Very Reverend

I still remember walking into my church for the first time. I had walked from home, and because it was mid-July and the church is pretty much entirely uphill from where I live, it was rather hot. So I was a little sweaty, a little self-conscious, and a little curious--full of that tentative hopefulness and guardedness that one feels at a new church: "please don't do anything weird because I really want to like you guys."

Ed cheerfully greeted me from his stool by the entrance in the lobby. (Is he always perched there? Apparently last week I walked by the church and he saw me because he was sitting there, by the door, in greeting position. It was a Thursday morning, for crying out loud!)

But I like this picture of Ed, one that I have in my mind from that morning and dozens afterward, week after week, the same smile and the same eagerness to welcome--an interesting eagerness because it's entirely about the other person; a bright-eyed, earnest alertness to how he might help and care. I like this picture not only because it has become so familiar to me, nor even because it signifies the beginning of the church services I have come so to love . . . but also because it also seems like an image of Ed and Jodi's faithfulness.

I've written before about how they seem to me like the parents of prodigal sons and daughters, waiting with endless steadfastness for the return of "the least, the last, the lost." I love how in that parable, the father was waiting and looking down the road for his son: he had not been healthy, let go, gone back inside. He was maybe a little codependent. At our church, it feels like even if you were to show up on a Thursday morning or ten years later, there would be someone waiting for you. Even if you were the meter man for whom Ed was waiting last week, Ed and Jodi would have a kind word for you, often one discerned from God to encourage you.

Our church is so different from others I've attended, even within the Vineyard. My last church was astonishingly healthy. It reminded me of an exchange student from Finland I once met--tall, trim, with apple cheeks, sun-streaked hair, and glowing skin. A single glimpse of her and you wanted to drink glacier-melted water and eat only herring.

My church now, I think, is more like the little kid with rickets and maybe a few head lice that nobody wants to sit next to. It's homely to begin with. And then it has poor hygiene and a few bad habits, like perhaps an affinity for narcotics or matches, or a tendency to pick up wallets left lying around in people's pockets. It's a little below grade-level and it's definitely hyperactive.

Ed and Jodi could have stayed with the Finnish girl (or her sister), grooming her and adding depth to her loveliness, polishing the signs of grace so evident all around her . . . even preparing her to go out and do something glorious for God someday. God loves her--can't you see His favor upon her, and His pleasure in her wholesomeness? Can't you see what a stable family life you could have, doing the work of the kingdom with all the resources the world has to offer? Can't you see how your children would grow up richly blessed by the love of all these others joyfully serving God alongside you?

But instead, they chose to plant and pastor our church. They are like my friend Clare, who chooses not the cutest pet, but the cat with no tail and the dog with bladder issues, whom she fears no one else will want. They are, I think, like the soldiers who gave up their deferments and went to war in spite of all the good reasons--prior service, age, children--they could have invoked. Or the rescuers who ran into the Twin Towers as everyone else was running out.

Their heritage to their children and grandchildren, both natural and spiritual, may not be one of an easy walk in faith. I think that in some respects this must be difficult for them; who wouldn't want their children's way in the world smoothed by a sweet and easy faith? But instead of ease, they've chosen all the hardships that bring knowledge of Christ as redeemer, of God as the maker of all things new: experience with sacrifice and suffering and transformation, and with all the ways in which the Kingdom is different from the world. Instead of an untested wholeness, they bequeathe an eye for need, a taste for service, a love of mercy.