Pissed-off just like Jesus?

I just attended an Alanon meeting and after the meeting I stopped by the little "treasure mart" attached to the church where the meeting is held. Much to my delight I discovered and purchased a used Fredrick Buechner book for $0.55 entitled Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary. I have been reading Buechner for about 15 years and I always find that he has a way with irony.

In the room where the meeting was held there was a giant painting entitled, The Tree of Church. On this tree there were yellow post-it notes in the branches with various words on them such as liturgy, prayer, Compline etc. Each post-it had a word that represented fruit in the Tree of the Church. During the meeting I was thinking of how the church spends a great deal of time defining what it believes; what is important; and how they worship God. As I looked at the Tree of the Church, it dawned on me that very little of the fruit hanging on the Tree of the Church had antthing to do with Jesus’ mission on earth.

I wonder how the church is doing in relation to Jesus’ mission on earth? It seems the Church likes to talk about itself. As a church, we can find ourselves "me-centered" if not careful. It is almost like Church exists so that Christians don’t have to actually follow Jesus in his mission to restore those who are pushed to the margins of their communities on account of gender, family, disease, religious purity, ethnicity and so on; or about the restoration of human wholeness in all forms and the embracing of those who society regards as misfits and outcasts.

Have you ever noticed that our arguments and decisiveness are about what we believe and how we worship and very rarely about how we serve like Jesus Christ? Rarely—if ever--have I ever seen a church argue about how they can incorporate more of society’s outcasts into their Body. If we are going to be pissed off that is what we should be pissed-off about, not some irrelevant crap that Jesus could not give a shit about. I’m sure Jesus just loves us all bunches and bunches but I doubt he reads Barth; cares what color the carpet is; or pays much attention to who gets to decide what music we play.

I returned home and opened my used treasure where I read this: "All the duplication of effort and waste of human resources. All the confusion about what the Church is, both within the ranks and without. All the counterproductive competition. All the unnecessarily empty pews and unnecessary expense. There are Baptists, Methodist, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutheran, Quakers, Disciples of Christ. The question is not are you a Baptists, the question is what kind of Baptist? But if you were ask the AVERAGE member of any congregation to explain their differences with others you would be apt to be met with long, unpregnant silence."

"When Jesus took bread and said, "This is my body which is broken for you." It is hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the Church as his body. There is no reason why every one should be a Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much to themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unites them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the Church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess."

Are you pissed-off? If we are going to be pissed-off, let's be pissed about injustice; let's be pissed off about how folks are excluded by the religious establisment; let's be pissed off that we participate in prejudices against humanity; let's be pissed about the same things Jesus was pissed-off . Let's be so pissed-off about how humanity is being destroyed by evil that we have no time to be pissed-off about what another member thinks about the carpert or why their favorite theologian actually sucks.