Church

I want to begin by telling you that I love the church, and I love my church. I love the people first of all.  And I love our pastors, especially our new pastor of preaching.

I also love the way our particular church has chosen to worship. Our liturgy, our music, even the worship space draws us to reflect on our Triune God, the only Holy One. Indeed, the formality of our worship is one of the things that drew my husband and I to our current church.

But today something happened that made me wonder if sometimes, our formality overwhelms opportunity. Let me explain.

We worship in a downtown, urban area. There are several homeless shelters within a block or two of our building. As a congregation, we are involved in any number of ministries that assist this needy population and it is not uncommon for some of our needy neighbors to worship with us on Sunday morning.

Within minutes of the beginning of the sermon, a woman, obviously from the neighborhood, walked up the center aisle, bag and all, and sat in the second bench from the front. Her hair was rather messy, her bag was full of who knows what, and she was dressed in jeans – not typical apparel at our church. She sat there for a few minutes, then she got up, and walked out without saying a word, just as she had walked in a few minutes earlier.

A couple of minutes later, she walked back up the center aisle, back to the second bench. All of this happened in front of us: the congregation, the choir, and the pastors.

But no one said or did anything.

Not a word of kindness. Not a gesture of love. Not a question about what she might be seeking. Not even an offer to pray for her, although I would suspect many, like me, were doing exactly that. No one even got up and sat next to her. Me included.

A few minutes late, she got up and walked out again.

Unbeknownst to me, one of our pastors and several of our members did attend to her in the back of church. I was very happy about that.

But I couldn’t help but wonder, especially in the middle of a sermon on the church as family and unconditional love for others, whether the real sermon was not the one being preached, but the potential sermon sitting in our second row. And despite the help we offered, I still can’t help but wonder whether a sermon acted out wouldn’t have been more effective than the spoken words we heard today.

Sunrise

I do not really like the shorter days of fall. It is dark when my alarm goes off in the morning these days, making it all that much harder to wake up. When I drive to the bus or all the way in to work, I have to use my headlights. Admittedly, that's not a big deal, but it seems that just as I am getting used to bright, sunlit mornings, we dive back into gloomy darkness.

But today was different.

I drive east to get to work and this morning the sun was just peeking over the horizon as I left my neighborhood. The horizon was clear, but at just about the three o'clock mark above the horizon and stretching to about the 1 o'clock point behind my car there was a thin, bumpy layer of clouds. These clouds made for a near perfect refraction of the light coming from the rising sun.

Have you ever sat and watched the remnants of a campfire when all the wood has burned down and you are left with glowing embers? The embers glow reddish-orange with tinges of blue around the edges. Now pick up that mind-picture and put it up on the sky. Throw on a little bright pink everywhere for good measure and you have some idea of what the sunrise looked like this morning. I wish I could have taken a picture so you could see it. Of course a picture never does such things justice.

I often ride with my radio off but this morning, I had a CD of praise music in. I turned it off. It seemed to me that the heavens were doing all the praise that was necessary. Indeed, the heavens were declaring the glory of God, the skies were proclaiming the work of his hands (Ps. 19). 

Psalm 148 calls for the sun and the moon to praise God and for all God's saints to join in that praise. And that was exactly what happened this morning. I praised God with and through the sunrise.

And if I had woken up in light, as I did all summer long, I would have missed the glory.

David

My best friend, who I’ve known since college days, called me the other day. She was very upset and asked me to pray. Their son, David, had run away from home.

David is 17. He was severely neglected in his birth home until the age of 4, when he was placed in foster care with my friend’s family. They adopted him as their own a year later. The effects of the sort of severe neglect David suffered have colored his life however, making it difficult to form relationships, and difficult to navigate life in a socially appropriate way. Despite this he is very bright.

No one really knows why David ran away. He was in a loving environment with parents and siblings who loved him. My friend’s family is quite well-off, so David also had all the comforts and benefits money affords, including all the medical and psychological help available. But while they were vacationing on the other side of the mountains, he emptied his bank account, bought a new phone, and simply disappeared. After desperately searching for several days, they finally packed up and went home – without David.

It has been nearly a week and there is still no word from him. The police have offered very little assistance – this is a runaway, not a kidnapping.

Because of David’s lack of social abilities and some of his other difficulties, my friend is unsure if he can survive alone, and if he needed help, whether he would know how to get it or be willing to ask for it.

In the middle of all of this my friend and her family are in agony. The kind of heart-rending agony that only deep love can cause.

As I have been thinking about and praying for David and his family, it has occurred to me that David’s relationship  to his family is not entirely unlike our relationship to God. God reaches out to his people and graciously plucks them out of a situation not unlike David’s. (Ez. 16:1-14) He adopts us in Christ, as his own children and offers us all the benefits of that relationship. Yet like David, we are prone to wander, prone to think that we know better than God, prone to think our way is best.

 Despite all of this, Luke pictures God in much the same way I see my friend and her family. Despite our rebellion and stupidity, God is searching for us (Luke 15:1-10), scanning the horizon, waiting for us to come to our senses (Luke 15:11-32) and recognize that the yoke of serving Christ will always be lighter than the supposed freedom of the world around us. The responsibilities and obligations of being adopted children will always be outweighed by the benefits.

For those of you who happen to read this post, will you please pray for David’s safe return and for the peace of God’s presence for his family.

Dementia and the Church

I am reading a book that explores dementia. The book is entitled Dementia: Living in the Memories of God. It is really a book that falls under the heading of practical theology and pastoral care. I am a systematic theologian (which by the way is also practical) so what does this book have to do with me?

This is a very personal issue for me because my father has dementia. And as it turns out, this is also a very theological issue because the book has at its core ideas about what it means to be a human person and how we, as Christians, may have allowed science and the medical community as a whole dictate the answer to this question more than is warranted.

