Back in 2009 I had a post that explored the idea that while Jesus learned the trade of carpentry, he did not use many carpentry metaphors when talking about the kingdom of God.  

After further reflection on this idea more thoughts have been stewing in my brain.  

Not only did Jesus not use much carpentry language he also did not use much fishing language to talk about the kingdom of God.  It is interesting to me that Jesus did not use much insider language with his parables.  

Jesus used a lot of farming metaphors, wedding metaphors and even the occasional sheep metaphor.  These are the images that the followers of Jesus, the crowd that surrounded Jesus, could understand because it was their world - their images.  

I can understand how the disciples never seemed to "get it" even though they were with Jesus all the time.  

He was using language that was rooted in the life experience of the non-believer and the crowd.  He did not spend much time trying to appease or create insider language with just himself and the twelve.  

Is this not a way to consider the mission of the church?  

Too often we gather on Sunday morning expecting the same things that we who attend, understand and "get". We use insider language and even are fearful to change things because we might "upset" the most faithful members.  So we continue to do what we do in order that those who are in the church can be comforted and those who are not in the church can continue to feel like church is, at best, weird.  

What would it look like to take a model that we might find in the way of Jesus?  What if we created a church that was so concerned about connecting with those outside the church that those in the church would even be willing to "not get it" like the twelve disciples.  

Do you get or understand Jesus, or are you like the disciples and continually scratch your head wondering what the heck this Jesus guy is teaching and saying?  

Carpentry makes for lousy parables

Talking with the ministers the other day about theology and whatnot and in the course of the conversation we began to talk about the Church's mission to help people gain meaning for their lives. In that pursuit, the Church must be able to help people discover language which helps articulate a meaning for them to embody. We commented how we each felt about how the Church is doing (not too well at the moment) and then discussed the influence of scientific atheism in the culture.

In the course of the conversation something struck me about Jesus and his ability to speak to the people he was with. He never once used a parable dealing with carpentry.

Parables of coins, strangers, sheep, sons, grain, goats... sure. Parables of hammers, tables, crafting, designing... no.

The only one I could connect to carpentry was the saying where we should not talk about the splinter in our neighbors eye with a plank of wood in our own. But that is a weak connection at best.

By all accounts Jesus was a carpenter. In fact the "Passion of the Christ" has Jesus making the first table people sit down in chairs at to eat a meal. But he hung out with fishermen, farmers, and the socially estranged of society. Thus his parables and language reflect this.

Perhaps the Church could take a lesson from this and stop trying to control a conversation and force it to always be about God. Not everyone is comfortable or even knows theology or God-talk. But everyone has an area or a world which they know and can relate with and the Church could possibly connect with more people if we were only willing to stop talking about God with our own insider language and talk about God with the language of the people we are in relationship with.

Either that or Carpentry makes for lousy parables.