GOD, THE CHURCH, AND THE PANDEMIC | PART 2

God is concerned with the renewal of all Creation and with setting the whole Creation free. Thus, the purview of our partnership with God seems to be much bigger and wider in scope than we are accustomed to and perhaps even comfortable with. The overall theme of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught us to pray is consistent with the above. Here, I lean on N. Tom Wright again from his book, The Lord and His Prayer. It is a long quote but a good one! I have not read anything better.

What then might it mean to pray this Kingdom—prayer today?

It means, for a start, that as we look up into the face of our Father in Heaven, and commit ourselves to the hallowing of his name, that we look immediately out upon the whole world that he made, and we see it as he sees it. Thy Kingdom Come: to pray this means seeing the world in binocular vision. See it with the love of the creator for his spectacularly beautiful creation; and see it with the deep grief of the creator for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world now finds itself. Put those two together, and bring the binocular picture into focus: the love and the grief join into the Jesus-shape, the kingdom-shape, the shape of the cross — never was Love, dear King, never was Grief like thine! And, with this Jesus before your eyes, pray again, Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven! We are praying, as Jesus was praying and acting, for the redemption of the world; for the radical defeat and uprooting of evil; and for heaven and earth to be married at last, for God to be all in all. And if we pray this way, we must of course be prepared to live this way.

So, as we pray this for this world, we also pray it, of course, for the church. But this cannot simply mean that we want God to sort out our messes and muddles, so that the church can be a cosy place, without problems or pain. We can only pray this prayer for the church if we are prepared to mean: make us Kingdom-bearers! Make us a community of healed healers; make us a returned orchestra to play the Kingdom-music until the world takes up the song. Make us, in turn, Servants of the Lord, the few with the message for the many.

The world, the church — but what of ourselves?

I used to think of this clause simply as a prayer of resignation. ‘Thy will be done’, with a shrug of the shoulders: what I want doesn’t matter too much; if God really wants to do something I suppose I can put up with it. That might do if God were a remote, detached, God. It won’t do for Isaish’s God; it won’t do for Jesus; and it won’t do for those who break bread and drink wine to remember Jesus and pray for the kingdom. No: this is the risky, crazy prayer of submission and commission, or, if you like, the prayer of subversion and conversion. It is the way we sign on, in our turn, for the work of the kingdom. It is the way we take the medicine ourselves, so that we may be strong enough to administer it to others. It is the way we retune our instruments, to play God’s oratorio for the world to sing.

I could never pray the Lord’s Prayer in the same way. Going from Wright to Rodney Stark, Stark, as a distinguished sociologist of religion, has researched and detailed how early Christianity gained its humble “power” and prominence against all odds. To borrow Wright’s phrase, it is as a result of the prayers of “submission and commission as well as subversion and conversion”.

Stark has a fascinating chapter called Urban Chaos and Crisis in his book, The Rise of Christianity, in which he specifically delves into the city of Antioch. He shatters the idea of affluent and even luxurious Roman urban life and effectively claims that it is nothing but a projected illusion. According to his research, he found that the density of the city would have been 195 persons per acre compared to 100 inhabitants per acre in Manhattan, NY (and this is with high rise buildings in the city)! Stark argues convincingly the problems of sanitation and water supply which then becomes a pesthole of infectious disease and plague. He says, “given limited water and means of sanitation, and the incredible density of humans and animals, most people in Greco-Roman cities must have lived in filth beyond our imagining. (1997:153) He goes on to claim that none (scholars) challenges that life expectancy at birth was less than 30 years. Stark concludes the chapter:

Since Antioch suffered acutely from all of these urban problems, it was in acute need of solutions. No wonder the early Christian missionaries were so warmly received in this city. For what they brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture capable of making life in Greco-Roman cities more tolerable. (1997:162)

The early church grew and expanded through willing helping hands and feet to a desperate world that required immediate redemptive action and service. The vibrant and incarnational faith in action portrayed by these nameless saints cannot be overstated enough or forgotten. Over time, the early proletariat-based “bottom-up” Christianity successfully, one may say, created a new culture of both generosity and tolerance until patrician-led “top-down” Christianity began its building of encrustation of dormant and irrelevant culture. 

As I close, I wonder about these questions: When and where are Christian missionaries (or Christians) so warmly received by the suffering people today? When will we see viable forms of partnership with God focusing on redemption of the whole creation, which is ridden and weary amidst the current global pandemic? And other pandemics in the future? What will a “new” Kingdom culture befitting the 21st century look like in our time? How will or should we “retune our instruments, to play God’s oratorio for the world to sing?” Or just perhaps, are we being invited to play with a completely new set of instruments as opposed to simply retune the existing instruments?