lent || chairs & stages
One friend said that church is more than a chair. Another friend said that teaching is more than a stage. But what if church and teaching had nothing to do with chairs and stages to begin with? What if our starting point is wrong and our epistemology was rooted in aesthetics rather than reality? Working from those two questions I do not expect to now ‘define reality’ or even answer any question. But what if we were so culturally blinded by what it is to teach and do church, that we thought it was someone else’s job, like a pastor or someone who seemed really religious?
It was on a mountain years back that a group of people were called the priesthood of God. This was a huge deal because it meant that the people of this wandering clan, bound together by a great story, had a story to tell together. The stage was the world and the main character was the Deity, who years before this ever happened told a few people in a garden to show the world what it was he was about. Priests mediate the divine and this is the kind of thing people who are the church, that wandering clan of Jesus-bound together by a great story, do as the discover who they truly are.
Teaching is an embodied reality. I have seen preacher-types who I was just talking to minutes before jump on a stage and start talking and I am not always sure if it is the same person i was just talking to. Their voice gets deeper, their thoughts are said as if they are reading-because they are. I think to myself… ‘if what you are teaching, preacher-dude, is so important and I am suppose to hear it and understand it, why do you need a script to tell me about it?’ When our stages get to small our words seem to become scripted. But the stage is the very fabric of the lives we live. It is a play emeshed in reality, a canvas we paint on as big as the cosmos. Teaching, as orientation, is a communal vocation that points us toward great stories, even the greatest story.
