What would you say is 'the first task of the church'?

Christians are in the midst of the Lenten season, which leads, in a few weeks, to the most important day on the church's liturgical calendar, Easter. Without Easter and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, there would be no church.

So this period of time -- which is, in purpose, in harmony with Islam's current season of Ramadan and Judaism's upcoming season of Passover -- is a one in which to ask a foundational question: What is the purpose of the church? And, by extension: What is the purpose of the mosque? And: What is the purpose of the synagogue? And: More broadly, what is the purpose of any particular religion?

Today, as a Christian, I will share an answer to the question about the church's purpose from a wonderfully wise theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, (pictured below) an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School. I've read some of his books and I heard speak a few years ago at a Kansas City church.

In this essay written for Plough magazine, Hauerwas offers a simple but perhaps surprising answer, one that I hope may guide people from other faith traditions to ask and try to answer the purpose question for their religion.

At the beginning of Hauerwas' Plough essay, he insists that "the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such, the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic."

What does that mean?

It means, he writes, that "the church must never cease from being a community of peace and truth in a world of mendacity and fear. (Tammeus note: If I didn't know the world as well as I do, I'd be insulted by that description of our world.) The church does not let the world set her agenda about what constitutes a viable social ethic; the church sets her own agenda. She does this first by having the patience amid the injustice and violence of this world to care for the widow, the poor and the orphan. Such care, from the world’s perspective, may seem to contribute little to the cause of justice, yet unless we take the time for such care, neither we nor the world can know what God’s justice looks like."

One way to think about this is for people of faith to remember that they are not, first, beholden to their secular/political government, though they may support whoever is currently in power and may devote their time and efforts to get the government to behave efficiently and effectively. Rather, in the case of Christians, they are beholden to the gospel, the good news of Christ Jesus and what the church, as the body of Christ on Earth, is called to say and do to show the world, as Hauerwas puts it, "what God's justice looks like."

It's important here to remember that the term "God's justice" means more than how society on Earth functions. It means that, for sure, which is why Christians are called to care for "the widow, the poor and the orphan." But it also refers to an eternal system of justice that is to result in God eventually redeeming not just us individually but also the entire creation, the whole cosmos (and beyond, if there is a beyond).

So on the one hand God's justice may require people of faith to stand against the abusive powers in government, business, society or anywhere that those powers are failing to treat all human beings as precious in God's sight and as bearers of the image of God. On the other hand, it requires faithful people to keep an eternal perspective about life, which means recognizing our Earth-bound limits and not giving up the struggle on behalf of God's justice just because we recognize that we can't achieve total victory today.

In the end, given all that, we would do well to remember the assurance that the wonderful mystic Julian of Norwich is famous for citing: ". . .all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Stanley Hauerwas is an intriguing writer and thinker, and I hope you'll read the whole essay to which I've linked you. But I also hope you'll engage with leaders of your own faith tradition, if you have one, to explore what that tradition's "first task" might be. If you've never asked that question, it's way past time.

(The first image above here today came from this site.)

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LET'S PAUSE ONCE MORE AND AT LEAST FEEL OTHERS' PAIN

Can we, at least for a few moments, simply pause and feel the pain in this season of Ramadan and Lent, with the High Holy Days coming soon? We need to lament once more humanity's warring ways. The recently renewed Hamas-Israel war is producing yet additional bloodshed, grief and death. And even if we can't somehow stopped the fighting, we can lament, we can pray for peace, we can ask our leaders to do what they can, we can gather together and cry as we think of human lives -- each one precious in God's sight -- being wasted in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine and elsewhere.

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