Liturgy 051: Christian Idealism

🕊️ A Prayer and a Blessing for the Messy Road of Faithfulness

☕️ Lectio Divina

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.

The Teacher of Ecclesiastes

🪴 Prayer

Christian Idealism
Every last one
Like a chapter out of Ecclesiastes
Suffers
the same fate

Here in America
From the days of the Puritans on
Each generation has echoed the last
We’re gonna do it right
Everyone else is doing it wrong

The mega church
The house church
The protestant church
The growing church
The dying church
The stagnant church
The white church
The black church
The non-tokenizing equitably compensated multiethnic church
The queer church
The immigrant church

And they set off
So much zeal
So much fire
So much the same as everything else under the sun

You know
it is as infallible
as gravity

No ideal succeeds the plans of God
Nor the messiness of humankind

The human condition
And the cost of insurance
Disrupts the plans of man
and feminism, both

So what then?
Where shall we turn?
What shall we build?

LORD

Teach me to lay down
my fantasies and kingdoms

Show me the way of Jesus

Entering a broken
First Century world
embraced and rejected
by institutions and friends…
yet faithful
to his dying breath
in union with You
in service to all

For he too laid down his
will, his dreams,
for the sake of love.

Sanctify me
by the power of your Spirit LORD
until my ideals are but an offering
at your altar

Amen.

🕊️ Blessing

May you know the joy
of finding God
in the gory mess
of disruption

In the Name of Christ
Amen