The diaconal ministry of the baptized is a profoundly hopeful ministry.

This is the last of three articles by the Ven. Dr. Thompson on the orders of ordained ministry—priests, bishops, and deacons. The first installment presented the ordained ministries as refracting the ministries conferred in baptism, then focused on the ministry of priests. The second installment focused on episcopal ministry, and now we turn to diaconal ministry of the baptized.

Three losses characterize the human predicament in these early years of the twenty-first century. These losses—the loss of the holy, the loss of communion, and the loss of mission—haunt our contemporary landscape.

As it turns out, these losses are not unique to us or to this time. They are, in fact, part of a universal rhythm of grief and grace woven into the human story. And because our losses are part of that rhythm, our ancestors have endowed us with resources—traditions and stories, songs and prayers—that allow us to endure and address them. Sadly, we have not always treasured those endowments, and so a community once uniquely equipped to address the hunger provoked by these losses has unwittingly relinquished much of that capacity.

Churches have settled into forgetfulness. Traditions and stories, songs and prayers that once sounded across the life of God’s people like “Reveille,” awakening them to the coming day, now feel more like a lullaby.

In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard probes the loss of the holy in the lives of churches:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.

The holy, the undomesticated wild mystery that runs through the life of the world, has in many places—even in churches—been driven underground, usurped by gods who can be tamed, but cannot save.

They have mouths but do not speak; eyes but do not see.
They have ears but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat. (Psalm 115)

As I wrote in the first of these reflections (Fall 2008, “A Witness to the Holy”), attention to the holy finds itself expressed and refracted through the ministry of ordained priests, but it is the responsibility of the whole community of the baptized. Recovering our capacity for the transformative encounter with the holy depends in no small part on the capacity of those ordained priest to invite the whole community of the baptized into this dimension of the ministry conferred in our baptism. But it depends also on the willingness of that community to take up that invitation and, as I wrote several years ago, to visit the house of a dangerous God, to risk the unsettling encounter with an undomesticated wild mystery of a God who runs through the life of the world for its healing and renewal but not for its ease.

The second of the losses is the loss of communion. As our proximity in a global human village brings us into contact with the Other, a global village in which we ourselves are Other for so many, we are more and more in need of evidence that our Other-ness need not make us enemies, need not lead to violence and hostility. Where values diverge, where practices among one group are in conflict with practices in another, a human capacity for communion, for sensing a common life even and perhaps especially where diversity and divergence are obvious and persistent, will make the difference between a good future and no future at all.

But one need only explore recent events among Anglicans to discern that, as the world hungers for a sense of human communion—that is, of people and communities working with diversity toward a common life in service of the common good—the churches are no safe place for such hopes. Some of the same Primates who said in 2000 that “when we turn away from one another, we turn away from the cross of Jesus” now turn away from the very presence of Jesus in the blessing, breaking, and sharing of bread with those of whose leadership and discipleship they disapprove.

In a world of alienation, distrust, hostility, and indifference, God calls the community of the baptized to offer an alternative vision of human interactions: communion instead of rivalry. That some of those ordained bishop use that office to obstruct rather than refract the light of communion is nothing short of scandal. That others find Christ’s accomplishment of communion, in the sacrifice of love on the cross, more compelling than their need to prevail in doctrinal squabbling, is a sign that the office still functions to refract the light of communion.

The third loss is the loss of mission. Remarkably, the church has become, in many ways, an association of religion clubs, each franchise desperately committed to competing for a larger share of a shrinking market. Religion clubs concern themselves with producing an acceptable religion product, either for existing members—who often prefer things to stay more or less the same—or for the prospect of new members, in whose name have been proposed and enacted many changes that failed to draw them into club membership.

In his 1994 book, In Over Our Heads, Robert Kegan asserts that, until some time in the twentieth century, the final stage of human development involved learning to cooperate with others. The end toward which such cooperation would lead was a matter of what he calls “a community’s collective intelligence.” Purpose, that is to say, was provided, mission was transparent and in place. In contemporary society, purpose is no longer provided by the community, and mission is neither simple nor clear. This creates what Kegan calls an “extraordinary cultural demand” that each person create internally what once was given by culture—a sense of the purpose toward which we might direct our lives. We have lost our mission, and must somehow create it for ourselves.

