Caught Up in the Mundane

I've been off the grid lately in this time between leaving one congregation and starting at another.  My life has been preoccupied with getting ready to move from Columbus to Falls Church, VA, and I have discovered that the normal rhythms of my life have been thrown out of kilter.  Those rhythms revolved around my identity as pastor.  But for these last couple of weeks, I've not been one.

Without my old pastor rhythms, my life has begun to revolve around rhythms of home and car repair, planning and packing for a move, doing taxes, and tying up loose ends.  In a sense, my life feels like it has become captive to the mundane.

I don't mean to disparage the mundane.  The fact of God's Incarnation in Christ, that Jesus experiences hunger, hallows the mundane.  God is at work and is encountered within the mundane.  The spiritual is not outside the mundane.  But that does not mean the the mundane is inherently spiritual.  A discerning eye and awareness are required to encounter God in the mundane.

Though God is in the mundane, the mundane makes a very poor god.  And when the mundane totally dictates the patterns and rhythms of life, life gets out of kilter.

Monday's gospel reading is one of those places in Mark where one story exists within another, and the two need to talk with one another to understand fully what the author is trying to say.  Jesus cursing a fig tree (an odd event considering that "it was not the season for figs") and its withering bracket the cleansing of the Temple.  Mark seems to say that the Temple is not bearing the fruit is should, and, given the events of the cleansing, it might be correct to say that the Temple apparatus had gotten caught up in the mundane of religious enterprise. 

Church work and religion offer their own form of the mundane, rhythms and activities that can come to dominate the life of those who are a part of them.  And while God indeed inhabits and is at work in the the details of church administration, planning worship services, and setting budgets, those things make very poor gods.

A deep spiritual question that many ask is "Where is God in my life?"  In a sense, this asks where God is within the mundane.  The Church has often assumed that the mundane rhythms of its life were of God, but many no longer share such assumptions.  And so the burning spiritual question for both the individual and the Church becomes, where is God at work in the rhythms of my life?

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