from her generation into your own. She gave you roots, and she prayed that you would have wings. And because, across the centuries, this image of a good-enough mother has generally held up for most of us, Christians have often taken to calling this institution which has conveyed the tradition from one generation to another: “Mother Church.” She’s not perfect, either. She’s got issues. She’s gotten it wrong a bunch of times. The committee meetings can run long, the big decisions take so much time, all of that. But she told us the stories, she taught us the songs, she bathed us at font and she fed us at table, she nurtured us, she gave us the roots, and she prayed for the wings. She’s not the gospel that Jesus brought us, for Heaven’s sake, but she is the earthen vessel that has kept and preserved that treasure, and at her best she has transmitted that gospel, that precious treasure, from one generation to another. In these days when the air is filled with cries of protest and disgust about virtually all of our current institutions— the government, the banks, the corporations, and certainly the church—it strikes me that the protests themselves seem, in the moment at least, more satisfying than the solutions they propose. All of this intense desire for change has so far produced relatively few good and coherent recipes for change. As David Brooks puts it, “If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions, and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged. That’s what happened to Jefferson Bethke. “The paradox of reform movements,” says Brooks, “is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a countertradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.’” You’ve already made that attachment—to the church. That’s why you’re here today.
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Tom Currie—an alumnus of this Seminary and the dean of the Charlotte campus of Union Presbyterian Seminary— puts it well in his article in the recent issue of our faculty journal Insights. He examines this moment of unrest that we’re going through in our Presbyterian Church, this moment of schism, and in his last paragraph he says this: “The issue before us today is whether we can love the church. It gets so little love, and perhaps deserves less than it receives. It is so easily despised, especially for its manifold shortcomings, its weak and timid witness, its halting and vacillating call to discipleship, its own failure to live out what it professes … [But] the great mystery of the church is that Jesus Christ loves the church. Which is why the new heaven and new earth comes to focus in a new Jerusalem, ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’ And it is the voice from the throne that declares that this life [between Jesus and his church] is always a life together” (Rev. 21:3-4). Back near the beginning of this year, Kay and I were in New York for the annual gathering of Presbyterian presidents and board chairs. Several days of meetings, and each day began with Morning Prayer. One day, we were led in prayer by Rabbi Angela Bachdahl, an amazing young woman on the rabbinical staff of the largest synagogue in New York—maybe in the country. A good bit of that service was singing, and she played her guitar and taught us the most beautiful melodies, and we sang them. And then she taught us something about song itself. She said that every note in a song has a special relationship with the note before it and the note after it. They are not single notes unrelated to other notes, and somehow capable of being the song by themselves! No, each note needs all the other notes to make the song. Each note is in a special and sacred relationship with the note that came before it and the note that is to follow it. And while being sung, that note pauses to say to the note before it, “Thank you for being my teacher.” And then that note says to the note that will follow it, “I permit you to be even more beautiful than I am.” That, in my judgment, is a beautiful image of who we are in this generation of that ongoing song we sing as the church. And you: this is your moment to sound your note in that ongoing song. If it’s just you and your one note, it’s not a song. But if your note has the humility to see itself as the connector—linking the song that has come from before, with the song that is to come—then the melody is unbroken. And the church, that good-enough mother, continues. So it is that I charge you to do your best to love the church, and to pass on the Gospel, which is its treasure. v
The church is that earthen vessel that has kept and preserved the gospel and transmitted it from one generation to another.
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