Religion clubs have nothing to offer in the face of the human loss of mission. They enact the same selfishness and inward-turning purposes that plague so much of the life of the world. They divert God’s gifts from God’s transforming mission into institutional self-preservation for which no Messiah, no matter how kind, would offer his life. And they offer no contradiction to prevailing narratives of the age, narratives in which selfishness is the only reasonable response to a world of rivalry for scarce resources.

In fact, it was not for, but against the instinct of self-preservation among the leaders of the temple that Jesus acted during his ministry. That ministry took up the proclamation of his cousin John, a proclamation of a new kingdom, of a new creation, of a new life, but not of a new religion club. In Luke’s gospel, he echoes Isaiah and takes upon himself the Spirit-driven work of freedom for prisoners, liberty for the oppressed, sight for the blind, good news for the poor. He enacts the Kingdom of God in healing and in driving out demons, proclaims it in teaching and parable, clothes himself in its ethic of compassion and justice, and serves it in his body absolutely and at enormous cost in his passion and death.

In all of this, Jesus lives out the servant ministry conferred in baptism and held as a common vocation by the whole community of the baptized. This ministry, refracted through the life and ministry of those ordained deacon, is not simply a ministry of serving others, but is also a ministry of disclosing, proclaiming, enacting and serving the Kingdom of God, and offering it as a living alternative to the kingdoms of this world, governed as they are by indifference, hostility, entitlement, and lethal rivalry. Diaconal ministry joins the community of the baptized to the mission of God, who seeks the transformation of the world, and offers Jesus into our midst to proclaim and enact that transformation among us.

Like the orders of priest and bishop, the order of deacon serves to recall the church to a vital dimension of the ministry conferred in baptism—the dimension by which God’s mission offers purpose and freedom. The diaconal ministry of the baptized is a profoundly hopeful ministry, because it both proclaims and enacts the extraordinary truth that our lives have a purpose that we need not invent, that we cannot purchase, and that we share with others in such a way that even the most modestly gifted life can contribute to the common good, and to the dream of God.

A fiddlehead strikes an episcopal pose. Photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/princebart/2608626295/}Prince Bart{/link} on Flickr.

This is the second of three articles by the Ven. Dr. Thompson on the orders of ordained ministry—priests, bishops, and deacons. The first installment presented the ordained ministries as refracting the ministries conferred in baptism, then focused on the ministry of priests. Mr. Thompson took up the question of holiness as the promise that “the bare soil is not the last soil and that business as usual…is not the only business afoot.” He then invited readers to understand the community of the baptized as bearing witness to that holiness, and the ministry of priests as nourishing that witness among the baptized. In this installment, we turn to the ministry of bishops and to the episcopal ministry of the baptized.

The bishop is the “celebrity” of the ordained, showing up from time to time in parishes, with accessories unique to the office—mitre, crozier, ring. Because the bishop is less familiar than the parish priest, one might think of him or her as a visitor from head office, causing an interruption in the normal rhythms of a parish community.

But the bishop is more than a head office supervisor, and much more than an interruption. The bishop, like the priest, refracts a dimension of the ministry of the baptized, a dimension that plays a vital part in healthy discipleship. Episcopal ministry, both as exercised through the office of bishop, and as enacted in the community of the baptized, is a ministry of communion, of the unity of the church, and of a common humanity in the image and likeness of God.

Episcopal ministry stretches the community of the baptized beyond what is comfortable and familiar into encounters with the Other who is strange and sometimes frightening. In the discourse of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of episcopal teaching, a call out beyond tribal and provincial loyalties into the hard work of negotiating a common humanity.

Episcopal ministry calls the community of the baptized to establish communion as a principle of the first order.

In a communiqué at the end of their meeting in Portugal in 2000, the primates of the Anglican Communion asserted that “When we turn away from one another, we turn away from the cross of Jesus.” At a subsequent meeting of the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Terry Finlay of Toronto made an impassioned plea for the unity of the church, inviting those present to see the arms of Jesus, stretched out on the cross, as arms gathering all people together.

Episcopal ministry, then, is concerned with the unity of the church, and more comprehensively, with human communion. That communion is grounded in the communion of the Trinity, in whose image we are fashioned, not just as individuals, but as persons-in-relationship. That is to say, as persons-in-relationship, we reflect the truth of God the Holy Trinity as persons-in-relationship.

