Tuesday, July 3, 2012 at 9:45AM I Need the Eggs
From Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell
This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,” and uh, the doctor says, “Well why don't you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.”
It’s a line from Woody Allen’s 1977 classic Annie Hall that’s been floating through my head since the Reformed Church’s General Synod met a couple weeks ago. As you may know (some of you know far more than I do), after some intense and unhappy wrangling, Synod made a statement about homosexuality that many consider divisive, imprudent, unnecessary, beyond its bounds, and lots of other bad stuff. There is beaucoup commentary about it all over the internet. I haven’t read very much of it.
Invariably in times of turmoil, questions arise—or sometimes they are more assertions than questions—“Must I now leave the Reformed Church in America? Am I no longer welcome here? What happened to ‘my’ church?” I confess to thinking all of these on more than one occasion. But when I do it honestly and for very long, I come back to the guy at the psychiatrist in the joke, “I need the eggs.” My church may be crazy and think it is a chicken, or often even crazier things. But it is still my church and I need the eggs.
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