by the Rev. Sarah Reynolds, August 31, 2023
…we’re called to look for Jesus not my turning inward to the already known, but by leaving the familiar behind and seeking him in an unknown future. Since the empty tomb, [as Michel de] Certeau writes, “the believers have continued to wonder: ‘Where art thou?’ And from century to century they ask history as it passes: ‘Where have you put him?’” -Mac Loftin
As a Christian in 21st century America, it’s nearly impossible to miss all the dialogue and think-pieces (and panic and mourning) about the decline of Christianity as the central, organizing institution in the West. Many of our conversations, as people who care about and count ourselves members of the Church, spring directly from the anxiety that this decline creates. How do we attract and welcome new members – especially younger ones who will preserve the Church for the next generation? What changes can we make to bring ourselves up to speed with the increasingly fast-paced world around us? How can we retain – or regain – relevance? What can we learn from this? And above all, what should we DO about it?
In his article “A better response to the decline of the Christian West” in the September 2023 issue of The Christian Century, Mac Loftin illuminated for me a perspective both breathtakingly incisive and heartachingly difficult. It centers on the empty tomb. In that Easter morning moment when Mary Magdalene’s panicked search for Jesus is answered with the angel’s words, “He is not here,” Christianity was inaugurated as the search for Jesus in the world around us.
“Jesus did not set down a full and final account of who he is and what his life and death mean,” Loftin reminds us. “Instead, he handed his story over to others. Withdrawing from history, he makes room for a breathtaking diversity of texts and communities that will tell of the changes and transformations that he awakened in them.” Wow. Not self-preservation but self-renunciation. Rather than planting a flag or building a monument atop a mountain, we are invited instead to leave no trace, letting the mysterious beauty of the mountain speak for itself and stand on its own. In other words, we participate in Christ when we make room for what is foreign and unknown to us without trying to conform it to our will or our purposes. Most simply put, it happens when we welcome others on their own terms and without anxiety about how we might be changed.
In our (increasingly) post-Christian landscape, Loftin says that, for the Church, this looks like resisting the urge either “to beat back the stranger so that we might remain as we are, [or] to welcome the stranger by assimilating them and making them more like us, [but by welcoming] the stranger so that we might be made more like them.” This seems to me to be related to the poet Rilke’s urge to “live the questions.” Perhaps this is the time, in the life of the Church, not to hold tighter, but to relax our grip, to wait and see, to foster curiosity about how we might be prompted by the unknown and unforeseeable to grow and evolve, to stay curious about the surprising ways and places God might show up.
The passing away of the familiar is always a cause for grief. But we find ourselves with Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, wondering where in the world Jesus is to be found, and ready to go searching for him. He may not be in any of the expected places, but then again, that was never really his style, was it? My prayer for us as Christians navigating a world that looks different than it once did is that we are prepared for that difference to be chock-full of God, and that we remain open to God’s mystery, ready to be changed, to be surprised, and to encounter Christ somewhere altogether new. The Church as we know it is dying. But Christianity isn’t. We are a resurrection people, and we are sent from the tomb to find Jesus in unexpected places: no longer on the hillside with the 5000 but huddled over a barbecue fish breakfast on the beach in the chilly early morning. No longer huddled in the upper room but following the martyr’s way of living counterculturally in a violent and power-hungry world.
Loftin writes, “We as Christians are called to have faith that while our wanderings will bring risk and danger, we might also find grace in being altered by what comes, in listening with attention to the incomprehensible words of the strangest stranger as perhaps the word we have been listening for.” Change is hard. But God is constant. The morphing of Christianity is not a signal of God’s absence, and we need not light a funeral pyre. Instead, we have been given an invitation to experience God differently, and find grace in unexpected places. The empty tomb is the best possible news: Christ is no longer confined but out in the world, hiding everywhere in plain sight and waiting to be recognized.
