Welcome to Soul Check, Part 2!
The Wesleyan crew of the U.S.S. Interpretize know that on Christmas Day, everything will be destroyed and their captain, John Wesley, alone will survive…plummeting a few weeks into the past gleefully singing Christmas carols in Advent. To make matters stranger, this week the crew encounters another set of “duplicates from another franchise,” the Pragmatic Four, where John “Mr. Pragmatic” stretches his reason to hold together a team of Phoebe “Inscripture Girl” Palmer, Charles “The Doctrine” Wesley, and George “Great Balls of Fire” Whitefield. Both teams have plans for how to face uncertain futures. The Soul Check crew focuses on the means of grace, practicing works of piety (loving God) and works of mercy (loving neighbor) as a means to experience God’s grace and live as “God’s workmanship in the world” (Eph. 2:10). The Pragmatic Four discern God’s movement in the world today, examining the collective life experience of the present through a close study of Scripture, using reason to compare this with the church’s experience in the past (tradition).
The crew begins to panic, believing that their impending doom is coming in February 2019, when a called General Conference will gather United Methodists from around the world to choose one (or none) of the options proposed by the Commission on A Way Forward. Here we are two months away, and almost any decision or lack of decision made at this called Conference seems destined to result in a church split. Denominational organizations are bracing themselves to be shut down, assuming the Conference will lead to the breakdown of shared resources. Most local churches have waited to talk about the issues at hand (if they’ve talked about it at all), hoping to not cause a prolonged panic of parishioners who already have enough to worry about. I’ve had weeping church members come to me saying, “I can’t lose my church family but if it goes all (liberal/conservative) I don’t think I could stay.” It’s an unknown future coming quickly around the corner, and it’s very likely that nothing will be as it was.
And yet, the heroes of our story today discover a greater threat than a called General Conference. It turns out their destruction will happen on Christmas Day. Enter the new villain (or is he?), ATHANOSius. St. Athanasius of Alexandria spent his life insisting on the co-eternity of Christ, that there is much at stake in the incarnation, for it is God who is putting on flesh to dwell among us. The first advent of Christ, the birth of the God-man, reveals to us a God of the universe who chooses humility and vulnerability, cradle and cross. As we approach Christmas day with candlelight and hushed hope, we find that the one in the manger is the cornerstone, “Whoever falls on this stone will be crushed. And the stone will crush the person it falls on” (Mtt 21:42-44). Insisting that the birth of Christ radically reveals God-with-us, we must die to the belief that we are abandoned and alone in this world. The first advent of Christ is our judgment, destroying our patterns of self-destruction. Whether we fall on the rock or the rock falls on us, falseness will be destroyed in the inescapable embrace of God-with-us.
There is much work to do after Christmas comes. A called General Conference will come and it will go. Emotions will get high, and Traditionalists, Centrists and Progressives will all stand on their soapboxes with fear and trembling, each assuming they have the fullest grasp of the truth. The denomination will end, now or 10,000 years from now. It has provided a framework for the local church to thrive, and missions to save lives and souls. But it’s just a framework, a tiny piece of the Infinity Story. Loss is loss, and it is real, and each one’s grief matters deeply to the heart of God. And yet, no matter how devastating loss is in this world, no loss is as devastating a destruction as the soul that meets the Incarnate One of the Manger and Cross, for it is only in the complete loss of self that we find who we truly are, and whose we truly are.
May we come to the cradle this Christmas with the humility to accept that our own falseness will be destroyed there. May we cling to the means of grace God has provided to guide us in patterns of living and loving. May our hope for resurrection be greater than our fear of death. See you next week as our heroes meet their destiny.