Letting Jesus shine through the biblical quilting pattern
QUILTING is a wonderful and creative hobby that mixes fabrics, styles and stitches, resulting in beautiful pieces of art. Fifty years ago my grandmother made what was known as a “lappiesombers” by using scraps of materials passed on to her by the family from leftover dressmaking projects. The end result was nowhere near the exquisite quality one can view at quilting exhibitions today.
As human beings we very often feel our lives are like a quilt in progress. We experience life in our modern, mobile society of religions, races, classes and backgrounds with its many overlapping subcultures as bewildering.
We may even be prone to constantly look back to the past comparing it with the present and remembering it as so much better.
We insist that the government should be maintaining laws that express our Christian faith or we attempt to desperately preserve church traditions as we have known and experienced them.
We deny and resist all suggestions that we have shifted into a post-Christendom era or that the church is on the margins – very often not even aware that it has happened. However Christians, like a quilter discovering a new pattern, can experience renewed enthusiasm when the opportunities of operating as a movement rather than an institution are discovered.
Jesus used a parable about tearing a piece of cloth from a new garment and using it to patch an old garment in Luke 5:36-39 to illustrate that hearts need to be flexible to receive the life-changing message of Jesus given in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-11).
A fresh touch of the Spirit on a flexible heart will mean a new way of living for the church on the margins as we become faithful witnesses to the Christian story in our workplace and spheres of influence – gentle instead of wanting power, just instead of pursuing personal greed and comforting instead of wanting personal happiness at any cost. We become the change we want to see as our influence becomes bottom-up when we partner with others in the struggle for justice and the transformation of individuals and communities infested with gang-related crimes and rampant rape of children.
Stuart Murray writes in Church after Christendom that we become “fellow strugglers rather than sources of superior knowledge or virtue”.
Theologian and author Richard Rohr says: “Paul idealises not power, but powerlessness”. Rohr quotes from scripture as follows: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). and “I glory in nothing except in the cross of Christ” (Galatians 6:14). “Is he a masochist?” Rohr asks in relation to Paul. No: Paul has found what he calls “the mystery that has been hidden since the beginning of time” (1 Corinthians 2:7). Rohr continues that that “we don’t break through and transform history from the top, but from the bottom” – Richard Rohr.
In order to use the new cloth on a new garment we need to dig deeper within ourselves; recognise the need for a strong spiritual life by learning a new dependence on the Spirit and the Word and living our lives as transparent witnesses to the presence and reality of the kingdom of God.
We can trust God and believe God can lead us somewhere new in this post-Christendom era that is a good place to be even though the pattern and colours of the quilt of our lives and communities may seem frightening and unknown.
Ethel Schultz Pittaway is the canon for gender issues, Anglican Diocese of Port Elizabeth.