(Song of Solomon 6:4) You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners.
Traditionally, the Feast of Epiphany (January 6th in the western calendar) follows the Twelfth Night of Christmastide (January 5th) ending the season which celebrates Christ’s entering the world as God in the flesh. The name comes from the Greek epiphania – “manifestation”. Epiphany seems to have originated in the Eastern Church as a holiday especially commemorating Jesus’ baptism (see photos at end of post) but also closely associated with Christ’s nativity, the miracle at Cana, and the visit of the Magi. All these events emphasize the revelation of the Son of God as a human being. Christ’s baptism by John was an important way of his identifying himself entirely with the plight of his people – though sinless he accepted the baptism of repentance. The Eastern Orthodox commemorate this by leaping into icy waters every year at Epiphany (January 19th on their calendar).
In Western settings the Magi visit gets primary emphasis on Epiphany – those Gentile sages who followed a stellar sign to pay homage to Jesus some time after his birth (Matthew 2). Those foreigners recognized baby Jesus as Jewish royalty while the Jews themselves were largely oblivious that anything significant had happened. (The Magi are the ones who told Herod, not realizing he would seek to kill the child as a rival.)
The obscurity of Ephiphany provides me an opportunity to feature another quote from Eugene Peterson’s recently published memoir, The Pastor. As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reading Peterson in an effort to seek guidance from a much more experienced pastor, and he does not disappoint. (See my Nov. 4 post, The Congregation as Sanctuary, below for more on the book and Peterson’s background.)
What follows is an extended quote from the conclusion of chapter 16 of The Pastor in which Peterson explores the close correlation between Christ’s obscure birth and the original obscurity of the Christian church, in its historical origin and within Peterson’s own experience in starting a new congregation.
Throughout this chapter Peterson explores the spiritual benefit of meeting for worship in an unconventional setting, namely Peterson’s large windowless basement, for two and a half years. This was a new church plant which Peterson had initiated just north of Baltimore, MD in the early 1960s. As they persisted in meeting underground, some of the youth dubbed the new congregation “Catacombs Presbyterian”. Peterson welcomed that designation as it emphasized God’s work in hidden places – like the womb of Mary.
How did God bring our Savior into our history? We have the story of what he could have done but didn’t. God could have sent his son into the world to turn all the stones into bread and solve the hunger problem worldwide. He didn’t do it. He could have sent Jesus on tour through Palestine, filling in turn the seven grand amphitheaters and hippodromes built by Herod and amazing everyone with supernatural circus performances, impressing the crowds with Super-God in action. He didn’t do it. He could have set Jesus up to take over governing the world – no more war, no more injustice, no more crime. He didn’t do it.
We also have the story of what he, in fact, did do. He gave us the miracle of Jesus, but a miracle in the form of a helpless infant born in poverty in a dangerous place with neither understanding nor support from the political, religious, or cultural surroundings. Jesus never left that world he had been born into, that world of vulnerability, marginality, and poverty.
And then the parallel question: how did he bring our salvation community into our history? … Pretty much the same way he brought our Savior into the world – by a miracle, every bit as miraculous as the birth of Jesus, but also under the same conditions as the birth of Jesus. Celebrities were conspicuously absent. Governments were oblivious.
…The Holy Spirit descended into the womb of Mary in the Galilean village of Nazareth. Thirty or so years later the same Holy Spirit descended into the collective womb of men and women, which included Mary, who had been followers of Jesus. The first conception gave us Jesus, the second conception gave us church.
It was a miracle that didn’t look like a miracle – a miracle using the powerless, the vulnerable, the unimportant. Not so very different from any random congregation we might look up in the yellow pages of our telephone directories. When Paul described his first-generation new-church development in Corinth – “ not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many of noble birth, but…the low and despised in the world” – he could have been writing about us.
