Frederick Buechner, in his devilish little book entitled Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, writes the following regarding the church: “The visible church is all the people who get together from time to time in God’s name. Anybody can find out who they are by going to look. The invisible church is all of the people God uses for his hands and feet in this world. Nobody can find out who they are except God. Think of them as two circles. The optimist says they are concentric. The cynic says they don’t even touch. The realist says they occasionally overlap.”
Buechner was not the first to make this observation. Augustine. Bishop of Hippo, (354-430 C. E.) wrote, “Many whom God has, the church does not have; and many whom the church has, God does not have.”
Today we enter the season of Pentecost – that time when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church, and the continuation of the Incarnation in the fellowship of the faithful. At such a time I think it is appropriate for us to think about the church and what it means to be the people of God. For centuries distinctions have been made between the visible church and the invisible church. Different criteria have been offered during those years to distinguish one from the other. As Buechner intimates, in the end only God truly knows which is which. However, I find what he says helpful.
As a child, I was an optimist. I assumed church was church—that the visible church was the invisible church (VC = IC). Membership, attendance and contributions were enough to make one a part of the Body of Christ. I also assumed that church members lived by the Golden Rule, told the truth, were kind and loving, could be trusted, and meant what they taught, prayed and said.
My college and seminary years were probably the cynical season of my life. There I learned that anyone, even Archie Bunker, could be a member of the church, but I was persuaded that one’s name on a roster and one’s faithfulness to God need not have a thing to do with one another. I discovered that some of the meanest people in the world were in the church – that hypocrisy, deceitfulness, and hard-heartedness were alive and well, not in the taverns, courthouses, and pool halls, but in fellowships supposedly dedicated to the Lordship of Christ. I doubted the equation VC =IC. In fact, I wondered at times if one was even related to the other.
And as an adult I suppose I have become a realist. Some of the meanest people may be in the church, but some of the kindest people are also in the church. There are those who play at being the church, and there are those who pray with utter abandon that perfect prayer of obedient discipleship, “Nevertheless, Thy will be done.” There are those who are mercenary in their associations with the church, and there are those who come to the Table because they have found love, life, and light and understand the Source of all three. And in all honesty, I suppose my mellowing over the years is directly related to my discovery that within myself is a strange, disturbing mixture of faithfulness and wavering, courage and cowardice, honesty and deceit, love and apathy. Sometimes the visible church and the invisible church do overlap, even in me. And sometimes they do not.
But today I want us to consider one reason why VC does not equal IC. Too often they don’t overlap because deep down we don’t want to follow Jesus. And maybe that’s why we lack inspiration–why we lack the Spirit. And by having the Spirit, I don’t mean jumping up and down, rolling in the aisles, shouting to the top of our lungs, pounding the pulpit, or speaking in tongues. I mean that we are not aware of the abiding and energizing presence of God in our midst and in our world. And that’s because we are not paying attention to the presence of God – to the movement of God’s Spirit – to the voice and touch of the Divine within ourselves and the world around us. Too many of us go through life totally unaware of the miracles surrounding us. Why is that? Jesuit scholar Anthony de Mello suggests this reason:
Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and beauty of this thing we call human existence. You know, all mystics – Christian and non-Christian – no matter what their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But basically most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.
Tragically, I believe de Mello is correct about a lot of human beings. They have no concept or experience of awe, wonder, joy, community, beauty, serenity, and connectedness. They are themselves miracles; they are surrounded by miracles, and they can become miracles to others, but they just don’t see it. Why? Because they are asleep. God speaks to them, touches them, comes to them in the uniqueness of others, astounds them with the beauty of nature, and desperately tries to tease them with wonder, but they slumber through life. They are dead long before they are buried. And when people in the church sleep through life, it’s no wonder that VC rarely equals IC. We are oblivious to the Spirit as God seeks to make all things new.
But other people are not so much asleep as they are distracted. They are in such a hurry that they miss out on what really matters in life. They are so obsessed with their petty agendas (the dishes must be washed, the lawn mowed, that business project finished) that life in all its goodness, abundance, and joy passes them by – and they don’t even know what they are missing. Presbyterian minister John Buchanan concluded that the world is divided between scanners and focusers, between people whose eyes are always darting from horizon to horizon and people who pay attention to what’s really right there in front of them. These focusers see a lot that the scanners miss. If you are a scanner, you need someone in your life who is a focuser or you’re going to miss a lot – miss a lot of God, in fact.
Novelist Doris Betts says that in authentic religion faith is not “synonymous with certainty, but a decision to keep your eyes open.” If VC will ever equal IC, we people in the church must begin to pay more attention – to look and see and taste and smell the goodness of God. How can the Spirit, whose coming we celebrate at Pentecost, ever guide us into an abundant and Christ-like life if we cannot or will not pay attention to the presence of God in our world? This has implications for the mission of the church. We are not so much called to bring God into the world as we are called to draw attention to the God that is already in the world—you know, the One in whom we “live, move, and have our being.” Acts 17:28
Bill Moyers at a graduation ceremony at Hamilton College told the students that if he were graduating, what he would like to be told is this: “I would like to be told that there is more to this life than I can see, earn, or learn in my time. That beyond the day-to-day spectacle are cosmic mysteries we don’t understand. That in the meantime – and the meantime is where we live – we infinitesimal particles of creation carry on the miracle of loving, laughing, and being here now by giving, sharing, and growing new.”
As Christians, it is our deepest conviction and most precious belief that the God who created this world and everything in it continues to create, energize, and animate the world with the Breath of Life, and that we meet that same God when we pay attention to creation. And that same God is wondrously, mysteriously present in the ordinariness of our lives: the food we eat, the drink we share, the work we do, the love we are given, the love we give–in all of life, God the Holy Spirit is actually working to reconcile, redeem, heal, and make all things new.
How sad to miss all that!! Whether we miss it because we are asleep or in a hurry or distracted by what does not really matter, how sad it is to pass up the mystery which is why God took all the trouble and time to bring us into existence to begin with.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it; but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” In other words, he told Nicodemus to pay attention to the Spirit moving in his life. Wake up! Focus! Pay attention! For awesome mystery–pieces of eternity–God Almighty is before you if you will open your eyes, your ears, your mind, and your heart to the glory of God surrounding you. If we could do that, then I believe VC would equal IC in extraordinary and healing ways.
