At the Pearly Gates

What state do you want to be in when you meet St Peter at the Pearly Gates?

It seems to me that the goal of much western Christianity is to arrive in style.  The physical style of the most relevant hairstyles and inculturated clothes.  The emotional style of the most ‘chillax-ed’ horizontal hippie you might hope to never imagine.  The spiritual style of the expensive-suit-wearing, bearer of glazed eyes – the pastor in a mid-life crisis extending their adolescence so that they might be ‘attractive’ to their generation.

Arriving in style might be in vogue but it’s not my style.

I don’t exactly believe in the image of the pearly gates and St Peter with a silky white gown and a shiny golden halo – but even if I did I wouldn’t want to match his style on arrival.

Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead I want to run with perseverance and cramp and a gammy ankle the race that is marked out for me to run.  The goal my faith is worth the skin off my knees and the blisters on my blisters.  I want to make it to the finish line with my clothes stained with blood, sweat and tears.  Carrying someone else over the line who ends up wobbling down the finish straight and with my heart broken by the guys I’ve tried and failed to bring with me.

Everyone wants to talk about boundaries these days.  There are books about the books written on keeping yourself safe from the challenges of modern life.  I wouldn’t mind so much but they’re aimed at keeping Christians safe from the dirt and the pain that means you’ve really lived.

I’m glad that David Brainerd and Dietrich Bonhoeffer never read one.  I’m deeply grateful that John Wesley cared more about the church than his ‘boundaries’.  As for William Carey, Hudson Taylor and the less well known heroes of the ‘Great Century of Missions’ – the great century would have been a bit of an anaemic malaise of Christian pontificating if they’d stayed ‘safe’.

My personal hero is probably a guy called Nikolaus von Zindendorf who founded the Moravian movement which was the launch-pad directly for Methodism and more recently for 24-7 Prayer.  Some of his missionaries sold themselves into slavery to reach the slaves in the Caribbean. Sold themselves into slavery – never to return.  I wonder what they would make of titles like “Take Control of Your Life”…

If you live in the West, your Church was built by people who eschewed boundaries in favour of pursuing a goal that was worth their lives.  It seems distasteful somehow to build a comfy nest on their sacrificial foundations.

And at the root of it all you have a man for whom boundaries were made to be broken.  You have a man for whom sustainability was an eternal concept but never a temporal consideration.  You have a man who prayed all night, wept with a broken heart and died on a cross as his ‘friends’ abandoned him.  Boundaries are made for man not man for boundaries…

Christianity wouldn’t exist if Jesus protected his ‘boundaries’.

It might be that making History is beyond me.  It might be beyond you too.  But I wonder if our acceptance of injustice, our torpid approach to missions, and our insouciance towards the destitute don’t come because we’ve tried and failed.  I have a horrible suspicion that our pursuit of boundaries and our abandonment of goals is fuelled far more by our inherent desire for comfort rather than anything more noble.

Christ-like kingdom-building has not been tried and failed but discovered to be uncomfortable and left to someone else.