church

so i went to an amazing church service today in my kitchen. it started when Tim asked me if i went to church today and i said i just couldn't stomach the thought. then we talked for a while. highlights of our worship experience:

-"I don't understand why we go to church and listen to some guy talk for forty minutes about things we either block out as unimportant or already agree with. why don't I just go out and feed the poor or do something important?"

-"yes, i feel alienated from the body of believers, but that's not because I stopped going to church. if i went back to church, i'd feel even more alienated. the church has rejected me and my generation because we ask too much, because we are hurt and cynical, because we swear and drink and smoke and don't follow the stultifying traditions and regulations of men, becuase we haven't embraced the culture of the upper-middle-class contemporary Christian America. i feel alienated from the church because i don't understand and embrace its idols: its theology, its arrogance, its safety-first comfort-first fear of the reality that surrounds it. i feel alienated because the church lives in comfortable illusions of importance and power and smug competence and has thus made itself irrelevant."

-"Jesus rarely ever talked about someplace we go after we die. He came and preached the Kingdom of Heaven: here but not here, within us and breaking out of us, hidden and yet inexorably movng forward. a world where the heartbreaking things--the things that make us cry out this should not happen--don't happen. where losers are not losers and children do not die and the brokenhearted aren't brokenhearted any more and the hungry eat."

-"There is no "them" and "us" in the Kingdom of Heaven."

-"We are--somehow--the Kingdom of Heaven. We have the power to neglect it, or to make it happen around us. If we spend out lives averting one tragedy, taking one poor person and helping him or her become truly wealthy, we have done something worth more than a thousand pretty worship songs or a hundred passionate prayers."

it's a pity we didn't break bread and speak the benediction, because for a moment i actually shared communion with two members of my family. but we didn't have any bread, and it was scary because i was thinking seriously of wandering off and joining a group of Franciscans and ministering to the poor and that's scary.