THE METAPHYSICAL COFFEE CLUB

Nearly every morning, I gather at a local Starbucks with the Metaphysical Coffee Club. It consists of three regular members--myself, another pastor, and a local businessman. From time to time, our numbers swell a bit with the addition of whomever happens to be there as we gather. These meetings are not scheduled, have no agenda, and began by our recognition that we all got our coffee at about the same time everyday, and as we spoke getting to know each other because we were so regular, realized we had an interest in thinking about things.

When the businessman learned that my colleague and I were pastors, theological questions burbled to the surface. The businessman thought a lot about a lot of things--whatever interested him at a given moment. His questions flowed from his voracious reading habit. The first time floored me. It was not a question like, “Do preachers ever cuss?” No, he asked me if Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning was ever truly answered or did the Holocaust destroy any hope of there ever being any real meaning to human existence?

I sat there. 

I said nothing.

At first.

First, it was way too early in the morning for Existentialist questions. They should only be asked after lunch. Of course, they really rise at 2:00 AM, but here in our corner of Georgia, there are no coffee houses open at that hour, so they wait. By necessity, then, he asked it at 9:00 in the morning.

Second, this question is hardly indicative of the usual level of conversation in an American fast food restaurant--even at Starbucks despite their often being flooded with students studying. Usually, conversation is the latest gossip, news of so-and-so’s marriage, a business proposition, or nothing much beyond whatever washed across someone’s computer screen. 

But there it was. Viktor Frankl over coffee. 

From there, things have flowed and developed over the years. We have compared and contrasted Calvinistic theology with that of the Wesleys. We have delved into where life is going at any given moment. We wandered around predestination as opposed to a more Armenian understanding of human freedom. We have pondered the dictums of other faith streams as they challenge Christian assumptions and flesh out Christian dictums. We have discussed The New York Times. We have thought about church growth in all its forms. We have wondered about how to live faith in the context of a workaday world, countering pastoral idealism with the real grit of someone who actually works in the world. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is sacrosanct. Our conversations are free to go wherever they need to go. 

We need places to think. We need contexts in which every question is all right. We need places where taking offense is not part of the air. Places to be. Places to posit questions because they arise. Places to reveal ideas, hopes, and utterances that normally might raise hackles, just to get them in the open air. 

Ideally, such a place should be the Church.

In the most ancient models within our faith stream, the Church began as a gathering of folks linked by their understanding of God and the recognition that God called them to be a people before God. Long before there were temples, sanctuaries, or soaring cathedrals, there were gatherings of faithful people with their teachers. As the Israelites trekked across the wilderness toward Canaan, they sat together with Moses, Aaron, or the elders to talk, question, wonder, and puzzle over God, their presence before God, and where they were headed. It began the tradition of midrash--the questions and collected answers of congregation and rabbis through the ages. We see Christ employing similar mechanics as he gathered the disciples. They explored faith through conversation--question and answer, prayer and confession, and observation and explanation. As the disciples became the Church, such a model gave them a start. Paul’s letters are the record of the teachings flowing from congregational questions.

But then we became an institution, both in structure and in dogma. 

Institutions can stifle conversation. 

Institutions become calcified in thinking. Answers become fixed as if questions ceased. Questions are discouraged as signs of inappropriate doubt. 

Institutions become self-serving. The survival of the institution becomes its end. They grow insular as focus turns inward. Preservation of the institution becomes the main task. Therefore, the open-endedness of conversation, dialog, and contemplation become anathema. Too many variables. Too many chances that someone will move beyond the narrow scope of the institution. An example--the Pharisees. They codified the religion of Moses, focusing on strict adherence to the Torah that became mindless. They kept the rules without question. They followed the rules without thinking about why the rule was there, what it might mean, and why, therefore, God gave it as a means by which to practice faith. They created a godless religion because God was forced into the background, replaced by the Torah itself. Paul embodied the fallacy, finding himself in the name of God persecuting those who followed God’s Son. God surprised the Pharisees by not manifesting according Pharisaical interpretation, but as God--wholly free and holy other. 

The Church needs to recapture its roots as a community formed by dialog, nurturing the conversations that arise as folks explore together God, meaning, and the dichotomies or bridges that come between the two. In exploration, we discover the wonder of God, for God is not limited to singular voice, expression, or revelation. In the infinite being of God, God meets each human being as that human being finds herself. As we discuss together our experiences of God, each person can find himself affirmed, confirmed, and firmly assured that he is a child of God, even when he feels at odds with all else around himself. 

Furthermore, such a nurturing of conversation becomes the avenue to understanding that we are in the presence of the Living God. What God said once did not cement the conversation in stone. For instance, yes, God revealed himself in Christ. Christ was a unique expression of God’s being for us. Yes, that revelation, by its nature, set the standard of love as the central tenet of our faith stream--its practice and its state as the means by which we can know God. But because love lives, what was true for 1st Century Palestine is not necessarily the same truth needed at this moment. Hence, we are reformed and always reforming. Hence, the Presbyterian Book of Confessions has more than a single creed penned centuries ago, but traces the ongoing dialog of faith through the ages. God lives. God meets each generation of humanity where it is as it is. Love evolves. Love grows. Love shifts and changes to meet its context. 

The Metaphysical Coffee Club attempts to live with that.

We meet daily to converse. Sometimes the topic is the same as one from years earlier, but the conversation is not a repeated script from that earlier moment. We are not the same. The answers change. God is, but we are not. Sometimes the topic is completely unexpected. Something happened, someone spoke, or someone did something that needs unpacking. The coffee flows, the thoughts spill over the table, and, at times, a new direction emerges, but at others, a previous answer is proved stalwart. In either case, our connection deepens. We learn something. We share something.

I think we are the Church. 

Even there in an American fast food outlet. 

The Church is. 

It is not and never will be a replacement for the Church as we institutionalized it because we need that structure, order, and body of accepted knowledge gleaned through the ages. But it becomes a communion of its own sort that deepens our involvement in the broader communion of Sunday morning. Drinking coffee, we deepen our understanding. As we deepen our understanding, we ground our devotion. As we ground our devotion, we come to know that God is. As we come to know that God is, we know also that God is love. As we come to know that God is love, we learn to love another and those whom we encounter.