The Next Faithful Step
by Bishop Kym Lucas
When my kids were little, one of our favorite family movies was Meet the Robinsons. The movie tells the story of an orphan named Lewis who is obsessed with building a machine that will help him remember and locate his birth mother. He meets a boy named Wilbur who claims to be from the future and needs Lewis to repair his time machine before an AI-enhanced bowler hat takes over the world. Wilbur coaxes Lewis to come to the future with him. There, Lewis learns a few things: (1) Wilbur’s futuristic family is unusual, and (2) the family patriarch is a world-renowned inventor whose motto was “Keep moving forward.” Lewis is perplexed by Wilbur’s unfailing confidence that he can fix the time machine, especially in the face of his many failures (the reason for this confidence is revealed later). Yet every time Lewis fails, Wilbur responds: “Keep moving forward.”
The movie, both funny and poignant, prompted many conversations between my kids and me about confidence, risk, and failure. The movie suggests that our failures can either crush us or teach us. We willingly risk failure, like Lewis, but we keep moving forward with new knowledge.
As I contemplate the new church landscape that we inhabit, it seems we followers of Jesus are being called to examine where we place our confidence and whether we are willing to risk failing. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us not only out of our comfort zones, but also to the point of exhaustion. And after decades of trying to maintain a model of church that is not sustainable, the church is being called to risk letting go so we might receive new blessings God has in store for us.
Odds are, we going to fail. We might even fail spectacularly. Our baptismal covenant reminds us that failure is part of our faith journey: “and, whenever you fall into sin, (will you) repent and return to the Lord?” All of us fall short of the glory of God — and the glory God intends for us.
Nonetheless, our salvation doesn’t lie in the world’s definitions of success. Our salvation has been secured by one who faced the ultimate failure of crucifixion and then rose victorious. Our call is to be faithful: to love God and love neighbor, to proclaim the Good News that the reign of God has come near, to reflect Christ. Our task to take the next faithful step.
We live in a world that desperately needs to hear the message of the reconciling power of Love. Spreading that message will require us to risk something. We might have to risk going where we haven’t been before. We might have to risk learning the language of those around us. We might have to risk real relationship with others. In this time, we must risk doing things differently and, in the face of our failure, keep moving forward.
In my own spirit, I recognize the desire for things to “go back” — back to normal, back to the way they were. But a wise person once told me that for a disciple of Jesus there is no “back to.” There is only forward, with fear and trembling and faith. Here in the Episcopal Church in Colorado I see congregations taking risks, trying new things, learning from mistakes and missteps. I see communities thinking creatively and expansively about what it means to be church. And while none of us knows what the future holds, I am confident that God is with us and that by God’s grace we can and will take the next faithful step and keep moving forward.
