Tomorrow's Sunday, and with Sunday comes The Decision. To church or not to church? I grew up going every Sunday with my parents. Well, until I became a Christian at 16, and decided it was too "establishment" for me, so I refused to go.
Every week for years I have agonised about going to church. I hate it (usually). It's boring. The sermons are long-winded and like store bought bread just leave you wanting for the real thing.
Fresh bread, made by people's hands -- not pushed through some lifeless machine --, moving and pushing and kneading the dough, changing the proofing time and baking time, based on the conditions of that particular morning. There is nothing quite so sustaining or yummy.
Hmmmm. The Rules say: Good Christians go to church every Sunday (or most Sundays!). But when I go, you can always know, I forced myself to be there. I never go because I want to. When I lived in the UK and the village church bell rang at 10:55am to 11:00am to remind everyone it was time to go to church, I would cringe. My flatmate and I called them the Bells of Guilt as we stayed at home and read the paper.
Sometimes when I go to my homegroup, I feel that is more like church for me. We worship, pray, talk, laugh, cry, eat, and discuss hard stuff together. And I certainly felt like the group of people I worked with in the UK...with them, I had my deepest experience of a living, breathing, moving church. Mess, pain, and difficulty it was definitely fraught with, but it moved me, changed me profoundly, drew my attention to Jesus and what he has to say about life and how we treat one another. I could only wish this experience for everyone. Though, I do know that some, even if offered it would not want it. It is not polished or perfect, it can be threatening, harrowing, and downright hard. But it is worth it.
I miss that, and long for church to be that. But I don't ever think it will be. I grew up in a liturgical tradition, and when I feel the need to worship, I most often am pulled back to the kneeler in the pew, to the Eucharist, to Cross hanging above the altar. I read in someone else's blog today that "liturgy is not preaching", it is pared down of extraneous unnecessaries -- those things that preachers, pastors, teachers like to add on to embellish, but really only seem to diminish. I think this is what I want. I am tired of the perpetual footrace to make church "appealing" or relevant as if it were a show to be staged each week. Putting on a good face. It's so incredibly boring because it is a reflection of mere human personality. It is not a place open to the many voices of Us, We, that is Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and The Bride -- together --empowered to reveal the Risen Christ, the Glorious Lamb of God. I am tired of the one-man band that heaves on its harmonica, pounds it drum, and crashes its cymbals together each week.
Bread and wine, Jesus, forgiveness, mercy, goodness, a hand to hold. Here I am at home.
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4 comments:
And I am with you. Thanks for the words to express what I too feel about the "gotta go" rule. There is sadly nothing there to make me want to go. Better to spend the time with a few *real* people on some other day :-)
Oy vey! The agony! It has become one of my least favorite things to do. I cried reading this just for longing.
Hope you're doing okay.
Love,
Jan
Ellen - Ethel here.
Like you and the liturgy, somehow when I'm doing dishes or walking outside and happen to get refocused on God, the songs that come to me first are usually old Baptist hymns. I don't think I could fit into the kind of church I grew up in again - well, maybe I could if it was in a small town and there was no other - but those are the songs that help me worship. I like a more modern style of worship now, but somehow those old songs with the deep meanings come back to me again and again.
When I last saw my grandmother alive - in the final stages of Alzheimer's so that she didn't know anyone - by the grace of a nurse that I think might have been an angel, I ended up singing old hymns with her. She was always a person who sang hymns while she worked, so I sang the old hymns I remembered her singing. As I sang out loud in the hallway of the nursing home, her face began to beam and she mouthed the words with me. When the songs mentioned Jesus, she beamed from ear to ear. When the songs mentioned heaven, she cried and cried. It was obvious that the last thing left in her mind was her love for Jesus and that she was trapped and questioning, "Why won't he just take me home?"
I went to her funeral a year later, just to tell that story to my cousins. I wanted them to think - as I had been thinking for a year - about what would be left in each of us when we got to the end of our minds, ravaged by Alzheimers or whatever other disease affects us. Will it be Jesus that is left at the core of my being, the One Thing that still connects with my heart?
Grandma hadn't been to church in years, but she still worshipped in her heart. As I was lying in bed the night before her funeral I was asking God, "Why DID you keep her here so long? Why did you let her keep breathing when she couldn't communicate with anybody or contribute anything, when all she could do was praise you in her heart?" And I heard God's voice very clearly, and He told me, "That's enough."
Jesus said, "Wherever two ro three gather in my name, there I am ...."
Modern translation? Church is where you find it.
Glad you're finding it in our humble un-Home Group.
Mike M.
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