thou shalt not change

"They profess to know God, but they deny Him by their actions." As I read the first chapter of the letter to Titus this morning this phrase struck me as a most ringing indictment.

First of all it is a challenge to all of us to be consistent - we will never perfect that - but if we talk about love and peace we should practice love and peace. But my mind them drifted to the institution. Institutions, and especially the Church, can be funny things. They have much which is good, learned and wise. But all churches can develop bad habits - and if they are not caught soon enough - the habits become enshrined in some strange pseudo-doctrinal way and really can deny God in the outliving and action of a Christian community. Perhaps the most famous psuedo-creed is - we have always done it this way.

There are some really common bad habits in Churches - things like the vestry meeting (PCC) in the car park after the official meeting ends inside. Coffee hours at which cliques form and newcomers are not welcomed (this is often accidental as people chat with their friends without thinking). Places where decisions have been devolved to one of two people who vigorously control everything about a community. All of these things mute voices, they preserve to the point of stultifying and they deny the power of the Holy Spirit to transform and grow the people of God.

St. Paul agrees with a line which writes off a whole ethnic group - Cretans - I am not sure I like this sort of blanket description very much - so I am not simply glossing over the whole passage - but this last line - this call to be who we are inside and outside is very important.

Kahlil Gibran writes famously on children but I think the same is true for our Christian community in so many ways - they grow like children, they slip and graze knees, like children, they squabble and fight, like children and they have moments where, like a child, they can reach out and touch the Divine almost like breathing.....

So let me change Gibran's words:

Your Churches are not your Churches.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for God.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

I will not destroy the original poem any further - but it seems to me that the problems we encounter with not being true to our profession of Christ are related to our desire to control our Churches and faith communities. They are not ours to control and when we try we begin to enshrine our place, ingest the transient, and believe things which are nothing to do with God they stem from a creed of humanity, egocentric humanity.

When we put ourselves, our institutions, our way of doing things at the center, we not only reduce God to a spectator but we also spell our own doom. Without the God who sustains and creates life, without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, without the redemption of Christ we will, indeed deny Christ by our actions as we desperately cling to what has been and we demand should be.

To profess Christ, we must allow God to be in control. It is not a matter of simply saying and then doing something different - it is a matter of seeing all things as given for our good - but allowing the Good, God, to be who God really is.