This is the paper I read to the Cheyneygates ‘Work-in-Progress’ seminar at Westminster on 24th April 2008.
When the congregation of my Church is gathered in worship we say that Christ is with us, although, without faith, no evidence of him imposes itself on us. The degree to which we find one another unattractive and not very Christ-like comes from this dark and incomprehensible way in which Christ presents himself, crucifying our expectations as he comes. In each of these unlovely people at the altar rail Christ says, ‘Do you see me, do you love me’?
All human beings give themselves away – we cannot help ourselves. If we do not give ourselves to Christ and to all his body, we give ourselves away in some other way, and to some other power. Either we love and adore God and give ourselves to him, which is to say give ourselves back to him, or we direct all that love and adoration to other objects, thereby making idols of them. I just cannot hold my adoration in. I too readily give myself to the darlings and delights of the media, but so grudgingly give myself to the people of the church. All our whole consumer culture is a vast displacement activity for this true love.
To denigrate the Church is to fail to recognise Christ. When I declare that the Church is too full of old people, demand that it demonstrate its relevance, and search for a fresh emergent and more real Church consisting of separate congregations for young people, I reveal my disdain for the body of Christ. I need you to help me overcome this desire to distance myself from this body. When I decide that the Christians around me are too exclusivist, traditionalist and fundamentalist, or otherwise just too muddleheaded, you have to tell me that they have had fewer educational opportunities than I have, and that if they are the weak, we who are the strong have to wait for them. For if we go ahead ‘without waiting for anyone else’, we fail to ‘recognise the body of the Lord’, and so eat and drink division on the Church and judgment on ourselves. You have to name my disparagement of the rules and habits of the Church for the antinominianism and Gnosticism it is. We have to fast and abstain together at the appropriate point in the calendar and learn all the practices of self-control that make each of us more than just our own bodies. Until we keep the fast, and wait for each other, the joy of the feast will elude us.
