A Meditation on the Third Anniversary of Ordination

I remember visiting them in my youth, those magnificent churches with the vaulted ceilings, the stone pillars reaching upward seemingly to touch the heavens, and the long aisles that would deliver me to the very throne of God. Later, I would read how the architects and builders of these monuments had hoped to give us a foretaste of the grace and grandeur of heaven itself.

The Sunday worship that I remember was vastly different but it warmed me no less. I would sit Sunday by Sunday in what I learned was an upturned boat complete with a keel running from stem to stern. I would count the rows of dark wood that made up the plank on frame construction and be reminded that the Church was a lifeboat for people like me. We would ride out the storms of our world huddled together in a boat Jesus himself made for us to carry us safely to the heavenly shores.

I’m just now learning how deeply this image lives within me as I struggle with others in the work of visioning a new image of Church. I can’t help but think that much of my time is spent bailing that fragile boat, plugging leaks, and mopping up messes. I wonder what message our tired old buildings give to those who come to worship on Sunday mornings.

Perhaps the builders of these upturned ships were not building lifeboats, but arks? Arks built to carry us through the storm searching for a place to land and to disembark? Maybe instead of being run aground like a poorly captained ocean liner, we are finally making landfall in a recreated world that we hardly recognize, and there is only an olive branch to remind us of what was and to point us to what is to come.

I can’t imagine what that first pitiful ark must have been like after forty days and nights on the windswept ocean packed to the gills with everything and every being needed to sustain life. I don’t want to think about the devastation and destruction they found amid the sprouting new life. Perhaps it was not coincidence that they were moved to look upward to God’s sign – the bow – in the sky above them.

Outside my window, folks are lining up in a neat line that wraps around the church buildings. Men and women, grandmothers and sons, workers and old folks are waiting for the arrival of food that will carry them through the weeks ahead.

It is time for us to get off the boat.