Lesson By Cell Phone

It seems interesting to me, having returned to my home in Florida, within recent weeks, that my life without a cell phone would be more than inconvenient. Not so much so when I am at Quiet Rest.  While there, it seems to tether me in so many ways.  But here, I fit in with everyone else. I can take calls with an “excuse me,” in the midst of that conversation with the understanding, garrulous (my newest found word)  friend. Nor do I need to make a mad dash home from the workshop in order to make that important phone call. I now make it on the way, sitting in traffic, driving to the hardware store, doctor’s appointment, making a stop at the grocery store for items Bettyann has asked me to bring home or all the above. And I admit I do have a great appreciation when I remember the time I had to use the phone with a five foot cord, having to operate within a five-foot radius. On the other hand, this is not to say that I don’t feel a tethering of a different sort. Owning a cell phone has fostered the attitude that I am always available, always working, always obtainable. While there is no cord to which I am confined, the phone itself has proven it can be ironically confining.

But these kinds of shifting dilemmas, I’m particularly aware of today,  are not all that uncommon. Just as the pendulum swings in one direction offering some kind of correction, I’m finding, it swings back to the other side introducing a new set of problems. Major and minor movements of history possess a similar, corrective rhythm, swinging from one extreme to another and finding trouble with both. The pendulum swings from one direction, often to an opposite error, or at best, toward a new set of challenges.

I’m forever realizing that within and without its walls, the church, too, is continually responding to what I perceive needs correction. When the need to get away from dead, religious worship initiated certain shifts within the church, it was an observation wisely discerned. But from my viewpoint, what this has meant for many churches has, unfortunately, been a shifting away from history, common liturgy, and its own past—in some cases contributing to a whole different set of problems. I don't say much outside my closest circle of family and freinds but I have long observed; that while breaking away from the “religiosity” of history, I think some now find themselves tethered in a sense to all things contemporary and individually, unable to draw on the riches of the history from which they have isolated themselves.  I think, that probably, while the intent may have been good, and the shifts did separate their flocks from certain problems within church history, it also seems to have separated the sheep and lambs from all of history. As a result, I wonder if many church leaders now seem more divorced from history than ever, having swung so far in one direction that they we can no longer see from whence they have come? Coupled with our culture’s general devaluing of anything that is “outdated,” the risk of seeing the church’s identity more in terms of today’s form than its enduring essence seems, to me, both high and hazardous.

Something in the image of the ever-oscillating pendulum reminds me of the countercultural professions and practices that are meant to root the church in an identity beyond the one that might exist at any given time or changing mood.  Is this ever-moving world, with all it's technological improvements and ideological corrections rushing in so fast that I get caught up living my life with no fear of the future or disdain of the past? Or am I professing with the community, which St. Paul mentions in first Corinthians 10:11, saying:  “upon whom the end of the ages have come?” And in the midst of this culture consumed with the new, the contemporary, and the progressive, am I rooted in the identity of a Man who lived 2000 years ago, One who proclaimed the reign of God on earth here and now, but whose future return He also asked me to look to expectantly.

Moreover, as I've been looking at this, the spirit of awe brought something to my attention the last time I took communion at church. The church professes something Christ left behind as a means to understanding my identity and mission, at having turned seventy three. Before going to the cross, Jesus imparted that the disciples were to continue breaking bread together, as they had done so often before, but that now these common meals would also hold new meaning. They could not go where Jesus was going, but they were to be partners in what was about to be done. The bread broken was to be His body which would be broken; the cup they share was to be His own blood shared—and their repeated sharing in this common meal was to continually move them to participation in His dying, rising, and victorious life. In this, the disciples were to be united with Christ in an event that would inform all past, present, and future.  I just can’t help but to keep going back once or twice a week and ruminate on some of Lesslie Newbigin’s explaination in The Open Secret: “When they are still far from beginning to understand what ‘the reign of God’ means, Jesus does a deed and gives a command that will bind them to him in a continually renewed and deepened participation in the mystery of his own being….The disciples will thus themselves become part of the revealed secret of the presence of the kingdom.”

Father, God, I thank You for allowing an expanded peek into Your being!  Amen