...God's geometry

The church of Christ cannot be bound by walls of wood or stone.

Where charity and love are found, there can the church be known.

---Adam M. L. Tice, 2005

When Sarah was a young child, she wore out a CD of kids’ Christian songs---knew every word on every track, and often sang them at the top of her lungs. Lucky for me, the music was fine (mostly) and the theology had some meat on its bones. One of the songs on the CD was ‘If You Tried to Put God in a Box’. The first little bit goes,

            If you tried to put God in a box, how big would the box have to be?

            How strong would you make it? How long would it last

            If you tried to put God in a box?

The answer to this child’s riddle, of course, is that God will not be boxed in by any construction of human hand or mind. The irony, of course, is that we, most of us, spend our lives trying mightily to build that box. And to get our version of a greatly diminished God to jump on in. How foolish, to strive and strive to remake our Maker over in our own image---to fit our box. Ah, but fear not. God has no intention of being confined to the space we can imagine.

Thank God.

And here’s the other thing. The Church? The Body of Christ? We were never meant to be bound by the geometry of the cube. What draws us inward is only to energize and strengthen us to burst every boundary that separates us from a weak and wounded world. What pulls us close is to prepare us to fling light into the shadows and shower love on disregard. Those were never walls---they were bridges, for God’s sake.

Thanks be to you, O God. You never met a box you didn’t break. Embolden your Church to live/love with the same reckless abandon.

...pass-through gifts

I then shall live as one who’s learned compassion;

I’ve been so loved that I’ll risk loving too.

I know how fear builds walls instead of bridges;

I dare to see another’s point of view.

And when relationships demand commitment,

then I’ll be there to care and follow through.

---Gloria Gaither, 1981

Pat Benatar sang it, and there are times I almost believe it.

            Love is a battlefield.

There are so many ways to get burned. To get let down. To fall short. To do the hurting. To walk away. To run.

Thank God. No, really…thank God, for being our teacher in love, as in all things. Because we learn compassion from the creator of compassion. Because we pattern commitment from our model of steadfast love. Because we have watched our brother-Savior tear down the walls of fear that divide, we’ve heard stories of bridges of understanding spanning deep chasms. We have read the stories, too, of God’s love offered to an indifferent world, and of the patience and kindness offered even in the face of that indifference.

Fear whispers, “There are so many ways for love to go wrong.”

Thank God for the pass-through gifts of such compassion and understanding