The Church and The Ark

This morning a co-worker of mine shared an observation he had recently read about the church. He said that the author had compared the Church to Noah's Ark, concluding that "it stinks inside, but it's better than being outside."

I laughed, appreciating the joke and yet bothered by how much gets missed in the metaphor.

I think that for many people, both Christians and not, the Church can look like Noah's Ark; an unpleasant and crowded journey with the hope of reaching a better place. Non-Christians scoff at this as an unattractive solution to a problem that may or may not exist. Christians realize it's less than ideal, but don't want to get "left behind."

Unfortunately, this is the picture of the Church that we settle for, not the vision of the Church that we're given. Christ calls us into a community with a mission, into a gathering whose sole purpose is to make us, as C.S. Lewis famously wrote, into "little Christs." It isn't meant to offer a rather boring, often unbearable passage to heaven, but to invite us into a mysterious and miraculous knowledge of Christ. 

Now, the Church is made up of people, and people are messy; born of funk and feces and to funk and feces they shall return. And that funk is always with us, the stink is always on us. Get enough of us in a room together and it can be unbearable.

But this is why we are called, in Christ, to die to ourselves and be raised in Him. To begin to wash the funk off of us and to make us new. To create an experience that isn't so unbearable, but where we are called to "bear with one another in love."

I don't mean to say that the Church can be equated with the Kingdom or that we can ever make for ourselves a perfect world. But we are called to point the way to one, to be a signpost for those seeking the Kingdom. 

The good news is that, in Christ, the Kingdom is coming and has come. We live in the now and the not yet. And until the not yet becomes now, there will always be a bit of the Ark within the Church. But that isn't the whole story. We aren't called to simply sail along, safe but smelly, until we land someplace nicer. We are meant to live as those for whom the Kingdom has already begun to break through. We are called to reconcile the warning of the flood with the promise of the rainbow. We don't simply sit in the funk, but acknowledge and address it. And we are going out as much as we're inviting in, bringing hope to those without it and light to those in darkness. The Church isn't meant to be the great escape, but the beginning of God's great restoration project.

Sometimes being a part of the Church can stink. A lot. But our God who brings life out of death and shines light in the darkness is making all things new. And so this sweaty mass of bodies must remember that it is also the perfect Body, and must seek to live worthy of the name.

Or, to put it another way, a bit from Flannery O'Connor:

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the Body of Christ and that on this we are fed.