There are many thoughtful images of Church in Scripture. “You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:17). The Church is “the way,” the “gathered” ones, those “called out.” We are Christ’s “body.”
Paul reminds us that we are “ambassadors” for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20). That is, we are Christ’s stand-ins, communications specialists, representing our preferences but Christ. That doesn’t mean to be sweet or pious, since Jesus himself never struck anyone as sweet or pious. We speak and act with Jesus’ authority – which is a challenge and a privilege all at once. Do I represent him well? Does our Church represent him well?
Preaching on this “ambassadors” image, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wondered why people get bored with church but find the cinema exciting. “We ourselves have made the church into something it is not. We talk too much about trivial things and too little about God. We’ve made church into a playground for our feelings instead of a place where God’s word is received obediently. We prefer quiet edification to the holy restlessness of the powerful Lord God, a cozy, comfortable God instead of the disturbing, disquieting God.”
When we grapple openly and readily with what really is in the Word of God, we morph as a church into something the world needs desperately. We become “merchants of hope,” or “missionaries for love in the face of contempt” (as Arthur Brooks put it at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2020).
We will have a passion for and even put on display strong virtues, but not what one political party or the other thinks is good. And we don’t avoid the daunting issues of the day in order to keep people calm and avoid offense. Jesus calmed a storm but not the people! We don’t look for the lowest common denominator. Our task, our delight is to help ourselves and then the world to discover “Higher Ground.” God has a better way, and ours is (as his ambassadors) to show the way with warmth, compassion, enthusiasm and promise. We never condemn. We never judge. We love and do some hopeful shining.
For we are to be “the light of the world” (Matthew 6:18). It’s a dark, and getting ever darker world out there. People are looking for a little light, and for hope and truth. I see people who are pretty angry, and cocksure they know the truth. But their mood, their emotional posture is a clue to me that they’re uneasy, that they suspect and even wish there were a better way. God has entrusted to us that better way, which isn’t angry but joyful, which isn’t cocky but humbly sure of those things that simply are Christianity.
“Jesus said, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’” (John 8:32). Bonhoeffer called this “the most revolutionary text in the New Testament.” I love his thoughts: “Real truth is different from slogan-like truth, because it redeems a person and makes him free, it opens his eyes to the fact that he has lived in lies and in fear.” The source of truth isn’t you, or your politics, but God.
In Church, we humbly scrounge around for God’s truth, and live it out in how we act and what we do beyond our walls. It’s never arrogant, but is ready for sacrifice and even suffering. “The congregation that follows Christ must go with him to the cross.” There’s a question in Bonhoeffer’s words that a Church must always ask itself.