Thank you for reading Jasini’s Thoughts and Ideas
Every congregation has a choice to be one of two things.
You can choose to be a bag of marbles, single units that don’t affect each other except in collision. On Sunday morning you can choose to go to church or to sleep in. Who really cares whether there are 192 or 193 marbles in a bag?Or you can choose to be a bag of grapes. The juices begin to mingle, and there is no way to extricate yourself if you tried. Each is part of all. Part of the fragrance. Part of the “stuff.”
—— Anne Ortlund, Up with Worship: How to Quit Playing Church (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2001), p. 93.
More than twenty years ago, the above quote was one of our pastor’s favorite sermon illustrations. (Another one was a long, involved story that began with him making a sandwich, and ended with him having to turn down a steak dinner because he was full of baloney.)
I know the pastor must have been impressed with the imagery. Which you must admit is effective, for me to remember enough to look up two decades later. But I’m afraid my first reaction, and most of my reactions since, was, “Ewww!” I’d far rather be an intact marble than a squashed grape.
My husband suggested I think of them as raisins, rather than grapes, which did help some. But not really enough.
One of the main issues I have is with the line, “Who really cares if there are 192 or 193 marbles in the bag?”
Who cares? I’ll tell you who cares. The little boy (or girl, but boys were more common) who painstakingly collected and won them. He could tell you the name and history of each one of them, the cat’s eye, the aggie, the steelie, all individual, all unique, all loved. And lament over the ones that he lost.
But who cares how many raisins or squashed grapes are in the bag? I tell you, I don’t count the raisins as I eat them. They are just meant to be consumed (or composted). They are all the same, no individual characteristics, all subsumed, faceless, into the whole.
I expect that she was trying for the imagery of the Body of Christ. But the mystery of the Body is that Christ takes all of us, all these unique, different individuals, and melds us into one Body, without losing the uniqueness. Perhaps even enhancing it. After all, a hand is not a foot nor an eye. But we all work together for the good of the kingdom.
I have taken this book out via Inter Library Loan, and intend to do my best to give it a fair reading. My first impression, glancing through it to find the quote, is that it reads rather like a women’s Bible study book, but I’ll try not to let that discourage me.
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Someone to whom that illustration appeals to makes me think that they're a person who really enjoys the idea of communism or enjoys cacophonous Unity to actual musical Harmony . I fail on both accounts