The One-Legged Church

I’ll be the first to admit that, all things considered, I prefer comfort to discomfort, security to insecurity. I’m not sure, however, that these are reasonable expectations, or even aspirations, for a person of faith.

One of the more resonant ideas I came across while reading Jean Vanier’s Community & Growth recently was the notion that insecurity is a necessary, almost fundamental quality of Christian life together. That defies some of the religious training I’ve received in my life in the church: I’m told of the blessed assurance that comes from a personal relationship with Jesus, the eternal security that attends to the knowledge that on the cross Christ took all my sin and dispensed with it, of the confidence that comes with knowing the end of the story, in which the Savior comes to claim his own and usher everyone else into the outer darkness, where they will wail and grind their teeth. Hallelujah.

I suppose that in some more elegant and precise form those theological assertions are true, and that consequently we can find some security in them. But Jesus himself holds in tension the assertion “I have overcome the world,” on one hand, with the axiom “In this world you will have trouble,” on the other. A sense of security in our relationship with God notwithstanding, insecurity will still characterize the life of faith–particularly, and especially, the life of faith together.

It strikes me that, while popular eschatology along the lines of Left Behind and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (hey, remember the 90s?!?) concentrates our attention on the destination of the just and the unjust, the Bible seems to concentrate on the points of departure.

* God tells Abraham not to go to Canaan but to “leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1).

* God tells Moses not to take the people of Israel to Canaan but to leave Egypt for a land that God has promised them (Ex 3:9-10).

* Jesus tells his disciples that he goes to prepare “a place” for them, and insists that he, not some roadmap or system of discipleship, is “the way” to get there (Jn 14:1-7).

Of course these destinations are described later in some detail, and in the case of God’s conversation with Moses a specific destination is quickly given–”the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite” (Ex 3:17). But the emphasis is nevertheless not on the arriving but on the departing, and the implicit message is that wherever God has in mind for us, it’s going to involve getting up and moving along.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Cost of Discipleship, reconciles these seemingly contradictory notions–the security of relationship with God and the insecurity of life in a fallen world–by appealing to Christian paradox:

The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus).

I’ve since taken to picturing the insecurity of the church, the people of God, as not so much psychological malaise or ennui but a side-effect of movement. There’s a fundamental insecurity, for example, in standing on one leg, or in leaning forward out of our center of gravity. But a steady sequence of standing on one leg and “falling forward,” so to speak, is essentially what it means to walk. When walking, we almost never have both feet on the ground; we are perpetually one-legged.

So that’s how I’ve come to imagine the church: the people of God in constant motion, in step with Jesus, going where he beckons and sends, trusting that wherever we’re going is better than wherever we’ve come from, and figuring out how to all keep our balance together while we’ve each got one foot in the air. By faith we walk and walk and walk, just as by faith we know we are loved, and loved, and loved.