hoist by my own petard

a few weeks ago, in my ongoing search for the church, i decided that the correct criteria were probably found in the story of john's disciples who came to jesus just before john was beheaded:

"when john heard in prison what the messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ jesus answered them, ‘go and tell john what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. and blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.'" (matthew 11:2-6)

i confess i'm having a lot of trouble finding such a church. oh, i hear plenty of mouthing about "healing of relationships," and "metaphorical blindness," and i find cheese sandwiches and instant coffee brought to the poor, but almost everyone i meet is offended by jesus and what he says. more often than not the sermons i have heard these past months, when the new revised common lectionary months has featured the difficult parables from matthew's version of the gospel, have begun with asking something like "are you offended?" and then continued to say why we should be offended, because these stories aren't about "the real world."

so, into this search dropped a slightly worn copy of the mountain of silence by kyriacos markides. the church, the ekklesia that markides finds on cyprus as he chauffeurs and questions the gerontos maximos is a kingdom of god in which the events of the gospels and acts that so embarass us modern merely rational folk are commonplace. indeed, "the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. and blessed is anyone who takes no offence at [jesus]."

so, i am ready to give up on all the western divisions of the church and to singularly embrace orthodoxy. the problem is that the orthodox church in this country is as fragmented as protestantism. there is a greek orthodox church just a few blocks from my house. the liturgy is in greek, and my hair is not black enough to let me pass for the right ethnicity. the wall between greek and jew may be broken down in that church, but the wall between greek and welsh is still standing.

markides is satisfied, as a sociologist at least, with a concept of the church as a mystical body, not identified with any visible part of the institutional church. i am not. but i may have to live with it.

meanwhile, i am faced with the fact of how feeble my search for the holy one really is.