The Radical Root

Last Tuesday in a meeting I had the opportunity to observe one of many amusing and yet perhaps very telling quirks of the English language. As a part of a conversation of how to move forward as a congregation someone observed that what was needed was something radical, they also agreed that what we needed to do was get back to the root of what we had been doing. Now at face value this can almost seem a little contradictory, I mean we tend to think of something radical as far out and different and the root as sort of getting back to the basics. The amusing part of course is the fact that they really mean the same thing. In mathematics, a radical is the square root of something. To be radical is to go back to our roots.

One of the challenges in our world seems to be this tendency to bury and forget about the root. Instead we focus on the huge plant that springs forth from it. The root, the base, the foundation is lost in the midst of the edifice around it. In the end going back to the root, back the base, to what everything is built on is something radical, something exceptional.

Maybe Jesus was a radical because he did just that, point us back to the root, to God. He did not get caught up in the legalisms of the day, but went back to the root, to something truly radical. have we in the church gotten caught in the legalism, the bureaucracy, the edifice that is the Church and forgotten the root? It is a serious question, one that countless others have raised and hopefully many churches and even denominations are considering. As the United Methodist Church begins its campaign to rethink church maybe we need to rethink church mathematical, and find that radical root that got us started, that careful harmony that John Wesley had between personal piety and social action. Or go even further back, to that life with Christ, that reminder that Christ is meant to be the center of what we do, of who we are.

Maybe it is stretching the mathematical imagery further than it should be taken, but I see a striking difference between the search for the radical root and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is based on around certain core principles, getting back to the basics, and yet fundamentalism stops short of getting to that radical root. It stops with whole numbers, easy integers. Getting to the radical root goes a step further, if you keep taking the root of an integer eventually you get to one whose root is no longer rational, but irrational. The root of 81 is 9, the root of 9 is 3, but the root of 3 cannot be expressed with integers, it is irrational. To me that seems that when you get to the root of Christ, you are looking at that irrational number, the square root of 3, inexpressible with simply integers, irrational. Christ is the quintessential irrational, 3=1, the square root of 3. What is really radical about root is in the end we recognize that at the source of the church is something highly irrational, our root cannot be defined in simple integers, a God who will walk among us as a man, will die for us, and will free us all from the power of death. The to me is the radical root.