Metamorphosis.

 Changing into your true Self.

In my recent sermon on the Transfiguration I mentioned metamorphosis and the analogy with caterpillars.  Were we to open an active chrysalis we would not find inside a caterpillar growing wings but undifferentiated goo.  The caterpillar totally deconstructs -- "digests itself" in the words of a biologist -- into this fluid mush before it reconstructs as a butterfly, practically from scratch.

As an image for change this tells us that whatever new thing emerges will be built out of chaos and disintegration.  Metamorphosis does not happen in an easy, linear, logical manner.  It breaks something down to its essential parts and basically starts over.

In terms of the Church, maybe we should not see the decline of the last half-century as a catastrophic march to extinction ("at this rate there will be zero Presbyterians by 2040!"), but as a necessary time of deconstruction out of which something new will, or at least could, emerge.  This enables us to interpret these times in new and more creative and hopeful, not to mention less panicky and nihilistic, ways.  The Church is not dying so much as preparing for rebirth.

Something else happens in this process of metamorphosis that we need to take into account.  The caterpillar does not become just any random thing.  The goo cannot decide to become whatever it wants.  It emerges according to its original plan as a butterfly.  This happens because of things called Imaginal Discs or Cells which carry the coding for the construction of the butterfly.  These cells existed within the caterpillar as well, which means that the caterpillar always carried its own destiny and future.  Continuity persists between caterpillar and butterfly, the DNA is the same, they are one animal with two successive forms.  

To extend the analogy, I believe the Church has always carried within it the coding for its own future.  We need therefore to identify and activate these Imaginal Cells in our ecclesial life today which carry the blueprint for the Church of tomorrow.

We have a difficult task.  We have to counteract and avoid the lethargy and depression that currently infects the Church after 50 years of disintegration and loss.  At the same time, we cannot just get on any shiny bandwagon that promises to adapt to the new situation with glitzy new forms.  What if those new forms do not convey the Word?  What if they simply cave to the Empire's latest trend?  What if they even lead to growth in numbers... while crippling discipleship?  Dietrich Bonhoeffer foresaw this situation when he wrote about "religionless Christianity."  He meant that we would still identify the future manifestation as Christianity.  He did not mean we would wind up with an amorphous, secularized, dissipated, disembodied religionlessness.

My main interest here concerns the identity, character, and centrality of the "Imaginal Cells" that will guide the construction of the new Church while maintaining its continuity with the former incarnation.  How do we manage tectonic change while maintaining the original DNA of Christian faith?  

The primary Imaginal Cell has to be what we receive in the first thesis of the Theological Declaration of Barmen: "Jesus Christ, attested in Holy Scripture," the "one Word of God."  Without this as our initial framework and blueprint, we will not be recognizably about following Jesus anymore at all.  (This "Jesus Christ, attested in Scripture" means both moving away from both (1) any version of Jesus that includes only a part of the one we get in the Bible, and (2) any "Jesus" adulterated with extraneous material from other sources.)  Secondary to Jesus Christ, and therefore of central and indispensable importance, we have the core doctrines of the orthodox Christian faith, as affirmed by the early church and expressed in the Nicene Creed.    

I believe that this Jesus Christ does not just guide the community of disciples into whatever the new paradigm will look like, but to unite and include, embrace and welcome all.  Christ is compassion and liberation, equity and humility, justice and love, inclusion and forgiveness, gentleness and shalom.

Look: We will not have a future if we keep avoiding the chrysalis, either as souped-up and supremely adapted caterpillars or as imaginary, fantasy butterflies.  These are the twin fallacies of the historical and gnostic "Jesuses."   Neither offers anything but extinction to us caterpillars; both leave us caught in the tyranny of ego and Empire, and their nihilistic, creation-killing agenda.  Only the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture -- who died and was raised -- fully human/fully God -- can carry us through the necessary metamorphosis.  In him we emerge from the chrysalis ready to ride the Creator's Spirit in a new kind of life.

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