The Comma

Angels and Demons

In times of transition, great spiritual forces are present.  They come in many guises and particularly, what I term, “Angels of Faith” and “Demons of Anxiety”.  Their presence is real and they tussle for room in our hearts, lives and institutions in times of change.  In our church we know both of these angels and demons well. 

The Demon of Anxiety shows up among us in an old familiar story we tell ourselves over and over again.  I still don’t fully understand WHY we tell this story to ourselves, but we do.  It’s a very old story present long before I began my ministry with you 15 years ago.  My sense now, in fact, is that it has been around since the founding of this church and shaped our ministry ever since.  It’s a story that we repeat to ourselves about our “lack”, our “deficiency”. 

It’s an anxious story we tell each other about how we are not doing enough.  Not doing enough for our children and youth, college students and young adults, parents with young children, middle age adults and the elderly in our congregation…the list goes on.  It’s an old story we tell ourselves about anxieties about our leadership and anxiety about where we are going.  It shows up in anxious behaviors among us.  It’s an old story that has at its root often unnamed anxious questions, “Are we okay?”  Are we loving, doing, being enough?   Am I okay with God? 

It is not that the anxious issues we tell each other about again and again are not issues and will not always be.  In fact, this is our “work” of the church, is it not, to care for and pray for each other as God’s people and creation.  We seek to do that with God’s help the best we can. 

And yet, we hold these issues within an old anxious story that does not serve us well.  An old story that cannot lead us forward.  An anxious story that lacks a wider vision and call and keeps us trapped in the past.  An old story that can and has trapped our ministry and its leadership in wearying, deadening work of fixing and pleasing instead of claiming our faith and risking wider dreams. 

Like all stories, we tell it to ourselves over and over because something in it brings us some comfort.  I wonder if maybe it is comfort from the fear of being changed. 

But there is something else.  Alive among us is also an Angel of Faith.  It is an angel that spurs us on to take bold action in the way of Jesus and to share abundantly to support a common call.  The Angel is wild and live and among us as well.

The issue before us as church is this:  Will we be the church of the 21^st Century?  Will we be the new, reformed and reforming church that is always being called out by the Spirit of the Living God?  The Spirit that calls us to wider imagination, deeper loving, firmer faith.  Nothing thwarts the Angel of Faith, like the Demon of Anxiety which calls us circling back upon ourselves in an old anxiety that makes no room for us to dream anew.  To meet the Demon of Anxiety we need to know its name and call it forth.  To thank it for how it has served us and now to set it free.  To make room for the new, that soaring, Pentecost Dove, that Angel of Faith, flying like light, like fire, among us.