Sideways Locke: What makes you think letting go is so easy?I loved that exchange. I like the implication that these two flawed, fallen men could join forces and labor together to complete their respective redemption projects. This is what we religious people call ''church.''
Sideways Jack: It's not. I don't really know how to do it myself. Which is why was kind of hoping you could go fist.
--Doc Jensen in his recap and musings on “The Candidate” episode of Lost.
Leave it to Doc to say the things I wish I could have said. I love this image of "church" being an action—after all, church isn’t a place we go but a people we are. The church (or "called out ones") is God’s covenant community, as Dallas Willard puts it in The Divine Conspiracy, “in which he is tangibly manifest to everyone on earth who wants to find him.” And Doc’s description of the relationship between redemption and community fits right in with others I’ve resonated with, particularly Scot McKnight’s:
The story of the Bible is creation, fall and then covenant community--page after page of community--as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place…. God's idea of redemption is community shaped.
—from The Blue Parakeet (read more here)
For more on my musings about this redemptive living-together, see this blog’s “rethinking how we do church” category.
(Image: ABC via Hulu)