Buried Truth

Buried Truth

The first time I saw the art installation on the esplanade, I did a double take. Driving south on Houston’s Heights Boulevard, I passed something that looked like a half-buried church steeple. I recognized it as art (I’d already passed a neon beagle and a baby carriage made to look like an Airstream), but it looked more like the odd result of a small urban twister, neatly landscaped and strangely unscarred.

Several miles past the buried steeple, I was still wondering, Why?

It troubled me to see the church pictured as vulnerable and compromised. But she is. She is vulnerable to the flaws of the human persons who serve her. She is vulnerable to the preferences and prejudices of culture. And she is compromised. By the choice to peddle feel-good, pop encouragement and call it gospel. By every decision to insulate rather than risk. By the presence of charlatans and impostors in places of power.

Whether you believe Christ’s church is winning or waning in public opinion, is wooing souls or repelling them, is contextually relevant or hopelessly out of touch . . . she remains the bride of Christ. G. K. Chesterton once described her as a figure reeling but upright through the ages.^a

On the boulevard, she seems to be going down into the earth for good. But the whole arc of the Christian story leads us to this unflinching conclusion: buried things rise. Nothing is as it seems. And no matter how dark the horizon gets, the sun will rise on the day of the Lord and the trumpet will sound. As the Nicene Creed proclaims, “He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”

Now when I drive past this sculpture, I adjust my eyes to see the true reality: the church is not sinking into oblivion; she is rising as a bride from sleep to meet her Beloved. Her steeple ascends from the earth and points heavenward while the saints of all the ages gaze upward and the Risen One beckons her up and on.

Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.

Acts 20:28, NASB

^a G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Chicago: Moody, 2009), 153.