As Christians, we cannot separate Christ from the church, though “spiritual, but not religious” is a favorite posture adopted by many. The impulse to pull away from the church is understandable given our astonishment at what is done in the name of Christ. Anyone who is even casually aware of Jesus’ teachings and life, recoils instinctively from so much of today’s organized religion that claims to be Christian.
The sins of the church, particularly in crass and egregious worldly stances, when it seeks temporal power, exhibits a shocking tolerance for abuse and mistreatment, persistently fails to love those people who are on the margins, and seems to sanctify hatred and judgment, make the church often repulsive to anyone drawn to the love and mercy of Christ our Savior. This is nothing new.
Yet, as much as we mourn the sinfulness that plagues we ourselves, not just others, and as much as we continue to resist in every way this evil, confessing and hating even the garment tainted by the flesh (Jude 1:23), the solution cannot be to decapitate Christ, casting aside the body to love only the severed head. We cannot have the head without the body, or we will have neither.
They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow. Colossians 2:19
The body of Christ which draws its very existence and sustenance from Christ himself, however, is not to be uncritically identified with all the temporal institutions, hollow organizations, and religiously sterile entities claiming to be that body. Clearly, not everything that claims to be the church today is indeed living up to its calling nor bearing witness to God in the practice of love and mercy. The weeds and wheat grow together.
We cannot be too confident in our own faithfulness either, but should humbly confess that for all we know, we too may be poorly connected to Jesus. We may not be as much the members of his body as we imagine. We dare not condemn others while foregoing rigorous self-examination. Instead, we need to see the corrupt tendencies in ourselves, while diligently looking for the evidence of the Spirit of Jesus in whatever claims to be his body.
We can do quite well without whatever poorly incarnates Christ, but we cannot do without the community of fellow believers who are called together by the good news of God’s reign. This humble spiritual body, indwelt by God’s own Spirit, intoxicated on the love of God proclaimed in the cross, blinded by the new vision of glory manifest in apparent weakness, seeking to be priests to the whole world, decrying all the sin we readily admit we commit, accepting the unacceptable people whose sins pose no problem for God’s mercy, proclaims a year of jubilee where all debts are forgiven. This outpost of heaven, this gathering of those alienated from the world, who embrace the One to come, this is the fellowship of unlikely saints we cannot live without.
We are members of the body of Christ, dead, buried, and risen to the life of the coming age. We are thoroughly sinful people who, nonetheless, are the communion of the redeemed and the incarnation of Christ. Like Jesus, who was a son of the Israel that would not listen even while he proclaimed a new Israel under God’s reign, we inhabit the imperfect while bearing witness to the mystery of the incarnate body of our Lord in the world.
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