Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading Eugene Peterson's book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. It's worth a second read....and a third. When I came to page 310, I read an already heavily underlined section, with notes in the margin. It's just great, and I used the quote below to begin my teaching last Sunday at church.
“Anyone who joins a church expecting to be part of a happy and harmonious gathering of put-together people sooner or later is in for serious disappointment. We can also suspect that such a person hasn’t read the Scriptures very carefully. There are exceptions, occasionally quite glorious exceptions, but Christian communities, all of them are communities-in-progress, baptized sinners in various stages of development in the life of love.
“Men and women are not admitted to the community by presenting credentials of love skills, nor do we maintain our place in the community by passing periodic peer reviews on love. We are here to be formed over our lifetimes into a community of the beloved, God’s beloved who are being formed into a people who love God and one another in the way and on the terms in which God loves us.
“It’s slow work. We are slow learners. And though God is unendingly patient with us, we are not very patient with one another. Outsiders, observing our embarrassingly slow and erratic progress in love, wonder why we bother. Well, we bother because God is love: he created us in love; he saved us in an act of love; he commanded us to love one another.
“Love is the ocean in which we swim. So what if many of us can only wade in the shallows, and others of us can barely dog paddle for short distances? We are learning and we see the possibility of one day taking long, relaxed, easy strokes into the deep.”
I love this passage because it communicates so well what lies at the heart of a God-designed life: living as a beloved child of God and growing in that love so that we can pass it along to others.
I love Peterson’s words because they summarize our church’s (and my own) raison d'être. And even more, they describe what I actually see going on among our church....i.e. we are fulfilling our life purpose!
I am part of a phenomenal church community. And we are learning, slowly and imperfectly, but surely, to take long, relaxed strokes in the deepness of God’s kingdom of love and grace. We are learning about how to truly live the blessed life! How great it is!
