GK Chesterton compared birth to climbing down a random
chimney and trying to get along with the people you found living in that house.
Coming to General Assembly is like climbing down a random
chimney and find out you have landed at home.
From year to year, the players change, the business evolves,
the disputes cycle through the life of the church, and the city is a different
one every time. However one thing, one
important thing, always stays the same.
GA is a moment in time when hundreds and, in some years, thousands of
people come together for one reason; love for that part of the body of Christ
that is the Presbyterian Church (USA).
We are a family. An
occasionally fussy, often divided, and frequently exhausted family, but a
family nonetheless. And this morning,
that is what we celebrated together as we started the week with worship in the
Oregon Convention Center.
For all the “signs” so often and easily bandied around about
the demise of the mainline church and the PC(USA) in particular, this morning
we all encountered a countersign- a counter-witness- to the despair of so many.
We saw men and women, young and old, hipsters and boring middle-aged men
with thinning hair (we are people too!) singing, praying, reaffirming our
baptism, and sharing the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. We saw that there is yet life in that valley
of bones and the truth of resurrection alive in the church.
This is a family with generations yet to come.
I, for one, look forward to what the Spirit has in store for our family this week in Portland.
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