COME AS YOU ARE

Saturday, July 24, 2010

MY POST FOR TODAY ARE THE WORDS OF KEN GIRE FROM HIS BOOK, THE DIVINE EMBRACE.

I do not have horror stories about my church experience, as some people do. ...Nobody ever made me grovel for penance. All the while, though a subliminal message was being communicated that I don't think was healthy: Come to church, but come cleaned-up, with your best clothes, your best posture, your best face, and keep your secrets and your sadness at home, where they belong.

I don't think the early church was like that. I think it was a place where people came as they were, slaves and freemen, sitting side by side, laying down their burdens; Greek and Jew, elbow to elbow, sharing their heartaches; male and female, revealing not only the dark secrets of how they went astray, but also the luminous secrets of how Jesus pursued them, found them , and carried them home.

The people of the early church were desperate people, for the most part, living in desperate times. They were less likely to be pillars of the community and more likely to be prostitutes; less likely to be aristocrats and more likely to be adulterers; less likely to come from the cities social register and more likely to come from the ranks of the diseased, the demon-possessed, and the down-and-out. Imagine the stories they had to tell. And imagine how the freedom to tell their stories brought freedom to so many who heard them.

Room was made in the service of the early church both for the Holy spirit and for the holiness of their own stories. And in the dim light and dirty mess of such a stable, divine things were given birth.