Stones

Friday!!!!!!

Ok so I just experienced what 10 weeks feels like condensed into 2 weeks. It is a little nuts. Luckily for me my next two-week session doesn’t start till Wednesday (pending getting an email) so I have time to work through some stuff, but there really is only one thing: The group presentation project that we had to do for class, and the naivety that I have about the church.

Our project description was to present a bible study for seminary students that would go beyond what a normal bible study did and to push the people in the crowd to make a decision to actually do something about it. We did John 8:1-11 … The Stoning of the Adulterous Woman. Not something easy to do, but we felt very strongly about it. So we went for it, and our goal was to make the class look at the woman as the adulterous church rather than just a sinner. The link was drawn from the OT idea that Israel was called an adulterous bride in that they had turned away from God.

Rewind to Thursday: So we passed out rocks to everyone in the class … and then said this:

Sin exists in the church, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Sometimes it is a person, sometimes it is a doctrine, and sometimes it is ‘the way things are.’ Some of us have heard of churches that have fallen because of sin. Rory spoke two days ago about picking your battles within a church. Think about the battles that you want to fight, but just are not able to with the resources you have. Do they get under your skin? Do they keep you awake at night? Do you clench your fists till your knuckles turn white? Do you sit in your car yelling at God?

Perhaps the church has done something that has hurt you. I have a scar on my arm from when I broke my arm but this scar might be on your heart. Do you see it from time to time as you look inward? Has the wound healed? Is it still open? Is it festering with infection?

Lets come back to the passage, and put yourself in the place of the crowd (if you have difficultly doing that just pick your rock up.) Your standing there getting a good grip. Maybe picking a sharp side that you want to end up hitting her. Now that you have your grip, your eyes rise up off the rock and look up to see the woman. But is not the woman you see but the church that has hurt you, or drives you nuts. That something or someone embodied there. What do you see? The accusers are talking to someone on the side, but there it is, helpless, cant move, point blank, it’s a free shot.

After some more discussion we changed the point of view from the crowd to that of Christ. We had everyone look at their rocks and give a name to the rock in the form of the hurt or the thing. We went on to point out that Jesus acknowledge the woman's sin, and while the crowd had every right to throw stones, Jesus showed grace. We put a bucket up in the front and let people come up and drop their rocks if they wanted too, and gave them room to state what it was. I cried at some of the responses I heard

- I need to let God judge his own church
- The church that wasn’t there for me
- The church that sucked the life out of my family
- The church that destroyed the pastor’s marriage
- Fake Christians

- We have to be whole before we can make others whole.

If it were not for the fact that I had to catch up with some homework I would have done this yesterday. There were a few people who slammed their rocks down, others who just went up and were barely able to hold themselves together.

I do not claim that this short summary can even come close to the atmosphere of the room, but the hurts that were there were real.

Come back to Friday: I saw one of the rocks in class. It brought me hope. After the last of the presentations our professor got up and lost it, all the presentations hit very close to home in so many lives of the class that the class was for the better. Beyond just our presentation the Holy Spirit showed up each day in the sense that the groups that were on the same day, set up and complemented each other. We did not have a time for presentations but we had a teaching by the Holy Spirit. Our professor had to stop slight and collect herself some, and then she blessed us.

From this issues we discussed, we will need it.