Some people have a hard time believing that Jesus was conceived in the virgin womb of Mary. We were having a hard time believing that the church was being conceived in that catacomb [Peterson’s basement] womb which was us. But we stayed with the story. It would have been a lot easier to imagine a church formed from an elite group of talented men and women who hungered for the “beauty of holiness,” congregations as stunning as the curvaceous Tirzah and as terrifying to the forces of evil as the army with banners. But then where would we be? We wouldn’t have had a chance of being part of it.
The story had its way with us. It became more and more clear that when God forms a church, he starts with the nobodies. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works. Those are the people he started with – Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon – to bring our Savior into the world. Why would he change strategies in bringing the salvation community, church, this congregation into formation?
…Those old romantic illusions of sweet Tirzah and the terrible army were hard to give up. And the deceptive rush of adrenaline and the ego satisfaction that would put me in control of a religious business were continually seductive. Spiritual consumerism, the sin “crouching at the door” that did Cain in, was always there. But Luke’s storytelling had its way with all of us. We began to understand ourselves on Luke’s terms. Emily Dickinson has a wonderful line in which she says that “the truth must dazzle gradually or every man go blind.”
We were acquiring a church identity as the truth that dazzles gradually. We were learning how to submit ourselves to the Spirit’s formation of congregation out of this mixed bag of humanity that was us – broken, hobbling, crippled, sexually abused and spiritually abused, emotionally unstable, passive and passive-aggressive, neurotic men and women. Chuck at fifty who has failed a dozen times and knows that he will never amount to anything. Mary who had been ignored and scorned and abused in a marriage in which she remained faithful. Phyllis living with children and a spouse deep in addictions. Lepers and blind and deaf-and-dumb sinners. Also fresh converts, excited to be in on this new life. Spirited young people, energetic and eager to be guided into a life of love and compassion, mission and evangelism. A few seasoned saints who know how to pray and listen and endure. And a considerable number of people who pretty much just showed up. I sometimes wonder why they bothered. There they are: the hot, the cold, the lukewarm; Christians, half-Christians, almost-Christians; New Agers, angry ex-Catholics, sweet new converts. I didn’t choose them. I didn’t get to choose them.
…we didn’t get a church formed to our expectations. But once we understood that the Holy Spirit brings church into being this way, not ours, we saw something very different, a Spirit-created community that forms Christ in this place – not in some rarefied “spiritual” sense – precious souls for whom Christ died. They are that, too, but it takes a while to see it, see the various parts of Christ’s body here and now: a toe here, a finger there, sagging buttocks and breasts, skinned knees and elbows. Paul’s metaphor of the church as members of Christ’s body is not a mere metaphor. Metaphors have teeth. They keep us grounded to what is right before our eyes. At the same time they keep us connected to all those operations of the Trinity that we can’t see.
…Those months in the catacombs were exactly what we needed to free us from the lingering romantic, crusader, and consumer images of church that in various configurations all of us brought with us. We had been given sufficient time and a congenial place to have our imaginations cleansed of church-that-looks-like-a-church illusions and to have the Holy Spirit paradigm shift established. Not totally, of course. It would always be an ongoing work in progress. But without this substantial “cleansing” and “shift” that took place in the catacombs [Peterson’s basement], we would not have been able to recognize and participate in the actual church that was being formed among us. Without that, the church that most of us expected and wanted would have become the enemy of the church we were being given.
Eugene Peterson, The Pastor (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), pp. 126-29.
Peterson’s thoughts on this remind me very much of my own church which has been meeting in unconventional settings for over 40 years, most consistently in Dan Orme’s old Victorian house for almost 30 years (www.theuniversitychurch.org). Our setting is much better lighted and more beautiful than a suburban basement. Dr. Orme (our founding pastor) built a large room on the back with worship in mind; it’s lined with windows. Still, despite the aesthetic appeal, there are constant reminders that we meet in a home and not in a conventional church. I think the quirks and the constraints of meeting in a non-conventional setting have guarded our congregation against some of the temptations Peterson describes – not least, spiritual consumerism.