Bearing witness to that truth is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It goes against the grain of tribalism to acknowledge a common humanity, especially in the face of profound diversity, divergence, and conflict among tribes, cultures, and peoples. Within Anglicanism, diversity was, for a long while, submerged by the assertion of English cultural and tribal practices as universally normative. Especially in light of the global prevalence of the cadences and idioms of the Book of Common Prayer, “sameness” took the place of unity.

In the past half-century, the Anglican Communion has had to contend with a post-colonial reality and the indigenization of ministry, leadership, and liturgy in ways that make obvious the diversity, divergence, and conflict among the tribes, cultures, and peoples who make up the communion.

The quest to reconstitute “sameness” as a proxy for unity has led, in the past decade, to the establishment of something called “orthodoxy,” departure from which is deemed to be departure from faithfulness. Among those pursuing this retrenchment of sameness under the rubric of orthodoxy (with orthodoxy understood as “what we believe and not what you believe”), diversity, divergence, and conflict constitute a basis for division, not a challenge to negotiate unity, a common life, communion.

In Constructing Local Theologies, Robert Schreiter asserts that catholicity is a movement toward unity among diverse, divergent, and even conflicted local churches. As a movement, it depends on both polar elements—the unity of one pole and the diversity of the other. It is precisely in honouring this movement, and in holding its elements in creative tension, that the episcopal ministry of the church finds its contemporary purpose. Those who inhabit the office that refracts the church’s episcopal ministry are not free simply to insist on sameness as the only possible basis for unity. Nor is it faithful to abandon the quest for unity in favour of an orthodoxy that they themselves define and by which they would exclude others from human and divine communion.

Unity is not the means by which the church carries forward God’s mission in its life and ministry. It is not an instrument by which God pursues God’s purposes for creation. Unity is itself among the ends of God’s mission. Unity is at the heart of the church’s sacramental understanding of relationships as expressed in marriage. God seeks to knit together the diverse, divergent, and conflicted tribes, cultures, and peoples of the earth. God calls us in our baptism into a community—the body of Christ—whose mandate includes a call to incorporate every “Other” into the meaning of “We.” It is the work of those who inhabit the office of bishop to serve and refract this dimension of the ministry of the baptized.

The world is plagued with hostility, indifference, and violence among its human creatures. And our failure to inhabit the communion with one another for which we were created has consequences not only for our common life, but also for the mutual custodianship by which we relate to earth and earth’s creatures. That mutual custodianship first comes to light in Genesis 1 and 2, in which the fruit of the garden is to sustain its human inhabitants, and in which God declares the human vocation “to till and keep it.”

The episcopal ministry of the community of the baptized, and of those who serve that ministry as bishops, is one of a comprehensive mutuality that gathers earth and earth’s creatures into the peaceable kingdom promised, among other places, by the prophet Isaiah. The proclamation and enacting of this comprehensive mutuality is at the heart of episcopal ministry, a ministry betrayed whenever the community of the baptized, or those who serve it as bishops, allow diversity, divergence, and conflict to overwhelm the community and obstruct the work of God’s Holy Spirit by fostering or enacting the division of the world into a holy, good, and faithful “Us” and a diabolical, evil, and apostate “Them.”

The episcopal ministry of the baptized, and of those who refract and serve that ministry as bishops, is a vector aimed at the heart of God’s dream for creation, of God’s promised and emerging kingdom. Every act that fosters communion in the face of diversity, divergence, and conflict contributes to the church’s episcopal ministry and participates in the mission of God, who has, in Christ, “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). It is not, it turns out, just Gentile and Jew that God sets out to reconcile, but the whole household of creation.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
⁷The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6–9)

We have deacons, priests, and bishops in order to sustain human participation in the mission of God. Photo: Michael Hudson

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge & shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

From “God’s Grandeur”
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

In his Hobart Lecture of December 2000, Archbishop Michael Peers spoke of the ordained ministries of the church as “refracting” the ministry of the baptized. Ordained ministries focus and illuminate characteristic elements of baptismal ministry-diaconal, priestly, episcopal. He acknowledged the corrosive effect of clericalism, in which diaconal, priestly and episcopal ministry were understood as the property, or even as the entitlement, of those ordained to the office of deacon, priest, or bishop. And he challenged his hearers to understand the complex and vital relationships among ordained ministries, the ministry of the baptized, and the mission of God-the missio dei.

