Lament for the Uniting Church

I’ve over it, O God! I’ve over the pettiness and the bureaucracy and the hypocrisy. I’m over the short-sightedness and the bloody-mindedness. I’m over the ignorance and the arrogance and the close-mindedmess. I’ve over the disrespect and the power games, the corporatisation, and all of the running after the latest shining bauble that glistens in any bright young thing’s corner of an eye. I’ve over the Uniting church and there is no reason for you to wonder why!

It was a dream, O God—a dream of a connected church, a visionary people, a community who would be a light to the nation and a beacon for ecumenism. We danced in the shopping centres and shivered in the June wind at its birth because it was a sign of hope, a portent of the future, a new thing that you were doing or so we thought.

But it seems to have turned out to be just the same old, same old—maybe in a slightly different guise. So instead of stultifying “traditions” that have very little to do with the real Tradition, we have everyone’s latest idea plucked out of the air as “the new” irrespective of its history or antecedents, and a disdain for “tradition” that does not know enough about Tradition to know when the baby has disappeared down the plughole with the bathwater. I’m over it, O God!

I’ve over the disrespect for ordination and ordained ministry. I’m over the expectation that anyone has the right and the ability to form the people of God, “overturn tradition” and re-invent the wheel. I’m over the ignorance that does not know that entering the story is more than knowing how to read.

We do not teach our people theology, O God; and our people do not want to learn it. They are content with the blasphemy of violence that passes as sacrificial atonement theory; or the paucity of mystery that satisfies the liberally historically-minded. People seem happy to worship the words in a book reprinted a million times over without discerning how they stand in relation to the Word who entered history, embodied, enfleshed, incarnate.

I’ve over it, O God! I’m over the “I love Jesus” romantic hit parade—as if Jesus were just another Justin Bieber not the “Thou” of Martin Buber. I’m over the surprise that worship might be more than puppy-dog eyes cast upon an Adonis of a Saviour. Where some may once have worshipped Bacchus and other Apollo, our redeemers are buff young men with bedroom eyes and bedroom voice—poor substitutes for a broken, wounded Christ “of Middle-Eastern appearance”.

We cannot self-actualise ourselves into a heaven made in the image of Bondi, nor “boot-camp” our way into a realm made up only of the robust and the strong. We have no power to manipulate our way into the fulfilment of the eschaton. We have only you—utterly loving, utterly relational, utterly hopeful, utterly patient, still waiting for your prodigal people to come to our senses and head for home.

I’m over it, O God! And sometimes that makes we think I’m over you, but I’m not…

I’m not over a God who calls us into a community of imperfection to muddle our way through as the perfect flawed glorious Creation we are. I’m not over a people called to be pilgrim, struggling on a journey of promise. I’m not over the hope that you offer in the call to servanthood and I’ve not over the body of Christ… we poor pale imitations of what it means to a communion of the Spirit.

Yet we are your people, well of part of them anyway; and our election is not of our own making. It is an undeserved, unmerited, unwarranted gift bestowed by you.

And so, we journey onwards, but not always in the right direction and mostly not even in the same direction at once—we could-be prodigals, would-be pilgrims, not noticing that we must be prodigal to be pilgrims at all; and yet always under the holy, wholly, sheltering wings of you, O God. You cannot, you will not, you shall not let us go for, fortunately, you are never over us, O God!