No matter how long you might stay at the spring, you would always be beginning to see the water.  For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again.  It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite beauty of God.  It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has always understood.  And as God continues to reveal himself, man continues to wonder…

-Gregory of Nyssa

I missed Rick’s sermon this Sunday for the best of reasons: because I was serving in the nursery with my wife.  The joy of caring for our children is always coupled with the loss of that restorative time of fellowship, worship and communion that makes Sunday morning for us.  But what better way is there to be reminded of the value of something, than to sacrifice it for others’ sake?  In so thinking I acknowledge my deficit gladly, and am the more motivated to press those of you who heard the Word preached to tell me where it took us.

At the double risk, then, of completely missing the point we were supposed to have been thinking about this week or of disagreeing with it (both rather attractive thoughts to the argumentative side of my specious quest for truth), I have been thinking about what it means to be a community.  There are two questions that may be shown to be at the basis of human philosophical inquiry, necessary because of the mists that hang equally over our beginning and our end as a race.  The first is “Who am I?” and the second is “Is everything going to be OK?”  I want to examine our church in these lights.

Who are we?  The simple answer is that we are a group of about 70 people in Staunton who get together to worship every Sunday.  But that is about as satisfying as answering the first philosophical inquiry with the observation that I am a collection of living cells acting in harmony for the preservation of a human body.  That satisfaction can be trampled on with the savagely predictable questions “Where did the cells come from?” and “Why do they act together so?” and “Why, being so harmonious, must they ultimately die?”  That my body should exist is in itself an act of defiance against the downward grade on which the universe is moving, a transient eddy in the stagnant pool of spacetime, a momentary dereliction in the magnificent decline of all things as we know them.  My being is an anomaly pregnant with meaning that demands an accounting, yet cannot serve as a foundation on which the structure of knowledge can be raised up.  I think, therefore I am; but I know not why I am, and so my very thoughts condemn me.

This same futility permeates my thought on who we are when taken together.  If I take all the faces I know and love as being part of Holy Cross Presbyterian Church and set them as its highest definition, the house of cards quickly falls.  For I know faces that were part of this body of Christ when we first began meeting that are no longer here.  The names Jeff and Becky probably mean nothing to most of you who are reading this, but for me they call up a flood of memories and emotions that go back 30 years to my childhood.  I think of piano lessons when I was 4, of being in school with Lesley when I was 5, of birthday parties in middle school, of Meredith’s baptism, of a conversation with Jeff on the sidewalk when the church was meeting at Blue Ridge, of homeschool functions in teenage years, of a field trip to the Reynolds plant in Grottoes and first thinking about engineering as a career, of taking the GED exam, of meeting Jason and Lesley and Nathanael and Jackie when we got back from New Orleans, of the first time Jeff talked to me about the eldership, of delighting in listening to borrowed Mars Hill tapes, of a heartfelt apology to Esther after my abruptness at the Bridgewater IGA on a late worknight, of the series Jeff was doing on Revelation, of listening to the Messiah in Sunday School, and of how my heart broke when God called the two of them away from Holy Cross.  There is enough happiness at the thoughts prompted by those two names to last me a lifetime, and at the same time, because they are in another part of the body of Christ now, there is an ache that will never go away.  They are no longer members of this church, yet in a greater sense they will always be a part of who we are.

But this again begs the question of what it is that makes us truly what we are.  By definition I am part of it, because the term “we” is my way of denoting to the world that it is so.  But what if, God forbid, I left?  Or what about after I die?  It will still be “we” to someone.  And who could be taken out of the equation without diminishment?  We all know that if Peter and Paige and Reagan were no longer here, our church would lose double-digit percentage points of its joy and personality.  But would it still be Holy Cross?  We know that it would be.  So what about Rick and Jessie and Madi and Beka and Andrew and Snoogie?  Wholly apart from the wrongly elevated view (there is a rightly elevated one) I have of my pastor that is handed down by my American Protestant evangelicalism, the thought of them not being here is horrifying to me purely because of the depth of our friendship.  But it is not an unthinkable thing.  Could there have been a friendship more close, a partnership in the Gospel more precious than that of Jesus and his disciples?  Yet he laid down his life for them, going away so that the Helper could be sent to them, and their sense of “we” became greater and deeper and richer than it ever would have without that sacrifice.

Though we grow by being added to, it is also true that sometimes God shapes us by taking away.  Much as the sculptor carves away everything that does not look like the figure he can see in his head, there is much we have yet to lose that will show us the treasure we have in Christ.  I think it is far easier to bear the loss of the goods than the loss of the kindred, but since in the end we will take our mortal lives and commend them to the gentle hands of God for the last time, we must in the meantime see that it is better in all things to give than to receive.  There are saints who worked tirelessly to see this church prosper who have been called on to other work, and there are people we will minister to and pour into who will go on to bless others with what they have learned for us.  These have gone and will continue to go, and through our loss we will know gain.  But what we need to realize is that in our identity as a church we are not the sum of our discrete parts taken at an instantaneous moment in time, but rather that as a church we exist in the transitory flux that is the progression of human life through the story of redemption.

Jesus in a gesture of compassion (knowing the drama that was shortly to come) once said to his friend, Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah!  For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.  And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.  With these words he taught Peter something about himself (Peter’s self), but at the same time he cast a vision for him that went far beyond those limits.  Jesus gave him a revelation of the Church to be surpassed only by the Apocalypse of John, a revelation beautiful in its portrayal of the power of the Resurrection in the lives of God’s people.  It was a blessing primarily for others, and not for Peter himself; it was a blessing primarily for the ages, and not for his day; and therefore he could have had no higher honor bestowed on him.  Because of that calling he was to hold above all else that chosen race, that royal priesthood, that holy nation; that people who, because they were the possession of Another, belonged to him all the more.  It was in seeing the Gentiles come into the inheritance, as those who were not a people became a people, that Peter proclaimed the excellencies of him who calls us out of the darkness into his marvelous light.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.  It is beautiful, wide, and deep; and as we gaze into its recesses we perceive all the significance of human history being molded by its movements.  We see things happening to the Bride of Christ that crush our very spirits, and before the altar we cry out How long, O Lord; but along with them other things drift into our field of view that are beautiful beyond description, pictures of that Bride being made ready for her wedding day.  All those who are closest to us, our dearest friends in this world we see portrayed there, but they do not linger long.  They move on before a mighty and purposeful current that is bringing all of Creation back before the God who gave it life.  And there we see our faces too, reflected in the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever, carried along with the rest of the new humanity toward the Tree of Life with its twelve kinds of fruit, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.  This togetherness, this unified motion into eternity, is the infinite beauty of God as he has chosen to portray it in the fleeting moment that is our lives.  Come with me and taste of its waters; come with all those appointed to eternal life along with you; come and find yourself in it, and finding catch a glimpse of that vision which will forever tell us who we are.

JV

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV