Birdcage or Birdbath?

Which is the Church?

Which is the Church called to be?

We celebrated Pentecost today as a church community in Dimond Park, having our worship celebration outside followed immediately by an all church picnic. The story of Pentecost (told in Chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles) was presented to us anew through drama by various members of our community of faith.

I spoke about the church - then, how the Spirit of God erupted into people's experience, expectations and visions of what faith meant for individuals in a community. I spoke about the church for us today - how the Spirit of God explodes into our lives, inviting us to new experiences, to seize new opportunities, to embrace a bigger vision of how God "shows up" in our lives. So is church to be a birdbath or a birdcage. (The metaphor comes from Jack Rogers.) We had both on our communion table. The cage seeks to keep a bird present by barriers, ensuring that the bird won't escape or go somewhere else so that the owner can always enjoy the presence of the bird. The other, the birdbath, has no barriers, is open, birds are free to come and go, to find refreshment when they want, need and seek it. One is built upon trust in a relationship, the other on mistrust or fear.

As I reflect on my recent outbursts of frustration with the state of the church in terms of who can be ordained and serve as leaders - not just as pastors - but as elders and deacons - local lay leader in local church communities - I'm struck by the question. We often choose the birdcage, in how we construct the church, in how we approach our relationships. Don't we? We often make choices - most often because of our own baggage - based on fear and in mistrust. Oftentimes we approach encounters and relationships fearful that we won't receive what we desire, that we won't be heard, that we will be forgotten, that we aren't all that important. As a result we're either hyper-aggressive, taking up all the place, on the attack to ensure that we don't get steam-rolled. Or we're passive, apathetically assuming that what we want won't happen anyway so why bother. It seems like a lot of our relational encounters in our urban life swing back and forth between these poles. What does it take for us to choose trust over mistrust, to live acting from hope and opposed to reacting from fear?

As I reflect on today I have to admit the irony of the birdcage/birdbath metaphor. It's not just about church - it's about us. How can we move from living in birdcage mode to birdbath mode? Is that what we even want? It's interesting....seems to me (not that I have a lot of experience with birds besides flipping them) that birds in cages seem happy and content...they have all of their needs met, they are fed, they drink, their cages are cleaned....yet they have no freedom, no liberty, no choice, no passion to choose - to develop - to follow - to share....maybe that's the whole thing about trust, hope, and fear.....it all comes down to freedom, dependence, interdependence, collaboration, reciprocity, peripathetic living..... I want to live in the birdbath...how can I, and when I say "I" I mean "us", encourage, empower and exhort others to do so too?