I don't know why it struck me today, but with my mind freer to wander than usual for a Sunday morning, I found myself thinking about summer and worship attendance. I assume that most anyone who attends worship regularly has noticed that attendance drops off in the summer. There are some obvious reasons, of course. More people take vacations in the summer. Some folks take extended vacations, and so the pool of members and others who attend any congregation is diminished.
I don't have any hard data to back me up on this, but I am of the opinion that vacations, summer camps, and the like do not account for the total decline of those in worship. There is another factor, folks who "take summer off" from worship. In a pattern that somewhat mirrors schools, they take a summer vacation from church.
Now I'm not wanting to impugn these folks in any way. My interest in noting such vacations from church is not to chastise or cajole anyone. Rather I am wondering what it is about the way we do church, the way we conduct worship or education, or the way we envision ourselves that creates a church from which some folks need a break.
I written before that I don't think it's possible to have church without institutions. Practicing faith with no sort of structures usually ends up being terribly vacuous. But at the same time, religious institutions can become impersonal, and worse, they can lose focus on relationship with God and be more about the institution itself. And if doing church becomes mostly about institutional loyalty, maybe it should be no surprise that folks need a break now and then.
"My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God." Psalm 84 seems to speak of something other than institutional loyalty. And I wonder what practices of faith and worship might enliven our congregations so that when folks get back in town from a vacation or trip, they couldn't wait to get back to worship.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O LORD.
For some reason, these lines from Psalm 36 caught my eye this morning, specifically the part about Yahweh saving "humans and animals alike." This isn't the only place where the Bible speaks of God's concern for the earth's creatures. According to Jesus, not a single sparrow falls to the ground "apart from your Father." And in what it my personal favorite, the book of Jonah ends with God rebuking Jonah and arguing for animals. In the very last verse of the book God says, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"
"...And also many animals?" What an odd way to end. Or maybe it only seems odd because people of faith tend to focus on souls and heaven to the point that we've forgotten about God's love for creation, for bodies and such. The Apostle Paul speaks of creation itself awaiting its redemption. And obviously God thought creation was a good thing when God created it.
I've been reading a wonderful book by Barbara Brown Taylor entitled An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. It has some interesting chapter titles such as "The Practice of Wearing Skin - Incarnation" and "The Practice of Walking the Earth - Groundedness." In these and other chapters she notes how often we miss the sacred, miss God, because we are so unaccustomed to looking for God in the created, messiness of earthly, fleshy life.
"You save humans and animals alike, O LORD." If this is true, as the psalmist insists, then surely God is present and at work in the garden, in the backyard, in the day to day living of our lives. Surely God is more present than we often realize because we forget that God is not contained in the "houses" we build for that purpose.
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I've always been fascinated by the image of Jesus asleep on a cushion in the stern of a boat as a storm threatens to swamp it. (Mark's version of this event is the gospel reading for today.) I visited the Sea of Galilea once as part of a seminary trip. They had recently discovered a fishing boat from Roman times buried in the mud of the lake and were in the process of restoring it. It wasn't very big, and it's somewhat difficult to imagine anyone being able to sleep in it as a gale raged. When I was young I could sleep through phone calls and thunderstorms, but sleeping while waves crashed over the sides of the boat? That's mind boggling.
Yet Jesus seems surprised, perhaps even irritated, that the disciples awoke him. He acts as if his sleeping through the storm was no big deal. What were they worried about anyhow?
I don't need a storm to get the worry motor revving. I can get worked up and cry out for help over all sorts of things that might happen. Will the church be able to meet its budget? Will our congregation figure out how to reach out to the different sort of residents who are moving into this area? Why haven't we been able to find a new music director? The list goes on and on. And Jesus is asleep on the cushion, or so it seems much of the time.
My denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), has just released its latest membership statistics, and they are depressing. Our numbers are dwindling at an alarming rate. And there is much worrying and hand wringing over the future of the Church. "Wake up, Jesus! Don't you care that we are perishing?"
I don't think that God's plans require that any particular congregation or denomination do well or even survive. But surely God has things under control. If not, God wouldn't be God. And so Jesus' words from that boat come to us. "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" And I take that to mean that Jesus wants us to stop worrying, trust in God, and concentrate on living faithful lives. God will take care of the rest.
I'm trying to take that to heart.
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As a pastor I've had conversations with people whom seem to think that being a believer should somehow insulate them from the troubles of the world. And when things go badly, they feel God has abandoned them or that they've done something wrong so that God doesn't help them. Such feelings are natural, I suppose. I've certainly had my share of times when I thought God needed to step or I might throw up my hands and walk away.
