Watch Your Mouth

"Hey, ya don't talk dirty about your sister!" - Rocky Balboa

I'm hearing a lot of people bag on the local church lately. Thing is, they're mostly Christians, some fairly high-profile, some just foot soldiers like myself. It almost seems to be a mark of superiority, or at least of Evangelical chic. It has always bothered me and I thought the reason was basically theological until I read a blog by poet-professor Scott Cairns. After describing what he confesses was an ungracious retort on his part to someone who dissed his own communion - Orthodoxy - he muses:

Only today, thinking over how I might have responded differently -- with humor, say, and some measure of compassion -- I realized something that I hadn't suspected before.

I actually love my Church.

My initial response -- it now occurs to me -- was accompanied by the same sort of visceral rage that would have accompanied my response to someone insulting my wife or my daughter or my son.

That focused my own heart and mind for me: Yes, it is bad theology to say you love Jesus but not the church (if by "bad theology" we mean disagreeing with Jesus), but that isn't what upsets me most. Such talk hits me the way it would if someone insulted my wife in my presence with the full knowledge that I was her husband.

Why do we do that?

Well, of course there's the whole Bible-thing: The Hebrew prophets were simultaneously the greatest, truest lovers Israel had, and her most relentless assailants. And then there's our history: The Reformation began with Luther literally hammering away at The Church, then we Baptists burst on the scene and turned the Reformation's guns on itself. Cairns seems to acknowledge as much when he laments that:

This sense is, perhaps, one of the more significant losses that have accompanied the continuing splintering of the Western Church -- this sense that the Church is to be loved, as the Body of Christ, as the Bride of Christ.

There's a Moby Dick worth of theological controversy in that sentence but I'm going to sedate my inner-Ahab and focus only on the last phrase. I would like to see us recover "this sense that the Church is to be loved, as the Body of Christ, as the Bride of Christ." Maybe we love this body as Paul loved his, by delivering knockout punches to its carnality (1 Cor 9.27). Maybe we love this bride as Hosea loved Gomer (Hosea 1.2). But every body knows the difference between therapy and sadism, and every lover knows the difference between redemptiveness and self-righteousness.

Bottom line: Let's stop telling mama jokes about the Lord's Bride.