The relationship between the mission of God and the ministry of the church ought to be a close one. It does not seem to have been Jesus’s intention to establish a new set of religious propositions and ritual practices. Instead, one can easily read the gospels as an account of God working in Jesus to renew the relationship between (on one hand) religious belief and ritual practice and (on the other) God’s active and purposeful presence in the world. In contemporary Judaism, that purposeful presence is often expressed as tikkun olam, “repairing the world.”  At a recent bar mitzvah celebration, the young bar mitzvah elaborated at length on why a loaf of bread is more miraculous than manna. “Manna,” he said, “is God’s work alone. A loaf of bread requires human participation, and the sharing of a loaf of bread requires human consent to partnership in God’s work of tikkun olam.”

Human consent to partnership in God’s work of repairing the earth is a way we might talk about the ministry conferred in baptism, and about the ordained ministries that illuminate, refract, and serve that ministry. We have deacons, priests, and bishops not simply to sustain a set of ritual practices, not just to affirm a set of religious beliefs, and certainly not merely for the purposes of institutional survival and order, but to foster ritual practices, to affirm religious beliefs, and to sustain a common life that supports human participation in the mission of God, the repairing of the world.

Of deacons, priests, and bishops, the most familiar to ordinary Anglicans are priests. In most congregations on most Sundays, it is a priest who presides at worship, and a priest who preaches. In fact, the priest who serves as rector of a parish is often simply “our minister” to the people of that parish. Up until recently, a deacon has been simply someone waiting a while to be a priest, so renewal of the diaconate is a welcome and helpful initiative taking root across our church. And a bishop is, for most Anglicans, a distant administrator and, on occasion, a visiting celebrity with exotic accessories. It is those ordained to the order of priests who are visible day by day and week by week in the lives of Anglicans, and an exploration of how their ministry contributes to God’s mission can yield insight that will strengthen the whole people of God as we serve that mission.

In 1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins published perhaps his greatest poem-“God’s Grandeur.”  It sets out with a high and hopeful tone: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” then pauses to acknowledge the hard reality of a trodden, trade-seared, toil-smeared bare-soiled wreck of a world. And yet…

…for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to the holy in the life of the world, for the sake of the world, and the local ministry of those ordained priests is to foster the participation of all the baptized in that witness. This holy to which we are called to bear witness is not a sequestered node of ethereal perfection, held safely apart from the smudge and smear of the world. It is instead, a promise that smudge and smear are not all that the world can be, that bare soil is not the last soil, and that business as usual, with its claim to inevitability, is not the only business afoot.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to what Jesus called the kingdom of God, a kingdom founded not in stuff, status, and power, but in those other qualities, the ones we name, often unreflectively, at the beginning of our weekly celebration-“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”  These words mean more than we mostly take them to mean, I think. Most of the time, we recognize them as a signal that worship is about to begin, registering them as religious words without recognizing that they are laying a claim on this time, this place, and we who gather in them. This isn’t just 160 William Street in Oakville anymore. Now this is a holy place, governed by the ethic of the kingdom of God, an ethic of grace over entitlement, of love over hostility and indifference, and of fellowship over the lonely pursuit of personal aggrandizement. From the first words uttered by the presider, we are told to expect a transforming encounter with God, and with the kind of holiness that holds out an alternative to the accelerating devolution of the life of the world into violence, fear, indifference, greed, and want.

At a recent ordination the preacher, the Rev. Canon Dr. David Neelands, distinguished priestly ministry from clerical ministry. We can no longer, he asserted, ordain clergy-persons charged with managing the institutional life of a local congregation. He challenged the ordinands to resist the strong enticements to function as clergy. Much of the reward system of our church continues to favour clergy managers over priestly refractions of baptismal ministry. And for sure, functioning as priests who refract the priesthood of the whole people is harder work than counting the liturgical, pastoral, and financial beans of a diocesan franchise.

The truth is, though, that the world doesn’t need well-run Anglican franchises. Most of a generation raised in the ethic of such franchises have taken leave of them, and their aging parents are puzzled, and often deeply troubled, by that exodus. The world needs hope, needs desperately to hear that there is still a Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world “with warm breast and ah! bright wings.”  That is not to say that we do not need to make careful use of resources, to be thoughtful in our planning and our practices. It is simply to say that careful use of resources and thoughtful planning are useless without reference to God’s presence and purpose in the life of the world.