But even a cursory reading of the Bible will reveal numerous instances of the righteous suffering, of people of deep faith being persecuted or dealing with terrible troubles. It's hard to come away from Scripture convinced that faith will protect one from all misfortune. And yet the same reading of the Bible will also reveal some pretty animated "discussions" with God about suffering and injustice. The psalms, especially, are filled with voices calling on God to act, at times demanding that God act. These voices insist that God's reputation is at stake, that a failure to do something will injure God.
There seems to be a more dynamic relationship at work here than I sometimes witness among we church members. There is often a formality and deference in our approach to God that makes it nearly impossible for us to shake our fist at God or demand that God do something.
Today's morning psalm, Ps. 123, is not as bold as some, but it nonetheless demands that God respond.
To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!
As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the LORD our God, until he has mercy upon us.
Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us,
for we have had more than enough of contempt.
Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease,
of the contempt of the proud.
I would never suggest that if we enter into the correct sort of prayer pose, all our wishes will be granted. But I wonder about our difficulty is coming before God like the psalmist, saying that we will gaze toward God with pleading eyes until God does justice and mercy. Maybe that's what Jesus was talking about when he said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness."
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Love that embraces the most wayward and irresponsible; such is the love Jesus describes in his Parable of the Prodigal Son and his Brother, Luke 15:11-32. It's a beautiful parable. At least it would be if not for the problems presented by the good, responsible, older brother.
In today's reading from Acts, the "rejection" of the gospel by some Jews spurs Paul to carry the good news to the Gentiles, "and as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers." This isn't one of the primary texts for formulating a doctrine of predestination, but it certainly is compatible with such a doctrine. People became believers, not because the figured things out, not because it made sense to them, but because they had been "destined for eternal life."
Personally, I am glad that the Bible doesn't develop this idea at great length, a reticence that might have served my own denomination's theologians well at times. Presbyterians didn't come up with predestination. Calvin borrowed it from Augustine and we share the doctrine with Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and others. But we emphasized it more and became known for it. We've backed away from it some in more recent years. It's still on the books, but we don't talk about it a lot. After all, it seems so... un-American.
We Americans are big on notions of merit, of people getting what they deserve, of people getting ahead on effort and not status. What business does God have destining anyone for good or bad?
Someone once noted that no one would be inclined to embrace a doctrine of predestination without believing she was one of the chosen ones. But be that as it may, I wonder why it is that so many of us are more comfortable leaving things in human hands rather than simply trusting God. Most all Protestants want to talk about God's unmerited grace, about being "saved" as a gift and not by our own merit. So why does the idea of predestination bother us so? (It's important to distinguish between predestination and determinism. Predestination - formally known as the Doctrine of Election - is not about every event in one's life being preset. It is concerned almost exclusively with salvation.)
Part of being human is not knowing everything. Faith seeks understanding, but faith also knows that God is incomprehensible to humans in many ways. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says Yahweh. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9) So while I will seek to understand God and live as God calls me to live, I'm pretty comfortable leaving ultimate questions of judgment, of who's in and who's out, up to God. After all, the God we meet in Jesus is not only just, but loving, caring, merciful, and forgiving.
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Love that embraces the most wayward and irresponsible; such is the love Jesus describes in his Parable of the Prodigal Son and his Brother, Luke 15:11-32. It's a beautiful parable. At least it would be if not for the problems presented by the good, responsible, older brother.
There is a lot of conflict between Jesus and religious authorities in the gospels. It shows up in today's reading from Mark in the form of a Sabbath controversy. Over the years, Christians have tended to picture these authorities as evil folks in black hats, as cartoon bad guys. But that seems highly unlikely. No doubt they had mixed motives, as do religious leaders in every age. Some of them were concerned with preserving the status and privilege they had. And some worried about religious movements that might get out of control and lead to conflict with the powerful Romans. But along with such concerns, there were genuine religious concerns that God's laws be upheld. The Pharisees, especially, were a reform movement that wanted people to embrace the Law in day to day living, compared to what they saw as overly ritualized Temple Judaism.
My childhood was spent in North and South Carolina, when the Bible belt was a much stronger cultural force than it is today. And if you wanted a lot of folks in the neighborhood to look at you and shake their heads, all you had to do was cut the grass on a Sunday afternoon. Even though Sunday isn't the Sabbath, the culture had built in all sorts of safeguards to assure that the Christian Sabbath was not violated. And if you go back a bit further in the history of this country, you will find Sabbath enforcement that rivaled anything Jesus encountered.
Sometimes in these musings, I find myself sounding like one of those folks that hates organized religion. I'm not. I think that faith without a community that teaches and embodies the practices of the faith is a pretty nebulous and vacuous thing. But as much as I think the institutional Church is an absolute necessity, it, like all things human, has its dark side. The notion that Christians or the Church are somehow immune to the influences that made the religious authorities oppose Jesus, is a dangerous one, for it frees us from examining ourselves to see where we may be opposing God.
