God's disrespect for walls, borders, and boundaries

Look closely at the painting below. Few paintings in Christian history have sparked as much of a dialogue as this one, attributed to the early renaissance artist and architect, Giotto di Bondone.

Legend has it that when Francis traveled to Rome to convince Pope Innocent III to give official approval to his new monastic community, the Pope, who had just launched a crusade to end another group of upstarts called the Albigensians, was wholly unimpressed with young enthusiast. Later that night, though, the Pope dreamed that the church in Rome (and seat of the papacy) began to shake and would have come tumbling down except that a brave Francis stepped in to prop it up.

Giotto’s brilliance is his ability to interpret the still very relevant ironies and incongruities implied in this story. While a plump pontiff, the most resourced man in the known world, sleeps in a well-adorned room attended by two servants, the richness of his church becomes its weakness as its weight threatens to crush him in his sleep. Only a shoeless beggar, who notoriously had no love for ostentatious buildings, stands between the Pope and his death, and presumably the death of authentic Christianity, by his own opulence.

Beyond the more obvious critique of clerical hypocrisy, which has pretty much been a given at any point in Christian history, the painting cautions the viewer against defining what the church is too rigidly. Francis probably had no intention that his monks would show up regularly to a cathedral, practice mass, or give alms in any way that the Pope might recognize as real church.  But the viewer knows (about a century after the fact) that what one person hastily writes off as another naïve attempt at “religionless Christianity” becomes another person’s sainthood in hindsight. Yet it’s not as simple as just saying that Francis’ informal band of mendicants is the real church over against the hypocritical establishment. That would be to rest the legitimacy of the church on our piety, which is a recipe for that very same hypocrisy. To muse on the painting further is to realize that Francis himself must see some value in the hoary, old institution, at least enough to justify propping it up. In fact, historically, it's not clear at all that the faith could have survived very long on charisma alone without at some point embracing the necessary evil of bureaucracy. And to say, as many in our time want to, that the Spirit can only work through the former and not the latter is a fairly prejudiced reduction of the Spirit.

The painting is arguably more relevant for us in our own pluralistic context than it was for that in which it was painted. Any church that will have any vitality in our own pluralistic context will be able to nimbly bind and loose the boundaries that define legitimate church participation. Any leader worth his or her salt intuitively knows this. We’ve all learned to negotiate strong working relationships with the aging hippie who is always game to serve at the soup kitchen but who hasn’t been to worship in forty years or the spouse of a key leader who is kind-of-a-little-Catholic-but-mostly-kind-of-agnostic. On the flipside, we’ve all dealt with the pew curmudgeon who couldn’t embody a pittance of God’s love to stave off his own execution but who, God bless him, has shown up to worship 52 weekends a year since Shem came off the boat. The proper Lutheran answer to the question of which of these represents the real church has always been neither…and also both.

We are all hypocritical rubbish. And we are all indispensable witnesses to the good news. The deciding factor, actually, the only factor, is whether it pleases God to use us as agents of grace and hope in the world (and a faithful disciple doesn’t care if he or she is the reason that grace and hope happen, only that they happen).

This really eases all the pressure about deciding who’s one of us and who isn’t.

Q: Is so and so still a part of the church even though she’s been experimenting with that Barnes & Noble, new age-y nonsense?

A: Yes, if God decides to utilize her in that way.

Q: What about so and so who hasn’t gone through new membership?

A: Yes, if God decides that that’s his call.

Q: What if he hasn’t been baptized?

A: No. Impossible…Just kidding, the creator of the universe might be able to work that one out too.

Questions about membership and commitment don’t become unimportant. But the edge is taken off of them when salvation is defined as something that happens to the world, not to church members. Everything else becomes a functional question (like any business or non for prof might ask) about how we as church can better serve our institution’s purpose—in our case, to deliver the good news to the world. Why baptize? Not because it “saves” you, but because we as people require some tangible sign of God’s claim upon our lives. Why gather around the communion table? Not because it “saves” you, but because we as people require some way to embody God’s clear future in the ambiguous present. Why become a member? Not because it makes you somehow more official as God’s instrument of grace but because a team functions better when it knows who its own players are. The primary question, then, is never “who’s in the church” but “what is the church for, and how are we doing at that?”

As my friend and ministry partner Nathan Swenson-Reinhold likes to say, "The Gospel is non-negotiable. Everything else is research and development."