There is something loose in the life of the world, something that intends the mending of what has been torn, the redemption of what has been wasted, the healing of what is broken, the reconciliation of what is estranged, the gathering of what has been scattered, the finding of what has been lost. This holy something is the business of priesthood, not just for those ordained to that order, but for all who are baptized into the working, serving, witnessing Body of Christ, called to ministry in God’s mission in and for the sake of the world.

Surely this is a hard blessing. He is still carried in those Hands, but they no longer gently cradle him. They bend and push and squeeze him. The Song, though, doesn’t falter. You are my child, my beloved.

Forty days and nights with nothing but those Hands and that Song, and the young man is hungry. He wonders – through the hot days and cold nights – about the shape of this blessing, then if it ever happened. After 40 days, the stones, polished round by the wilderness wind and sand, begin to look uncomfortably like bread. The new voice is convincing, pragmatic. But he’s grown up in a world where people are forever turning something holy into something convenient. Is bending the holy uniqueness of stones to meet my desire so different from hammering at the holy shape of another life till it conforms to the shape of my own hunger? Sand in his eye – he blinks. And the stones look like stones again. Holy.

The Hands that held him seem to pause from their bending, pushing, squeezing. The Song continues. You are my child, my beloved.

He pitches himself to his feet and sees a stadium full of applauding hands, garlands. He sees himself accomplished, recognized, celebrated. A sense of destiny engulfs him, and then a sense of providence, and then the adrenalin rush in his gaunt body, the leaping climax, and those Hands, sweeping down from the sky to cradle him before he reaches the ground. Though he can feel those Hands catching him in his vast and powerful vision, he can no longer hear the Song, drowned out in the roar of the crowd. A lizard brushes against him. His feet feel the earth, same dirt shared by lizard and messiah, then something like wind, something like a Hand, pushes his hair back from his face, and the Song fades back in, … my beloved.

The lizard scurries away. Then his legs give way to hunger and exhaustion and he sprawls backwards as the dust rises around him. He can’t find power to stand on his own feet. Where will he find power to follow the godly haunting in his soul? He has seen Herod once, living on borrowed power. He has seen the Roman governor from a distance – Herod’s landlord, Rome’s tenant. He knows Rome’s power, the single-minded, soul-draining power of will imposed by chariot, sword and cross. If he had power like that he could use it … he wouldn’t use it to … it could … then something like lightning pitches him backward into the scrub. He would, it couldn’t … And Hands soft as pillows lift him close to something like the warmth of a beating sun. The Song is so close and so deep it rises up through his body, through skin and bone and muscle, to his own beating heart. You are my child, my beloved.

His mother’s courage has chosen his life as her work. By courage now he chooses his Father’s work as his life. The work of beginning done, he limps out of the desert and into a life whose power will be suffering, his status – a servant; his mission – to become bread.

Becoming bread. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks. On the road to Jericho, Bartimaeus sees, and takes up himself the work of becoming bread. Matthew loses count of what doesn’t matter, then counts to one, and takes up himself the work of being bread. Flacid-willed overeager Simon becomes Rock, and takes up himself the work of becoming bread. Saul muttering threats becomes Paul breathing grace; John Newton slaver is amazed by the same grace; nine lepers (the other nine) – do we dare to dream that they did not return because they could not wait to take up themselves the work of becoming bread to the households and neighbors and lovers who welcomed them (or not) home?

Jesus leaves the stones be. They are stones for God’s holy reason. Hungry Jesus takes up himself the work of becoming bread. Hands kneading, yeast rising, baker singing. Hungry fed. The bread has no need to impress the hungry. People stuffed with cake may not notice the bread, people selling caramel corn may not admire the bread, but hungry people will find it. Pierced Hands will break the bread. It is not that bread becomes the Body of Christ, but that the Body of Christ becomes bread. This mystery set in motion when Hands first lifted. This mystery of the One who takes up himself the work of becoming bread. This mystery, kneaded by choosing and compassion, by suffering love, by naked bruised abandonment. This mystery, cradled by hands that placed him in the tomb, then by Hands lifted again from death. This mystery, becoming our bread. This mystery, who calls to us, drenches us, lifts us, drives us, tests us, this baker who sings to us:

You are my child, my beloved.

