Jason Clark

I’m posting a quote from George Hemingway, a member of my doctoral programme. George is a 65 year old, ex oceanographer, PhD, and one of the most wise men I have ever had the privilege to know. He doesn’t have a blog, but his writing is profound. George compells and helps me believe in and love the church. Enjoy…

“Remember the number “eleven.” Meditate on it frequently. Ponder it incessantly, because it may be the antidote to a multitude of ecclesiastical downers, like steeple envy, failure fear, numerical accountabilty standard (average Sunday attendance, eg.), the incesant gossiping and second guessing.

Eleven is the precise number of men left in Jesus’ chaburah after Judas split (pun intended!). The Project that Jesus envisioned was already fractured and messed up, and it hadn’t even begun yet! But Jesus didn’t streak off to his father’s carpentry shop and can the whole project as a loser.

Rather, he took the whole project right up to the Cross and hung it out there where everybody could see it. See that the most common, the most mundane, the most corrupted, the most fractured is lifted up and offered up and sanctified and made whole and renewed and taken forward in time to become a new time and a new thing.

What he didn’t do was create a whole mess of new rules so that we wouldn’t break things again. No Work Standards. Just one-size-fits-all thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart and soul and mind and thy neighbor as thyself. Not one rule for the rich or the black or the lepers or the soldiers and another for the poor or the oriental or the woman or the civilian.

And so the Church was broken before it began and it has been broken a gazillion times since. Hebarization vs. the gentile Church; Arianism vs. “Catholicism,” so many Greek words for this heresy vs. that true belief, conciliarism vs. monarchicalism, inclusivity vs. exclusivity… blah, blah, blah. All broken, fractured, smashed, with blood and water streaming out of her side, legs broken. And the altar guild rolls dice on the seamless garment. And we gossip and kill the body with toxic snickers and jibes.

And yet, out of her the Spirit calls martyrs and servants, and saints and a mighty cloud of witnesses, mostly unseen, unheralded, unrecognized. Len is right that the Easter faith is a resurrection reality, for it raises up that old dead stuff and pumps life back in its crusty veins, enfleshes the dry bones and makes the most amazing friends and companions out of the most unlikely sorts.

Remember the number “eleven” when you are just fed up with the whole thing!”

George Hemingway, Jan 7th 2004.