The Irrelevant Moral Stranger

To be a pastor for nearly twenty years is to become familiar with people coming and going. People dropping in for a service or two or twenty, and then never coming again. People coming once a month, a quarter, a year and then disappearing. People enthusiastically jumping in to the life of the church and then one day vanishing without a word. It is to know what it is for the inquiring call or email to go unanswered. It is to wonder, even if only briefly, “What did I/we say, do, sing, pray, share, believe, be that was wrong or not enough or…” Well, you probably get it.

It’s a fool’s errand, most of this, I know. While I believe that earnestly seeking clarity is important and worth pursuing, trying to meet every real or perceived need of every person that walks through the door easily devolves into a kind of whack-a-mole. One little church cannot be all things to all people. Some people need different kinds of communities at different points in their spiritual journeys. Different people have different worship languages. Sometimes, people just don’t click socially. Sometimes priorities are misaligned. Sometimes other communities really would be a much better fit, theologically, ecclesially, liturgically. None of this is bad. It just is. 

And yet, the other day my heart sank, if only a little, when I heard through the grapevine why a certain person had left and not come back. Our church evidently did too much of x and not enough of y. They were looking for something different. It was mostly peripheral stuff, personal preference, none of it terribly surprising. I may have taken issue with the way some things were framed, but I don’t typically have much trouble blessing people on their way if the way we do things is an obstacle for them. The church of Jesus Christ is big and broad and has room for all kinds. And yet, I’ll confess that a tiny part of me thought, “Really? That’s why you left?” I guess I was hoping it would be for something more, I don’t know, weighty.

I’ve recently been reading a book called Glimmerings by Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf, both of Yale Divinity School. It’s framed as a conversation between a poet (Wiman) and a theologian (Volf) and is a series of letters between the two friends about faith. This afternoon, I was struck by a simple statement made by Wiman in one of his letters where he was pondering the person of Jesus and how both he and Volf, whatever their disagreements and doubts might be, were drawn, powerfully, to this man:

Just imagine how beautiful religion could be if the true Christ were at its heart. 

I sat with that statement for a bit. In a sense, I have given my life to the institution of the Christian religion. I love it, but it can be annoying, too. The politics, the awkward social dynamics, the endless hypocrisies and unworthy preoccupations, the endless splitting off into ever more righteous and pure denominations and sub-sets. The consumer preferences. The leaving. So often it seems like the true Christ is nowhere near the heart of any of it.

Miroslav Volf also paused on this statement of Wiman’s. Here’s how he responded:

“Just imagine how beautiful religion could be if the true Christ were at its heart,” you write. I imagined. And I sighed.

Yeah. Me, too. 

Volf goes on:

I have come to think that Jesus Christ has become a moral stranger in today’s cultures of late modernity. He is a stranger to those who call themselves by his name and not just to those who have barely heard of him, who have no interest in rectifying that lack or any sense that there is anything there to rectify at all. Most of what is important to us—looks, money, sex, social esteem, success—does not seem to have been important to him. We have no idea how he looked; he had no possessions of his own; he never had intercourse; when word of him spread in a region, he would withdraw into solitude or go elsewhere; in obedience to God, he seems to have intentionally headed straight into what all those around him thought was a colossal failure. Most of what was important to him—purity of desire, going a second mile, forgiving innumerable times, serving the lowly, for instance—is odious to us…

Jesus, an irrelevant moral stranger. 

It is of course, no great mystery that the church often falls far short of the One in whose name we gather each week, the One whose love has bound us one to another, the One whose will we claim to seek, the One whose Way we claim to have chosen above all else, the One whose beauty draws and holds us. We are poor and miserable creatures in countless ways, far more prone to worshiping smaller gods than the true Christ. We so easily and naturally make a religion with Jesus at its heart less beautiful than it could and should be. We so easily and naturally make it about ourselves. This has been the case from the beginning, as any honest reading of church history (or the New Testament) makes plain. 

But just because it’s not surprising doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek something better, truer, more beautiful and worthy in our work and worship. I don’t want Jesus to be an irrelevant moral stranger, in my church or in my life. I don’t want what is important to me to bear so little resemblance to him and to his priorities. I don’t want what is important to him to be odious to me.