(46) A More Radical Church

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for A More Radical Church, originally shared on September 10, 2020. It was the forty-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   I glanced out a window yesterday and noticed light fluffy snowflakes drifting down outside, except they weren’t snowflakes. They were ashes from the Bobcat fire near Azusa.

   The fires are not close to us, but close enough to leave what has been a thin coating of ash. Yesterday, the winds turned toward us and it became a thick coating of ash, with clouds of smoke rising from the foothills to the northwest, and blue skies and fluffy white clouds to the north.

   We are praying for the firefighters and all those affected by these fires.

   The coronavirus pandemic seems to be easing to the south of us. And while the numbers keep going down in LA County, they aren’t at a level that would allow businesses and churches to get a toehold toward opening up for indoor services, as they are in Orange County.

   The Labor Day weekend probably didn’t help. We’ve seen pictures of people at the beach, on houseboats, at college parties here and all over the country, ignoring the recommendations to practice social distancing, wear a mask, and avoid crowds. We should see how that behavior affects the spread of the disease and, therefore, the recovery of the economy in a week or so, but it doesn’t look good when recommendations are ignored.

   And, oh, yes. I did get a haircut. Thanks for noticing. The first in six months. Ude Placencia, the guy who cut my hair pre-pandemic, graciously came over to our house and cut it in the back yard, under an overhang with circulation on three sides, and both of us fully masked.  Afterward, it looked like I had dropped a big grey wig on the ground. There was enough there to knit a sweater, but we passed on that.

   That’s where we are in the pandemic. A little more open, but still taking extraordinary precautions.

   I was talking the other day with one of our neighbors in a masked, socially distanced conversation, while I was out doing yard work, about how both ends of the political spectrum seemed to be becoming more and more radicalized. There is no light escaping these twin black holes. Only heat.

   The word “radical” comes from the Latin work radicalis, which is based on an earlier Latin word, radix, both meaning a literal “root”.

   We still have some carrots, onions, turnips and kohlrabi in our garden. They are all root vegetables, They are radical vegetables, like radishes. They are roots that can be consumed.

   A radical is something like a fundamentalist. They both focus on the essentials, the basics, the foundation of things. And, like fundamentalists, they can easily flip to the extremes because there is no compromise there, no grey area, no mystery, only us and them.

   The problems comes when movements devolve into more and more finely defined groups, and there is only me that is left. People get pressed further and further into a narrower and more exclusionary set of beliefs. And, then it is me who is consumed.

   As my hero in church development, Lyle Schaller, points out, groups that promote division successfully find out that they are really good at It, and ultimately that it’s a lot easier to fracture than to build community. It becomes their defining characteristic and, quite often, they keep dividing until there is no movement left.

   I think that social media takes at least some of the blame for this. You can easily find 20 people who agree with you, and that starts to be your world.

   The problem is, in my opinion, is not that they become radical, but that they are not radical enough.

   A radical is someone who knows the difference between roots and shoots.

   Shoots come up from the benefit of roots but take a different direction. They grow up toward he light.

   Roots grow down into the earth, the source of their life. The plant is the product of its roots. Roots go deep into the soil and draw nourishment for the shoots and then the plant and then, in some cases, the fruit.

   Our roots are grounded in the scripture and their Christian/Jewish worldview. Shoots grow away from the roots but they depend upon them for life. The shoots produce branches and the branches produce flowers and/or fruit, which contain seeds for the next generation.

   What is the purpose of an apple tree? It’s not to produce apples. It’s to produce more apple trees. But, it cannot happen without the root.  

   This is a rose I cut from one of our rose bushes this morning. It looks good, but it’s cut-off from its source of food and water, its roots. It’s dead.

   The year I started seminary in Berkeley as a student, Dr. Bill Lesher began his tenure as the school’s president. In fact, I was allowed to tag along when he got his tour of the campus. He had been an innovative and respected pastor in Chicago before he became a seminary present there, and then president of the seminary in Berkeley.

   This was in the post 60’s years and there was still social turmoil and, well, it was Berkeley. I remember him saying, probably in a sermon, that the best way to radicalize a congregation was to preach the Bible.

   Now there are many ways to interpret the Bible and preach that interpretation, but I took him to mean that the Bible is not a document from the distant past, not a collection of motifs and themes, but the living Word of God. That which is the primary way in which God, the creator of all things, the ground, as theologian Paul Tillich said, the ground of being, speaks to us.

   Paul writes in his second letter to the Church at Corinth:

*2 Corinthians 2:1-5
   Jesus said that the law and prophets are summed up by love God and love neighbor as self.

   The most important thing about Jesus is not what he taught, but that he died for us to give us life, and rose from the dead, to demonstrate God’s power, his power, to be that sacrifice. We live by Jesus’ death and resurrection, the most radical acts every accomplished because they address the very root of the human condition: separation from God.

   Our roots are not dead as long as we remain connected through the living relationship with the living God that is God’s gift. We will continue to grow and bear fruit and that relationship will be reproduced.
   I don't want to change the world. I don't trust that my vision of the world is what's best for the world. I want people to turn their hearts to God, to open their hearts to allow God to change them so that they are consumed with one thing, realizing God's vision for the world: The kingdom of God.

   We preach Christ, not about Christ or a Christian movement, but the living reality of the one true living God.

   How do we not let this focus devolve into smaller and smaller cut-off and dead, exclusive groups? The Holy Spirit, the streams of living water that flows through us nourishes us at our roots, so that we can be and remain a more radical Church.