Believing that kings can save you. You still have to fight your own battles.

Finally, suggests Dozier, nearly three hundred years after Jesus, Jesus who tries desperately and compassionately to return the people to the Dream and the Way of God, the people of God make the choice to embrace the Emperor Constantine and become the Empire. Which is a choice against the “uncertainty, the freedom and the risk of trusting God.” It was bad enough that the Jesus movement became an institution like the church, but now it had become the very Empire and a kingdom like all others, instead of the alternative to such Empires stretching all the way back to the days of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece and now Rome, the very empire that had persecuted the followers of God and Jesus in the first place. The Third Fall.

To this day the church struggles to recover any semblance of the Jesus Movement. It is wise of our current Presiding Bishop to speak more about our being the Jesus Movement than he does of “the church.” As her book continues, Dozier rightly critiques much of what the church became and remains: an institution devoted more to maintenance of its existence than a movement away from earthly kingdoms, repentance and a return to the Dream of God and God’s ways. She sees our baptism as our calling as those chosen for God’s purposes; “that the dream of God for a new creation may be realized. God has paid us the high compliment of calling us to be coworkers with our Creator, a compliment so awesome that we have fled from it and taken refuge in the church. God does not need such an institution. ‘Destroy this temple,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will rebuild it in three days.’ The institution is replaceable. The living body of God’s people is not.”

Where are we? What this remarkable woman saw as we have it in the stories in our Bible is that we are called to a possibility “other than the kingdoms of the world.” She recognizes that we do need what she calls “resting places where the story is treasured and passed on in liturgy and education. There must be those islands of refuge where the wounded find healing; the confused light; the fearful courage; the lonely community; the alienated, acceptance; the strong, gratitude.” But, such resting places and islands of refuge do not necessarily need to be what we traditionally think of as churches. They might be, but they need not be, churches as we know them. There can be other forms of community, resting places and islands of refuge that do not require the maintenance of structures that no longer serve our calling as coworkers with our Creator.

I suspect it all begins where her book ends, by first admitting and confessing that we have failed the Dream of God. The Good News, wrote Dozier: “The terribly patient God still waits.”