The lighthouse does not move. . .

There are a thousand lighthouse jokes.  The one I am most familiar with has several incarnations.  The one my Canadian friend likes to tell me goes like this.  A US naval ship is warned by Canadians to alter its course.

CANADIANS: "Please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision"

AMERICANS: "Recommend YOU divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision"

CANADIANS: "Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision"

AMERICANS: "This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course"

CANADIANS: "No, I say again, you divert your course"

AMERICANS: "This is the Aircraft Carrier USS LINCOLN, the second largest ship in the United States Atlantic Fleet. We are accompanied with three Destroyers, three Cruisers and numerous support vessels. I DEMAND that you change your course 15 degrees north. I say again, that's one-five degrees north, or counter-measures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship"

CANADIANS: "This is a LIGHTHOUSE. Your call"

The lighthouse does not move.  Its value lies in that it does not move.  Its light is anchored to a certain point and this is what gives its light authority.  Everything else moves because of its light.  I wish we took this to heart in the Church.

There are so many voices calling for the Church to listen to the opinions of the people in and outside of the Church, so many who insist that the danger before us is becoming irrelevant by failing to listen to our people, and so many who believe that God's Word is more suggestion than permanent truth.  By and large liberal Christianity has given into to all of these.  The times are filled with the mantra of a listening Church in step with the times and with the needs/wants/desires of its people.  The end result is that these churches have no light left.  They shine with the borrowed light of those around them -- a fragile light that changes constantly and offers nothing of permanence much less transcendence. It is a mirror of our own light which has already failed us in Eden and left us broken and marked for death.

Even in the churches you would least likely expect to hear this call, it is there.  Rome calls it Synodality.  Some Lutherans call it trusting the wisdom of others to come to different conclusions than we have.  It is the deception of diversity which celebrates difference and promotes a unity unfounded on truth.  God has not left us with the tools to make our own light.  We are merely tenders of the lighthouse, HIS lighthouse.  We also shine with borrowed light but it is not our light.  It is always His.  His Word.  His truth.  His doctrine.  The world is that ship insisting the lighthouse has to move.  The lighthouse has no course.  It is anchored to that which is eternal.  This is the Church's value.  We are anchored to the eternal in the midst of a changing world filled with deception and falsehood.  This alone does not make the world bad but it does make it clear why the Church and the people within listen to a different voice than their heart, their minds, or the times.  I wonder what might have happened if we had spent the energy we used trying to reinvent ourselves and applied it to being God's light.  That is all past now.  We cannot go back to our past errors.  We must shine with the brightness of the one, true Light now, where we are, with all that we are.  God's light has not failed us but we have certainly failed God's light.  We have dimmed the Light of Christ in the hope that our own light would shine brighter.  It did not work then and it will not work in the future.  Our hope is to chart our position against God's light, to set our course by that light, and to follow that light from the changes and chances of this mortal life to our eternal safe port in heaven.