This is not to suggest that meeting in an alternative setting is some kind of a spiritual panacea, nor to deny that it may bring its own set of temptations. Conventional church buildings often make for wonderful places of worship, which do elevate the imagination. The key insight here is not really about the building but about the people. The church itself, as the people of God, does not conform to any conventional architecture. We are deformed. We are unfinished. Our lines are not straight, and our corners are not clean. As disciples of Christ we do not originate in such beauty and boldness as is typically manifest in Christian buildings – we are rarely as attractive as Tirzah. Medieval cathedral builders seem to show an awareness of this by including the gargoyles which scowl down or laugh grotesquely amid all the grandeur and elegance.
We can become so enamored with noble visions of church that we start to see ourselves as those who will accomplish great feats for God, instead of accepting that it is really God who has done great things for us. On the other hand we can begin to focus so myopically on our own frailties and sins and handicaps and inadequacies that we begin disbelieving God is capable of working through us at all. Both are delusions.
Peterson rightly calls us to a full faith acceptance that God has worked for us and God will work through us, despite appearances – not because of our original greatness but because of God’s own greatness. If we look for personal greatness among God’s people in order to find hope, then we are looking in the wrong direction. This will lead either to frustration and stagnation or to selective denial while keeping up appearances of success.
Instead, the New Testament consistently calls us to find strength in the acceptance of personal weakness – our own weakness and the weakness of others. We are to boast in personal weakness (2 Cor 12:9-10). And we should show special honor to our weaker members (1 Cor 12:22-25). God’s strength arises when we are willing to be weak. This is another way of saying that God’s strength arises when we accept who we really are.
…Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
(1 Peter 5:5b-7)
Humility entails an acceptance that I am not God. Only God is God. It is my part to remain low; it is God’s part to exalt. It is my part to entrust my anxieties to the Lord; only God can answer my anxiety. Only God can heal the inward place. Only God can align what is broken and rebuild the ancient ruin of humanity. In other words, only God can birth the church. God can do it and He has done it. But he did it through the weakness and obscurity of Jesus.
Once we realize that even the Christ was poor and unknown and despised and rejected – that weakness and obscurity was key to God’s strategic plan from the beginning – then we can begin to cobble together some confidence in Christ’s church. Only then can we, as God’s people, begin to learn strength in weakness, finding God’s strength in one another. Only then may we begin to rejoice in suffering and to embrace trials. Only in Christ’s person will we find the freedom to stop trying to conform ourselves to the world’s standards. And, most importantly, it is only in Christ that we really begin to apprehend God’s glory in one another.
For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. (2 Corinthians 5:14-16)
Sacrificial love, love that sheds its blood for the beloved, when received, has a way of transforming perspective. The cross of Christ insists we are loved despite our depravity. His resurrection displays the power of an indestructible life – love prevailing even over death. It is this grace that enables God’s people to lift our heads without fear and beyond shame – to no longer live for ourselves but for Christ, and through Christ to live for others.
In Christ I can find strength in your weakness as well as mine. In Christ I can look beyond your failures. In Christ I can forgive your offenses. In Christ I can hope for your personal renewal even when you do not. In Christ I can discern purpose in your affliction. In Christ I can fight together with you to shed light in an evil age. In Christ we can rise together again tomorrow on a wave of new mercies. In Christ the old man has died. In Christ you are not yet perfect, but you are made holy. In Christ the God-man I rediscover the dignity and humility of being fully human again. In Christ I can see you with new eyes.
(Song of Solomon 6:4) You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners.
[These Serbian Christians, celebrating Epiphany, seem to be taking the “army with banners” imagery quite literally.]
[These Ukrainian celebrants are more like my church, and apparently Peterson’s. Not quite Tirzah, but beautiful and beloved none the less.]
Speaking Truth in Babel 