As I was casting about for ideas for this week’s blog, my eyes Sunday fell on the latest NY Times column by Tish Harrison Warren. In her piece she interviewed an expert on interfaith dialogues and she asked him what he finds most distressing in the area of religious discourse these days. His answer was that so often it seems people are aware of only negative aspects of religion. When he engages in Q&A sessions in various venues, so many questions center on scandals, violence done in the name of religious faith, bigotry in religious communities, and so on. The shame of it, he noted, is that there is so much good stuff to appreciate but that no one talks about.
As an example he said, “I’ll tell you what I find encouraging. Catholic sisters just keep on doing what Catholic sisters do, which is taking care of poor people. There are 10,000 migrants in Chicago that leadership recently welcomed into the city. But they had not adequately prepared for where those people would sleep. Well, guess who’s taking care of them? Largely, Catholic Charities and other faith-based organizations.”
I like his line “Catholic sisters just keep on doing what Catholic sisters do.” It describes a lot of the church most of the time. Christian people just quietly keep doing what Christians are called to do. They send cards or emails to encourage those in tough times. They bake casseroles and pies and bring them to those recovering from illness or enduring a season of grief. They come alongside the hospital bed of someone who is sick or just sit quietly with the person who is in a Job-like place of disorientation.
Church musicians keep trying to design worship services that will nourish people’s faith and give them meaningful outlets to express the praise we were all designed to render to God. Pastors faithfully do the hard work of bringing Bible texts to life in sermons they hope will be both relevant and interesting. And when now and again a sermon flops in some way or another, they just get back up on their feet to try again the next week (there’s always another Sunday coming!).
None of this grabs headlines. Most of it is quiet volunteer work in the background of life and most such activities don’t garner a Facebook post or a Tweet or an Instagram moment. I like a Tweet Esau McCaulley posted a few days ago pointing to the self-aggrandizing effects of social media. In response he wrote, “I know that for some of us it’s part of our job to work in public, but remember we are not the heroes in this epic. We are looking for a city whose builder and maker is God.”
Catholic sisters just being Catholic sisters, dear people standing at your door with that potato-chip-crusted tuna casserole: these are not heroes doing heroic things. They are just faithful folks doing the faithful work to which we have all been called. How easy it is to miss all this good stuff in our incessant focus on what is wrong with the church, what negative things are going on, etc.
Somewhere in his book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, Neal Plantinga noted that in this world, nothing sets our tongues to wagging like bad news. But perhaps in the kingdom of God when people sit on their front porches and call out to one another at a day’s end, what they will be most eager to regale each other with will be good news, all the good and noble and beautiful things there are to celebrate at any given moment.
Maybe this is a fine vision for the kingdom. For all of us who find it easy to wallow in what’s hurtful or what feels broken or wrong, it’s a good reminder to do what we can to do some warm-up exercises for the kingdom of heaven and already now talk about, give thanks for, and celebrate all the quiet ways in which the church of Jesus Christ keeps managing to get some things right.