Now no genuine Christian would intentionally set out to oppose God, but then again, no genuine Jew of Jesus' day would have either. And Jesus himself notes how easy is can be to miss him in one of his parables. There people both good and bad say, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison?"
Lord, don't let my religious certainties cause me to miss you or reject you.
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Here are a couple of verses from today's reading in Mark. "When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?' When Jesus heard this, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.' "
Complaints about the company Jesus kept crop up all the time in the gospels. There is also a phrase I've heard all my life that I suppose is rooted in Jesus' response to his critics. "A Church is a hospital for sinners and not a museum for saints." (supposedly said by Abigail Van Buren) I've heard all sort of people quote some form of this line, but in my experience most congregations seem closer to a doctor's office than a hospital. We'll all admit to being sinners and in need of help, but our sins are like strep throat or a cold, not heart attacks of pancreatic cancers. And we're not real comfortable when people with such serious conditions show up at our church. To stretch this metaphor perhaps to breaking, we're more comfortable dealing in preventitive care than we are in treating life threatening diseases.
It would be interesting to know if people outside the church saw things in a similar light. If they do; if they see the the church as a place that only handles mundane little problems, will they consider coming to us when they have a big problem, a full blown spiritual crisis?
We say we're in the salvation business. Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her latest book of being asked many years ago to speak at a church. When she asked what she was supposed to talk about, the "wise old priest" said to her, "Come tell us what is saving your life now." What is saving your life now? That's an interesting question. Maybe we should ask it to each other in our congregations.
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One reason I enjoy writing these "musings" comes from the fact that I don't approach the lectionary readings in the same manner I do when I prepare a sermon or a Bible study. What I do is closer to lectio divina, where you simply read a text and let it draw you where it may. This means that I am sometimes drawn to something in a reading that isn't its central point, that may even have nothing to do with its main point. I wouldn't want to approach scripture this way all the time, but sometimes this method lets the Bible touch me in unexpected and rewarding ways.
When I read today's story in Mark about the paralyzed man whose friends lower him to Jesus through a hole in the roof, I was not drawn to the issue of Jesus first forgiving the man's sins and then healing him as proof of having such authority. And I didn't think about the great faith of this man's friends. Instead, I found myself reflecting on what it was that drew these people to Jesus.
The story does not tell us what these four men carrying a friend know about Jesus. It seems quite possible that they knew nothing of his teachings, perhaps nothing that he had said. But they certainly had heard that he could heal. They had heard that there was something about Jesus that restored people, that made them whole. Here was salvation in the biblical sense. Nothing about going to heaven when you die. This was about life.
And so it seems to me that if the Church is somehow the body of Christ, we should exude life. We should be all about becoming whole, about being restored to full and abundant living. But I know that I sometimes worry so much about getting things right - whether it's doing worship correctly or trying to improve a congregation's programs - that any sense of vibrant life can get obscured.
Surely the picture in the Bible of crowds flocking to Jesus is not a picture of people coming to make sure they have their doctrines straight. Rather they sensed a life giving power and presence that drew them in. Lord, help us as the living body of Christ, to be a life giving presence in the world.
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Sunday's worship focused on singing favorite hymns and songs, and so the sermon was replaced by a very brief communion mediation from 1 Corinthians 11:27-34. In this letter, Paul is upset with his Corinthian congregation because of divisions that have developed there. One is particularly troubling. When they gather in homes for worship, the well to do are arriving early and finishing off all the food and wine before the poorer members can arrive. Paul's insistence that they not eat the Lord's Supper without first "discerning the body" is sometimes thought to mean discerning Christ's presence in the bread and cup. But a quick look at the context shows that "the body" Paul speaks of here is the congregation, the Church.
In today's reading from Mark 1, Jesus does a whole lot of healing. In Mark, Jesus' ministry begins with him proclaiming the coming kingdom and calling disciples, but the focus seems to be much more on the healings. Initially, we hear very little about the content of Jesus' message.
I'm not sure if I should make anything of this or not. But it seems to me that when we think of sharing Jesus' message, we often think of beliefs and teachings first. Presbyterians may not employ that evangelical stereotype of asking strangers if they're saved, but I've had many Presbyterians tell me that they don't share their faith with others because they don't know it well enough. I presume that means they think faith sharing to be primarily about explaining doctrines and such.
But in the picture I get from reading today's gospel, Jesus simply heals everyone who is brought to him. No faith statements are required, no promises to join his movement, no donations to the cause.
Don't get me wrong. Doctrine has its place, and people of faith should be seeking to deepen their understanding. But reaching out to people who are in need or are hurting does not require any doctrinal expertise. And if congregations did more to help hurting people, I suspect a lot of them would want to talk with us about what made us care for them with no strings attached.
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