Behold Your Mother

I heard an excellent sermon today. My good friend Ben Miller preached on "Mother City: A Window on Zion," a message which focused on the question, "Do you love the Church?" Ben chose Psalm 87 as his text, and demonstrated that this cryptic poem is not only a love song for the special dwelling place of God among men, which in the New Covenant is the Church Universal, but is also a promise of the triumph of the Gospel throughout the world.

I was greatly edified by Ben's reflections. I found his message timely, as it really is all too easy to despise the Church, or take it for granted, especially when you've been in it all your life. The reason that Ben urged, that God loves the Church, so we should also, is highly motivating. And the reminder that the Church's current state of "disrepair," as Ben put it, is not a rationale for affective estrangement, is also helpful.

I would add to Ben's insightful remarks that we should not only love the Church, but identify ourselves with it. Of course this concept was implicit throughout his message, but it seems to me that the point bears emphasizing, since we live in an age of "personality crisis," as The New York Dolls put it. Much has been said concerning the tribalization of the postmodern person, whose identity involves loyalty to one or more sub-cultures. The Church tends to be, in the minds of its members, one more sub-set in the stratified loyalties that make up who they envision themselves to be. That is, the Church is one more tribe among many. The challenge in this age is to catapult the Church to the level of the uber-tribe, the uniting clan of which all other allegiances are merely septs, a state of mind in which "I'm a Christian" will be the most fundamental identification of its members.

This sort of uber-tribe allegiance can, I think, help to refurbish the disrepair of the Church: by identifying oneself primarily with the Church, the Israel of God, one resurrects the Church Militant, because reality is instantly bifurcated into an "Us vs. Them" conflict. There is suddenly a sweeping category for those who are not members of the New Israel, the New Humanity: they are Gentiles. And they are inimical to the mother tribe. This mindset can help to call us once again out of Bablylon, because there is suddenly a Babylon to be called out of.

Who said postmodern tribalism was a bad thing?

Link to Ben Miller's sermons:
SermonAudio.com - Orthodox Presbyterian Church Franklin Sq