I open with insights into our nature from wiser men:“Instead of seeing God man sees himself. ‘Their eyes were opened’ (Gen 3:7). Man perceives himself in his disunion with God and with men. He perceives he is naked. Lacking the protection, the covering, which God and his fellow man had afforded him, he finds himself laid bare. Hence there arises shame. Shame is mans ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement from the origin; it is grief for this estrangement, and a powerless longing to return to the unity with the origin. Man is ashamed because he has lost something essential to his original character, to himself as a whole; he is ashamed of his nakedness. Shame and remorse are generally mistaken for one another. Man feels remorse when he has been at fault; and he feels shame when he lacks something. Shame is more original than remorse. The peculiar fact that we lower our eyes when a stranger meets our gaze is not a sign of remorse for a fault, but a sign of that shame which, when it knows that it is seen, is reminded of something that it lacks, namely, the lost wholeness of life, its own nakedness. To meet a strangers gaze directly, as is required for example, in making a declaration of personal loyalty, is a kind of act of violence, and in love, when the gaze of the other is sought, it is a kind of yearning. In both cases it is the painful endeavour to recover the lost unity by either a conscious and resolute or else a passionate and devoted inward overcoming of shame as the sign of disunion.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Ethics)
“This I do believe, that at each man's birth there comes into being an eternal vocation for him, expressly for him. To be true to himself in relation to this eternal vocation is the highest thing a man can practice, and, as that most profound poet has said; “Self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.” (Soren Kierkegaard – Purity of Heart)
What if church were the people with whom we could be ‘naked’ and unashamed?
What if it became the safe and sacred space in which all Gods broken images could find acceptance and yet the holiness – the otherness of God?
What if atonement – ‘at-one-ment’ can't be found other than in the kingdom community as together we seek the Truth? Our eternal vocation is surely bound up in beneficence to the beloved community and beyond.
To borrow from Martin Luther King Jr: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
What if church was where we become who we truly are?
Wouldn’t Truth then take on flesh, justice take root in our communities, and we become a living letter of Gods love and Way?
What if our gospel must be incarnated in order to be known?
Known among us and as seen as a living demonstration to those who are perishing from its absence?
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