Last year, a short article in the New York Times announced the retirement of the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus elephants. Changing tastes and mores, competition, an unforgiving marketplace and long opposition by animal right activists had taken their toll. After the final decision to eliminate the elephant act was made, the circus owners immediately began facing the inevitable: laying plans to close the Greatest Show on Earth the next year.
The article described the elephants being packed up on trucks and moved to a compound in Florida. There were assurances about the greenness of the grass, the devotion of their keepers. It was a brief article, but compelling somehow. Something about the phrase “retiring the elephants” lifted off the page. Mental pictures of those noble beasts lumbering up the truck ramps stayed with me. I made a note on my 2017 calendar to check back.
Sure enough, this summer the Ringling Brothers popped the Big Top for the last time. Exactly as forecast, once the elephants were gone ticket sales plummeted. Just one year after retiring the elephants – 146 years after opening, having endured through two world wars, the Great Depression, the era of television and well into the digital age – 500 human performers and 100 animals took their final bow.
There’s a lot of metaphor potential here, of course. The images resonate with the experience of the 21st-century church. We know about sweeping change, about old paradigms passing away. “We’re selling miracles here,” Ringmaster Ken Iverson said as he described the death-defying acts done nightly and twice on Sunday under the Big Top. “We’re selling miracles.” But, it turned out, even a woman dangling by one stirrup under her horse’s belly at 25 mph was not death defying enough anymore. Not miracle enough.
As changes swirl around the Church of Jesus Christ, some of us wonder: Are the miracles enough? Are the trucks coming for us? How do we know that what happened to the Greatest Show on Earth will never happen to the Greatest Story Ever Told?
For clues, we could do worse than look to Second Corinthians. It’s a book that knows about old paradigms – for the church in Corinth, that would be ministry that’s done under the Law – and new paradigms – ministry that is done under the auspices of the Spirit. If the old resulted in the kind of glory reflected on Moses’ face, Paul says in chapter 3, how much more can we expect the new ministry – the ministry of Life and the Spirit and Boldness and Freedom – to be veritably blasting with glory? That’s Paul’s answer to the “is it enough?” question.
I am telling you, Paul says, in the new ministry there is going to be so much glory bouncing around it will be like gamma rays bursting off your bathroom mirror, like pheromones firing off the faces of a thousand love-struck teenagers. It will be as if the Livermore Lab fired up its peak power laser diode array and shot out a couple of pettawatts (one petawatt = one million billion watts) of light. Glory. More light than every marquee, every big top, every Fresnel, ellipsoidal spotlight and follow spot in the world can create. A miracle of light.
That’s what the ministry of the church – the ministry under the auspices of the Holy Spirit – looks like. Light. The ministry, the story, the church will endure, Paul believes, not because of our cleverness. Not even because of our faithfulness. Certainly not because of our lumbering nobleness. But because of God’s graciousness. Because it is fueled by that most miraculous of all lights: the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Miracle enough. Let the church say “Amen.”
JANA CHILDERS is dean and vie president for academic affairs at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
