Shells and Wings

We came out the door yesterday to witness a cicada shedding it's old carapace.  The process took several hours, we got in on only the last hour or so of this rebirth.  The cicada adopted the top of our herb garden pyramid as the location for the struggle.  We watched with fascination and took a number of photos.

I was struck by the utter vulnerability of the bug during this process.  After the cicada ruptured the old shell, it hung there for several hours, completely exposed and clearly unable to move much at all.

I thought about how vulnerable we must be as we embrace change.  At first we are subject to all sorts of threats.  The temptation to go back into our shells is profound.  The cicada is fortunate to be unable to consider this option.  Once it has left the carapace behind, there is no return.  It is go forward or die. That is perhaps a description of our life as followers of Jesus as well.  We can embrace the changes Jesus calls from us, live into our new and enlarged lives and get on with the newness.  Or we can die.

I thought about the church, and especially local congregations, as I watched this drama.  We think that the local church is in trouble because we aren't big enough, doing enough, fast enough.  I think we are in trouble because we are unwilling to let the new life burst out of the old boundaries.  We have opportunities for serving, loving and witnessing like we have never had before.  It's not that our mission is too small to engage us.  It is that our vision of ourselves is too small to sustain us.  Most churches long to crawl back into the shell of some past golden age.  And that is the path of death.

For the cicada, the carapace has one remaining function.  Predators may mistake that old shell for a cicada and be thrown off the hunting trail.  You can see that the old shell does a pretty good imitation of a live bug.

Once more I thought about churches.  Too many Christian churches in North America look just like that shell.  They are just good enough imitations of a church on the outside to fool people into thinking that there might be a church on the inside as well.  Many visitors and seekers discover that they have been thrown off the path by an empty shell.  And they move on to look elsewhere.

Of course, this same set of photo-metaphors can be used for an individual life and the choices we face. We can become as big as our God has made us to be and fly away free.  Or we can stay inside the old shell and be nothing more than imitation disciples.

"...We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." (Romans 6:6-11)