I often think of that conference as I encounter people making choices. In the produce section, I sometimes see someone checking out the “reduced” bin, trying to determine if the aging cauliflower is an inexpensive good choice, or merely a cheap bad one. I remember an acquaintance telling us how his mother insisted that they not purchase something until they could afford a good quality version. It meant waiting, sometimes for a long while, but, as his mother insisted, “We're too poor to buy cheap.”

I think of that conference as I make choices of my own. In 1992 we purchased our first home, with generous support and encouragement from a local realtor and parishioner. Shortly afterwards, Deborah returned to school to undertake doctoral studies, and we began to budget more carefully, and for a year we kept track of every dollar we spent. Money was tight, and the line of credit was beguiling, but for a clergy family, having a home that would remain home to my family, should anything happen to me, was a value and a choice for which we were prepared to make changes in other areas.

For a family bent on fostering learning, Deborah's development of new knowledge, skill and relationships in support of a new vocation was a choice worth making, though it was costly.

As I reflect on the past decade, we have not always made choices based on values - hundreds of bags of Doritos can testify to that. But Jim Cruickshank's wisdom has prevailed often enough that we have some satisfaction that the choices we are making are consistent with the journey we have undertaken.

Stewardship in the life of the church, then, is much more than begging members to float the church just above the water line. It is engaging members in exploring and celebrating the encounter with God in worship, learning, and mission…

All of that is “stewardship.” Only some of it has to do with financial support for the church. Most of it is focused elsewhere – stewardship as choices about where we spend time, money, and effort. Stewardship as friendship, using time and energy to sustain relationships. Stewardship as parenting, using time, energy and money to nurture the lives of children in our care. Stewardship as vocation, asking and exploring the question, “What is my life for and for what do my gifts and God's grace equip me?”

That is to say, people are already stewards. Sometimes they make choices in circumstances of abundance – “chips or cauliflower?” Sometimes, because of conditions we impose on them by decisions we make as a nation, province, or municipality, they make choices in the scandalous circumstances of scarcity – “Shelter or supper?” As a society, we have a great deal to answer for in the choices we ask our leaders to make for us, larding our stewardship with self-interest and then blaming politicians.

We have much to answer for in our stewardship as churches as well. The choices we have made together, perhaps without much clarity or intent, have in many cases lacked missional energy and imagination. As a result, the front line, the place where God's Spirit urges us to encounter the world and illuminate its quest with gospel light, is all but abandoned, languishing on the dusty shelf with the mission statement and decades of good intentions never really intended.

Stewardship in the life of the church, then, is much more than begging members to float the church just above the water line. It is engaging members in exploring and celebrating the encounter with God in worship, learning, and mission, so that the choices we make as the Body of Christ are compelling to members as they navigate the choices they make in their household and personal stewardship. Stewardship among members will follow the stewardship of our common life.

“To live is to choose.” What choices will we make as the Body of Christ in Weyburn, and Wawa, in Montreal and Malahat, in Prince Rupert, Prince Albert and Prince George, Hamilton, Halifax and Hardisty, that will signal to our members that, when it is time to write the cheque, choosing the church is choosing life?

With respect to the author, Pi's question isn't really a child's question. The child's question would be more like, “When I throw this question over the horizon, where will the answer pull me?” When we asked questions as children, we expected to be drawn across new landscapes towards the answer. Just think of that question, “Where do babies come from?” Who could have anticipated the answer to that one? Who understood it? Who could imagine where it would lead us? When we asked questions as children, the questions pulled us, and our changing lives became answers.

Children live in the constant knowledge that they are “on the way.” Where things break down for adults is in our identification of the onset of adulthood as a destination rather than as another landmark in a journey. It is out of this misdirected sense of adulthood as destination that we ask the question that is not the child's question but our own: “How can I stand here, secure and stationary, and reel in answers?”

In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful question drags the frail, determined, solitary Santiago from one end of the ocean to the other, almost killing him, before yielding an answer – the transformed Santiago . The relentless question weighs enough—is powerful enough—to bring into being a new self.

The answers to our real questions, the few that we dare hurl over the horizon, will likewise be occasions for movement and transformation. By the time they pull us in, we will be very different people. We will have new words for the hunger at the heart of our lives and for the food that addresses that hunger. We had thought our adulthood was a stable perch from which to demand of the universe its answers. We will have discovered that the universe has instead demanded of us our questions, has pulled us by the insistent threads of those questions across a God-haunted landscape and deeper into our humanity.

