give ear to my supplications in your faithfulness;
answer me in your righteousness.
Do not enter into judgment with your servant,
for no one living is righteous before you.
For the enemy has pursued me,
crushing my life to the ground,
making me sit in darkness like those long dead.
Therefore my spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled. Psalm 143:1-4
You likely know this, but pastors go to lots of church meetings. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many of the groups I meet with have great people in them, and we often have very enjoyable meetings. Yet even in enjoyable church meetings, it is often difficult to get much sense of God being a part of them.
Graham Standish, in his book Becoming a Blessed Church, describes how church meetings often begin by asking God to bless what is about to happen but then take place as though God has left to get a cup of coffee while the business is actually transacted. Later, God will be invited back in to bless whatever was decided during that time. There's nothing sinister going on here. We simply get focused on the tasks at hand. That and we aren't quite sure how to let God's presence impact the proceedings.
This only gets worse in times of conflict. I've been to my share of presbytery meetings over the years (That is the representative, regional governing body in our denomination.) where we were considering difficult issues that divide us theologically. In the last couple of decades this was most often around issues of ordination, sexual orientation, and biblical interpretation. And in our heated debates over whether or not to ordain people in same sex relationships, a casual observer might have been hard pressed to think God was present at all. To be certain, talk about God along with verses from the Bible were heard frequently. But Bible verses were wielded as weapons, and God was referred to but never inquired of. People on both sides already "knew" what God wanted.
If you asked pastors and elders at a presbytery meeting, or leaders in most Presbyterian churches, they would surely insist that God is present at their meetings and, indeed, everywhere. Our tradition insists that God is not only omnipresent but also directly available to all people without need of mediation via priests or other sorts of intermediaries. So why does God so often seem to be on break when we are in a meeting?
I wonder if the psalmist quoted above isn't also struggling to find God's presence in a difficult time. Perhaps the words simply plead for God to be understanding and merciful, but I hear a bit of desperation, someone calling on a God who seems absent at the moment. It's easy to see why the psalmist might feel this way. Caught up in some sort of great, perhaps mortal difficulty, all the psalmist can see is danger all around. Those troubles obscure any glimpse or sense of God.
If God is indeed wherever we are, what is it that gets in our sight lines and obscures God's presence from us? In moments of crisis or great danger, our focus on these may hide God from us. But what is the problem in a more run-of-the-mill meeting? Might not it be much the same thing, our focus on the business at hand?
Many of us have learned how to be attentive to God in certain circumstances. In the midst of worship, in a time of quiet retreat, or in a moment of private devotion, we may clearly sense something of the divine. But if God's presence evaporates the moment we are doing anything else, how are we to carry Christ into the world in some way?
Surely some of the disdain the Church encounters in our world, the charges of hypocrisy and such, are related to this. If we can't actually invite God into our discussions, debates, and meetings, then we will have a hard time showing God to others except in our worship and private devotion.
Think about that the next time you are in a church meeting, or any sort of meeting for that matter. How might things go differently if everyone there was aware of God present in that meeting? Would we make different decisions, listen to one another differently, even question our own certainties, if we could see and hear Jesus sitting at the table with us? And if we cannot see or sense him, what does that say?
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