Choosing to Rest in God's Arms

Pastor Page, April 2, 2008

Monday night I was with a group of college students, leading a discussion of the film Gone Baby Gone, and it’s full of grist for the spiritual/theological mill (it’s also full of rough language, so beware if you’re sensitive to that type of thing). In the very first scene, the protagonist—a small-time private investigator named Patrick Kenzie—reflects on the nature of where he comes from and what he does. “It's the things you don't choose that make you who you are,” he muses, as the camera pans across the rough-hewn denizens of Boston’s mean streets, and then he tells about the time he asked his priest how to get to heaven and still protect his family. The priest responded by quoting Matthew 10:16—significantly, from the sending out of the disciples—“See: I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

The twin themes of personal responsibility and mission wind throughout the film. We see that Patrick is a moral man, an upstanding man, but he is always running into folks from the seamier side—crack-addicts, drug-runners, murderers—that he went to school with or knew in some fashion. And the question becomes: why did Kenzie make it and they didn’t? Was it some personal choice they made, some wrong turn they negotiated that led them to ruin? Or was it their family and surroundings—as Kenzie implies in the opening scene—that was the prime determining factor? And how does he balance the needs of self—of family and personal satisfaction—with those of living a moral life, of doing the mission of God the priest quite literally sent him upon?

There are questions here that are fundamental in everyone’s lives, but they have special resonance with Christian discipleship . . . how much of who we are—where we have gone in life, how successful we are—is God’s good gift (albeit in the form of good, family upbringing, perhaps) and how much the choices we ourselves make? How much of our mission is us—our own efforts, our own choices, our own sweat—and how much of it is God’s? Of course, everything is ultimately due to the creator, but where’s the equilibrium, how do we balance the two? This question is especially germane in this Seeker process, as we seek to balance our natural desires to get off our rears and do something—we are, after all, doers in this church—and the real need to sit back and let God tell us what to do.

On another tack, how do we balance our need to protect ourselves and our livelihoods with the needs of God’s work? How do we balance our desire for a certain kind of church experience, one that “feeds” us, with the need to proclaim the gospel, to invite the un-churched and never-churched into our doors? How do we take care of ourselves and still reach out to others? The way we answer these questions as a congregation will have real impact on the future of our church.