A child still has an expansive anticipation that, if there is not grammar or vocabulary enough to make sense of today, there may well be enough tomorrow. If that feeling, that sight, that taste, that direction doesn't have a name, cast your question over the horizons of language and follow where it pulls. There is always another word, calling a changing, growing new self into new being.

We grownups, though, grazing on the cold literal leftovers of modernity, sense the horizons of language closing. We butt against the end of imagination, against the fraying into nothing of the string of new words (and the new worlds that they brought to life by naming) that once seemed endless, against the impossibility that anything new can emerge, against the aching certainty that all the combinations have been tried and found wanting.

Does the ballast of safe familiarity make it all but impossible for our questions to pull us over the horizons into some new possibility? Is the apparent absence of any new reality simply a matter of weighing too much for our questions? Have we settled so firmly in the places where adulthood has set us that we hardly bother any more even to give voice to the questions that haunt us?

Into this sure—if stifling—existence there may come a question or two—an illness, a grief, a crisis in workplace, family, or neighbourhood—an interruption that cracks the shell of numbing sameness that has contained our lives. Or perhaps the question comes as what Walter Brueggemann calls the “testimony to otherwise” – a hint that beyond the smooth sameness is the dramatic topography of wonder, mystery, and surprise. The birth of a grandchild, a few bars of music, the sun at one of its extremes of rising and setting, or a smell or taste or sound from another time, a time of less close and crowded horizons.

Birth, song, light, scent—these are not experiences that can be said to mean any “one-and-only” thing; their meaning comes not because they establish and defend a proposition, but because they push towards us questions that outweigh our stability. Through them we enter another landscape; they draw us in motion across it, they call us to action out of our own newfound or long neglected longing. They invite us across a boundary, through a portal and into a journey. These “testimonies to otherwise” are not certain in the manner of death and taxes, or inevitable in the way of mortgages and markets. Their certainty is in the echo they find where we cannot find it without them, in the hope they stir against the hard shell of the inevitable, in their capacity to awaken what we had forgotten, lost, or laid aside when we allowed our feet to be planted in what passes for reality.

There is a rich and dependable source of such testimonies in the life of the world, and in the life of the church. Deaths and births, memories and hopes, a chance encounter with some strand of the depth of things, a loss, a regret, the powerful pounding of desire in our bodies and our souls – the world often enough, and sometimes insistently – bears witness to otherwise. And, often enough, our tradition adds the name of “holy” to that witness.

The first five books of the Bible—Torah—tell a story of otherwise, of a landscape shot through with the reality of God. Torah – the mother tongue of Jewish faith and imagination, traces the journey from Creation to Exodus by means of four journeys—the shell-shocked journey out of Eden , the improbable journey of Abraham and Sarah out of Haran , the desperate journey of Joseph's kin into Egypt , and the long ambivalent journey out of Egyptian bondage toward a God-promised future of freedom.

Torah comes to an end with the death of Moses and before the Hebrew people cross the Jordan into the land of promise. This mother tongue of faithful imagination comes tellingly to an end before the wandering God-nation arrives at its destination. In Torah, the people of Israel throw the question of freedom over the horizon of the wilderness and allow that question to drag them through the wilderness for 40 years, until they stand at the brink of fulfillment, and, transformed, become—for a moment—the Answer. Torah ends at this point. The crossing of the tribes across the Jordan is another story, a story in which the people of Israel achieve what they think is their heart's desire, to be “a nation like other nations.” It is another story that will tell of the closing in of the horizons until hopeful imagination is all but impossible, and only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few still dare to throw questions over the narrowing boundaries of current arrangements, and still fewer believe there is, beyond that edge, a Question with the strength to pull them out of the rut of the way things are into the dream of the way things might be.

Those who stand on the wilderness side of Jordan are themselves, of course, a marginalized, mad, prophetic few, whose only reason for trusting that Question is that its Answer—their own transformed life—has turned out to be true and evident. As they stand there at the boundary of a dream they didn't even have until God made them restless with it, they bear witness. We tell their story not primarily because of the destination they achieved, but because they tell our story, and because into that telling the Holy One crashes, bringing muted questions into words, hidden by the horizon of history, but weighing enough to tow them towards their heart's desire.

