Life At Scale

At eighteen I moved to Hartford, CT to study with the Hartford Ballet. One of the first things I did was find a therapist to work on family "baggage." Getting to my appointment meant walking through a very upscale neighborhood in West Hartford, past large mansion-like homes with perfectly manicured lawns and circular driveways. One house stood out. It took me a few trips to realize it was actually a facade hiding a modest older home that had likely been there long before the other estates had arrived.

I've thought about that house for many years. What strikes me now isn't the dishonesty of it. It's the effort. Someone paid for that. Someone maintained it. Every year, a door that led nowhere had to be painted.

What is a Facade?

A facade is a face. That's all the word means: from the Italian facciata, the front of a building, the part that meets the street. In architecture it isn't a lie. Every building has one. The question is only what's behind it, and why.

Some facades are for protection. This is the one for which I have the most sympathy. A person who has been hurt learns to present a surface, and the surface keeps them safe for a while. There's no shame in that. But protection has a shelf life, and the trouble with a surface that keeps harm out is that it keeps everything else out too.

And some facades are claims. This is the house in West Hartford. Not protection. Rather, a claim about size, made to people passing by, who would never get close enough to know better.

The Temptations

Jesus goes into the wilderness, is hungry for forty days, and is offered three things. The Deceiver says, "Turn these stones into bread. Throw yourself from the temple and let the angels catch you. Look at all the kingdoms of the world, they can be yours." We usually read these as temptations toward "sin," but that doesn't really describe what's on offer. A hungry man eating is not a moral failure.

What I see being offered, all three times, is a facade. Each one is a claim about size, and each one is aimed at an audience. Bread from stones proves Jesus can provide for all. The leap from the temple proves he is protected from all harm (and note the setting, the most public roof in Jerusalem, a stunt staged for a crowd). The kingdoms prove he is more powerful than any ruler, in a way anyone could recognize on sight.

Accept any one of them and Jesus' ministry starts with a wall in front of it. From the road he looks like more than he is, and every day after that, part of him goes into keeping the wall standing.

What is interesting is his "no." He isn't refusing power. He's refusing to claim a size he hasn't grown into, in front of people who would never get close enough to know better.

And then he goes home to Nazareth, where everyone knows exactly how big he is, and it nearly gets him thrown off a cliff. That's one kind of facade — pretending to be more than you are.

The Other Direction

There is a second kind of facade, and it's the one I see more often in mainline churches these days.

It's the front that claims to be small, poor, and powerless. We're just a small congregation. We don't have the resources. What difference could we make. It has the same architecture as the mansion front — a flat wall, a claim about scale, held up in front of people who won't come close enough to check. But the scale points the other direction.

The reason this one is harder to name is that it comes with scripture attached. The mansion front has no defenders. But a church that insists on its own smallness can quote Paul at you, and usually does.

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. People hear that as permission to stay small — weakness is holy, so remain weak and call it faithfulness. But that isn't what Paul is describing. He has something wrong with him, something he only ever calls a thorn, and he asks God three times to remove it. God says no. The thorn stays — nothing is removed — yet Paul continues his work.

What changes is that Paul stops pretending. He starts writing as a man with a thorn in him. That's the moment the ministry becomes unmistakably his. Not because weakness is power, but because he is finally at his own size, and everything he has can go into the work instead of into the wall.

The thorn wasn't the ministry. The end of the performance was.

Us, Now

Here is what I keep coming back to. A facade cannot grow. It has to stay exactly the size it was

built, because the moment it changes, the seam shows and everyone can see there's nothing behind it. Only the actual house can be added onto.

Which means being at scale isn't a verdict about how big you are. It's a description of where you are right now. Jesus was not at his full scale in the wilderness. He grew into it, over time, no shortcut taken. The refusal in the desert wasn't a refusal to become more. It was a refusal to claim more before it was true.

This is what our congregation is doing now. Not putting up a front, and not pretending to be smaller than we are either. Building capacity. Doing the actual work of becoming what God is calling us toward, at the pace that work actually takes.

Learning Still 

Many years on from that walk in West Hartford, I am still in therapy, still working through the baggage a life provides, still finding rooms in the house I hadn't opened. There's a symmetry there I only recently noticed: every week, rain or shine, I walked past a facade masking a home on my way to the one room where I had agreed not to have a facade at all. I didn't see the joke at the time. I was only eighteen after all.

What I've learned since is that the work never ends — nor is it supposed to. The thorn stays. What changes is how much of me is spent hiding it. Being in therapy is a practice of authenticity, which is another way of saying it is the work of coming into scale with my own past. Not smaller than what happened. Not larger. Accurate about it, so that I can be here now, at whatever size I actually am, and grow from here.

What I have learned about being at scale with yourself is actually a condition for being useful. It can't visit the sick or sit with the grieving or say the true thing in the meeting where the true thing is costly — it can only stand where it was built and be looked at. So the work of getting to your own size isn't preliminary to the calling. It is the calling.  

May we keep discovering life at scale together.

Pastor Robin