January 03, 2008
Farewell Hand of Fellowship
When Jesus healed a blind man the Pharisees didn’t believe the miracle and wanted confirmation from the parents that their son had in fact been born blind. This should have been a time of rejoicing for the family, but no. Rather than celebrating the gift of sight given to their son, the parents were in fear of the Jews, who had the power to put them out of the synagogue. It would be convenient for us to just write these parents off as being paranoid. However, it seems logical to say if they were in fear, others were sure to have the same fear. In today’s church, leaders can’t flex their ‘power’ quite as boldly as did the Jews of John’s day, but they can get the same results. It can be as simple as saying, “Maybe there’s another church where you’d be happier.” (John 9:18-23)
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Gail;
-----There have been times in the Christian era that church leaders acted with even more power than the Pharisees. If these parents said the wrong thing, or in some other way displeased the Pharisees, they could be thrown out of the synagogue. That would mean also being thrown out of the community social life, as well as the community market, unless they would feel proper in packing up and going to live with the Greeks. But they were the ones that thought Jews were pompous, religious bigots. So, settling in time with them would require a distancing from everything Jewish they had been. That is a lot of power those Pharisees had. But in the Medieval church, if you crossed up those with the inquisitive mind, you found yourself in the dungeon, maybe, under a pendulum blade, or on a rack, or maybe outside in the fresh air under a sunny, blue sky roasting over a fire. Those Medieval leaders were absolute demons.
-----I mourn the unity His body no longer has. I mourn the power of the leaders that has been taken from them. Not the power to slice, stretch, or roast those who disagree with them, but the power to influence godliness amongst a group of people, the power of respect that is built from honestly shown affection and love, and the power of reason acquired by a humble meeting of both life and the Word. But just as it is within any cooling clinker pulled from a coal furnace, deep inside are burning hot embers of sparkling beauty, so also deep within this cooling mess of religious bigots and self-righteous pompousness we call Christianity are burning embers of sparkling beauty. It is to those churches that the bigoted leader refers another who disagrees with him. But little does he realize that every church has embers aglow among some who come through its doors, even his own church, sometimes, even within himself.
-----While Char and I have been at “another church where you’d be happier” now for more than a year, we have often wondered why more of the injured folks at your church do not leave there and find that “other church.” Evidently, only God and they know of the sorrows that haunt your church like undetected ghosts. And only God knows just how many have been driven from fellowship there by the selfish ambitions and vein conceits of leaders who suppose God has called them to demand from others worship according to their own personal tastes. But I do not allow my wonderment to linger, because I know why. For even there at your church, within the honesty and humility of some who are true to His Word, true to the love, to the brotherly affection, to the sympathy, and to the ambition for the flowering of others in the Lord in what He Himself has made them to become, are the burning embers of beauty that are the “church where you’d be happier.” For that is a church which has Christ as its head, in truth and in action
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