Another One will stand at the edge of this river, sure of the call to faithfulness, though perhaps less than absolutely certain of the details of transformation that faithfulness will work in his life. Bearing witness to the forgotten heart's desire of the people, he will interrogate the universe with the Question that only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few will even understand. In the end, he will allow his Question to outweigh even his human instinct for security, for survival; it will be the ballast that pulls him over the last and most terrifying horizon. So, for Christian people, asking the Question—“Who is God?—the answer is a Person transformed, glorified and lifted beyond even the power of death. And when, in rare moments of courage or clarity, we allow his Question to echo in our lives, it pulls us through strange borderlands into the very presence of God. We now discover two weighty Questions meeting in this one Life: “Who is God?” “What is a human?” And when we shudder at the foot of the cross, or gape at the rolled-back stone, we agree for a moment that these questions, dangerous as they are, are the questions that will draw us towards the answer of our own transformation, the Answer we have seen in the lives of saints and neighbors.

To be towed by a Truth that pulls from beyond the horizon of our knowing, is not, of course, a comfortable thing. To be towed in the direction of our heart's desire, when our sin-bounded heart does not itself know that desire or have a name for it, is at least disorienting—more likely frightening. If in the Bible we expect to find confirmation of what we can know and embrace from within the shortened horizons of business as usual, we must choose either disappointment or deception. Choosing disappointment, we lay the book down and restore our attention to things as they are, to what we will, from that moment, call “the real world”. Choosing deception, we will pretend to read the book, pretend to take it seriously, all the while busy with scissors and paste to bring its expansive holiness into conformity with our sober self-regard. Choosing either, we step prudently aside while the wind of Truth—truth about the world, about God, about our very lives—blows (where it will) through the empty corridors of our all-but-abandoned lives.

Such prudence leaves us the safe dignity of familiar horizons; however, it robs us of a world of possibility and imagination that are the divine testimony against apparent inevitability. The world's necessity is not God's necessity. The inevitability of “things as they are” is swept away by a Spirit that blows where it wills, and things that cannot be—beauty, holiness, healing, peace, justice, communion—spring to life where the imagination of God touches the barren ground of necessity.

To have in our hands a book with such power, to have access to a God-shot landscape that turns out to begin in own back yard, is a rich endowment. To have that gift and not know what to make of it is a correspondingly profound impoverishment. To plunder this mystery for propositions by which we can do battle with those who are, or see, or behave or believe “otherwise” is to strip-mine the biblical landscape for the fool's gold of fundamentalism—a fundamentalism that ignores the fundamental reality that God's freedom, not our fundamentals, sets down the rhythm of Truth. To place its odd or dangerous texts under house arrest on the authority of the current or accepted version of what is “reasonable” is to colonize the biblical landscape under the flag of liberalism—a liberalism that ignores the extravagant liberality by which possibility is founded, not in what we can understand, but in what God chooses. To do either is to refuse the freedom and cost of a life with God, a life illuminated by biblical testimony, a life in which closing horizons break open and inevitability yields to the holiness of God.

Such a refusal is understandable. This freedom of a life with God is neither safe nor sure; it is life with One who is beyond our capacity to manage. It is a life in light of a witness that cannot be reduced to rules or bent to business as usual. It is a life that allows itself to be outweighed by God and God's ways. That life is more than any of us can endure without (at least) occasional retreats to the more stable – though less hopeful – ground that we can define by our power, our wealth, our status, our mastery. But when we call such retreats “biblical” or “realistic,” we are in danger of misunderstanding God's business with us and with creation. Whatever god we cobble together out of our failure of spiritual nerve is not the God of the Bible, but a small god dangerously inflated by our need for a safe perch from which to cast our insubstantial questions.

We know all this. We know that such a lightly certain god cannot either name or address the weighty question of our insistent hunger. A god as the answer to our demand for an answer is not the God who meets our humanity in Jesus. The living God is more like a question that draws us over the frontier of the familiar, accompanies us across the patchwork landscape of discovery, draws us towards the encounter that transforms us, and holds us open to the possibility that we will find our true and full humanity only by asking the Question who asks us into existence. As we struggle to know and love one another, as we probe and wonder at the witness of our ancestors, as we allow our frailty, fear and flaws to be outweighed by grace, will we have desire enough to ask such a Question? Or will we settle for an answer we already know to a question that doesn't matter—for anything, that is, that will relieve us of the uncertain beauty by which we journey home?

Rev. Michael Thompson is principal secretary to Archbishop Michael Peers.