Was grieved and annoyed with myself at not getting my act together to blog on the Ascension this last Thursday. If you are in the Anglican adjacent world, you will know that the late Johnny Simmons believed this feast should draw every proper Christian to divine service to celebrate such a consequential moment in human history. For without Jesus ascending to sit at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us, applying his shed blood to cleanse us from our sins, we would have continued as orphans, wandering around alienated from each other and him. But because he did, it is as though we are present with him in heaven just as he is present with us in our very souls and bodies through the power of the Holy Spirit. Such an astonishing mystery should be worth a church service on the day, and yet somehow we have never managed it all these years. Instead, we shockingly transfer the lections forward to Sunday, as all bad Anglicans do. I like to call these moments when the feast doesn’t fall on the first day of the week, but we celebrate it then anyway, “Faux.” We celebrated Fauxpiphany this year, and now Fauxension.
Anyway, the other thing I missed this last week was all the excitement generated by Redeemed Zoomer. Probably a lot of you don’t know who Redeemed Zoomer is. And why would you? He is one of these fancy, very-online fixtures. If we were all medieval peasants, or just living in the 80s, none of us would know each other, let alone the young man who has made a name for himself by playing Minecraft while he livestreams his thoughts and feelings about the state of Christianity in America.
This last week, Gavin Ortland had Redeemed Zoomer on his show for a polite and friendly debate. Ortland was trying to nail Zoomer down on precisely when Zoomer thought it would be appropriate to leave a Mainline PCUSA congregation and go to a PCA one, one that Zoomer calls “Schismatic.” It’s always bad, explained Zoomer in one of the clips I watched, to be “schismatic.” But sometimes you have to pick between the lesser of two evils. If you have children to raise, or you are weak, and perhaps also a coward, you may as well be PCA, but it’s very bad.
Zoomer was rhetorically slippery in the bits I saw. Ortland brought up the question of churches that are “God-optional.” That’s where no one in the church believes in God. Zoomer admitted that maybe it would be acceptable not to attend a church where it is optional to believe in God. He seemed to feel that this would be a rare occurrence. In most Mainlines, he insists, people do believe in God, and so it would be bad not to go there. I have to listen to the whole thing because I feel curious about what he thinks in context. It will be a long two hours whenever I get around to it.
In the meantime, here is something Redeemed Zoomer tweeted a few days ago:
This, my dears, is why I love Twitter so much. Without Twitter, where would we ever have a chance to ponder such a fascinating point of logic? Where would we find such fascinating comparisons, such deep thoughts?
As most of you know, I’m a missionary kid. I grew up in a supposed “third-world” country replete with various religious practices, political unrest, exotic illnesses, and lots of different kinds of creatures that would kill you with a mere bite. And I was sent away to a boarding school full of every different kind of Christian (mostly Christian Missionary Alliance, though). There, essentially alone for I have no siblings, I had to find my way to a life of faith.
I was also part of a supposed “mainline.” I was Episcopalian back when it was called the Protestant Episcopal Church of North America, which was kind of a mouthful. In my adult years, they simplified it and called it The Episcopal Church, or TEC. When I was a child, it was possible to be a true Christian and be an Episcopalian without too much difficulty. Though some people said the Creed with their fingers crossed, only the clergy, for the most part, had stopped believing in the resurrection of the dead and other essential doctrines. But denominations make significant decisions from which there is no going back, and so, through prayer book revision, WO, not disciplining bishops like Spong, and other compromises, when Gene Robinson was finally consecrated, that once rich tradition was revealed to be vacant, a gutted and mangy skinsuit worn by progressives who felt no particular inclination to tolerate true belief.
And so, as everyone knows, I joined the throng who left TEC over apostate and heretical teaching, even though it broke my heart to do so. From my perspective, TEC became schismatic by trashing the Faith once delivered to the saints. For me to leave and join the ACNA was simply an acknowledgment that TEC was no longer a true, visible church. I was not the schismatic in that situation, nor cowardly, nor weak.
I know this is really complicated, so read this bit slowly: Going abroad with your children to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth is not the same thing as deliberately taking your children to a church that is lying about who God is. Two different things.
So anyway, it’s Sunday and I feel like I need to glance at the readings, which, strangely enough, seem to fit rather neatly with the topic at hand—what kind of church should you go to? From Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer that we all may be one, to the Psalm where God triumphs over his enemies as he ascends on high, we are faced with a world at war with its maker. There is and always has been a clash between what we think we ought to be doing and what God thinks. The journey of faith is dark, and confusing, and treacherous. We long to see the glory of God, and yet, when you happen upon a church full of people on a Sunday morning, where is it? Can you see it in the Coffee room? What about the Vestry? Does it flash onto a screen as the congregation tries to sing some kind of song?
It always seems strange to me that Jesus would pray out loud on the night before he dies so that the disciples can hear him, and that he prays with both desperation and confidence. He’s praying for those eleven men who are about to scatter, crushed by the failures of their human estate, but for us also:
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
The disciples, peering out into the gloom of Jerusalem, must have had no idea what Jesus was talking about. Indeed, too few of us today can possibly grasp the significance of this prayer. It is as though the whole shape of cosmic history is spun out in these spare, circling lines. Everything that every person most longs for—to be perfect, to be whole, to be comforted, to be found, to be rooted and planted in everlasting goodness—is expressed here. And yet, when once you find your soul’s desire in Jesus, you are forever separated from everything and everyone who hates him. The perfect union of Father and Son, into which you are caught up, divides you from the terrible darkness of this world.
In this way, true Christians, in whatever denomination or congregation they may be found, are not at liberty to do what they might like best to do. They will have to go wherever Jesus, whose Word, sword-like, is alive and cutting, takes them. They may find themselves stuck in dark spiritual places because the Lord desires to shine his light and his glory upon the death and decay that is destroying his creatures. Or they may have to leave places of spiritual darkness because those places are corrupting and ruinous, and if they stay there, they will slowly die. There is a continual division going on all the time as Christ makes his invisible and eternal Bride into who she is supposed to be.
“Behold,” said Jesus, much later to John, speaking from heaven about how it will all turn out, “I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” That last hour will be one of terrible division. Everything we think we know will be shown either to be true or false. All the sins of the unrepentant will be revealed. All those who hid themselves in the righteousness of the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world will be safe. Whatever it takes to be with Jesus, in confidence and desperation, do that thing. Neither Redeemed Zoomer, nor Gavin Ortland, nor the bishop of any church, nor even your own private thoughts, will be sufficient to judge in that hour. Only Jesus’ true and penetrating gaze will matter.
So anyway, hope to see you in church!
Saw this quote on Dreher’s blog a couple of days ago: "In the old days, people left their churches because they didn't believe in God. Now they leave them because they do." It grieves me to see the institutional decay all around me. It’s also weird seeing all the Boomer church leaders in the mainline deny this reality. Zoomer is like many I suspect from his generation who see films and pictures from another age that they never experienced and yet they long for that time and experience. It is actually sad that the previous generation were unable to steward and hand over what they received. RZ needs a mentor to help guide him through the institutional wreckage that we are living in.
Redeemed Zoomer reminds me of those folks who don’t have kids lecturing parents on the correct manner of child rearing based on everything they’ve read. 😆
Smile and nod. They mean well.