With nearly every page I am struck in some way by how the community, including the Christian community, speaks about people with various forms of dementia. And it has long been recognized that how we speak about someone or something influences how we think about that person or thing. For example, if we refer to a person as a patient, we understand and react to that person in ways that we would not if we had not classified the person in exactly that way.

And so it is with dementia. We approach the person with dementia with a certain set of presuppositions about what a person with dementia is like, what she can or cannot do, what she will or will not remember. While assigning a label can be helpful in certain ways, it can also shape our understanding of a person and more importantly, cause us to respond to a person in ways that we would not ordinarily respond, thus influencing that person’s understanding of herself.

One common response, as it turns out, is to ignore or forget the person. The author, John Swinton, correlates this to unfriending someone on Facebook. It turns out that the person with dementia, particularly if they are placed in an institution, is rarely visited, except by a few close family members. The reason? “He/she won’t remember anyway.” It does not seem to occur to people that this person might be horribly lonely, in the same way that we would be if we were forgetful and forgotten. If this same person had cancer or some other form of chronic illness, would she be as easily ignored, questions Swinton?

More disturbing to me in all of this is the reaction I have observed in the church, a reaction verified by Swinton. The church, it turns out, seems also to easily forget or unfriend those who have difficulty remembering. These folks are never brought to church – a place of familiarity for them – although the church (the pastor/elder) will occasionally come to them. They are rarely if ever prayed for in a congregational prayer where nearly every other disease, including chronic diseases, is regularly brought before the throne of grace.

I remember my mother asking our very large church whether there might be a Stephen’s Minister who could spend time with my dad now and again, even though he still lives with her, just for some company. She was told no one was available for that sort of thing, although a kindly gentleman from the congregation was eventually located who was willing to spend time with my dad every other week – truly a Godsend.

I have long observed that our churches, like our culture, are obsessed with youth and that this obsession leads to a neglect of those who have served the church well their entire lives. It is hip these days to worry about the marginalized, but how often do our elderly fit into this paradigm? Are they not marginalized in our culture? What will the church do about this group?

With regard to those elderly with various forms of dementia, Swinton asks a haunting question: “Given the ease with which people with dementia can be unfriended, what is it that we actually love in those we claim to love?”

Male and Female

There is increasing societal pressure to accept homosexual behavior as just another way of being. In addition, there is ongoing pressure to understand gender as something that is or should be self-constructed. This notion includes a complete dismissal of claims that biological categories have anything at all to do with whether one identifies as male or female. 

One of the two texts in my devotional reading this morning was Gen. 2, the "other" creation account. I have read this text many times but one thing that struck me this morning was the loneliness of the first man. God creates man (adam) from the dust of the ground (adamah), an interesting Hebrew play on words. He puts the man in a garden, in Eden, so the story goes.

After reading the whole first chapter of Genesis where creation is repeatedly affirmed as good, God comes along in this sequel and says here that something is not good. "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper." 

No suitable helper is found among the animals, so God crafts another person especially for this man. God could have made any sort of person. God could have created another man. In fact, God could have created these first persons androgynous. But curiously, God does not. The person God creates as the suitable helper for the man is a woman, a female. The man responds with poetic glee: "This  is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh (emphasis mine)."

The man has seen other options and realizes that this creature, this woman, is exactly the being God intended for him to become "one flesh" with, a fact Jesus himself refers to.

What struck me as I pondered and re-read this ancient text, is how deeply creational this relationship of man and woman is. This is the way God intended things to be. This created male/female distinction in relation is God's design.

The Levitical and Pauline prohibitions aside, this text seems to me to be the central teaching on gender and sexuality for Reformed folks like myself, who take the goodness of creation seriously.

Seeing God

A few weeks ago, a group of young people visiting our church sang the popular worship song, "Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord." As I listened and worshiped with them I started wondering whether we really understand what  we are asking in a song like this. 

The song goes:
Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.
Open the eyes of my heart, I want to see you, I want to see you.

To see you high and lifted up
Shinin' in the light of your glory
Pour out your power and love
As we sing holy, holy, holy.

Most of this is repeated, with some variation, and the line "I want to see you" is repeated a number of times.

At least two things are notable here. First, the insistence on wanting to see God. While I like the impulse - I hope to see God someday too - I wonder what would happen if a congregation suddenly did see God. After all, this is YHWH, the Holy One of Israel, the one who told Moses that no one could see his face and live. (Ex. 33:20)

It all just sounds so cavalier to me. Israel does not see God, but trembles in fear at the base of Sinai while Moses is on the mountain with God. In fact, God instructs Israel not to touch the mountain and if they did, they would die. Only Moses and Aaron may go up Mt. Sinai, although the people could hear God's voice at the base. Sounds like fear is the right response to me.

If every instance that an angel appears in the Bible the persons involved are fearful, how much more fearful must it be to see the living God?

The second notable thing in this song is the repetition of the word holy. The song rightly recognizes that the God we seek is holy. But what does that mean? 

In a very basic sense, to be holy is to be set apart. In other words, God is not a big, powerful version of us. God is other. We are like God in certain ways but only God is the Holy One. The Holy God cannot dwell with sinful people. Thus, to ask to see God is in some way to ask to be destroyed.

My hunch is that our rather thoughtless singing of these simple words rarely has the appropriate amount of fear mixed in.

Annie Dillard once wrote about worship:
"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

She's right, of course. To ask for an audience with YHWH is to ask for God to change you, to strip you of yourself, and to rebuild you into what God wants you to be not necessarily what you want to be. Encountering God guarantees having to let go - and keep letting go - of all kinds of little idols that we all hold dear. This is indeed a fearful thing. A good thing, but a fearful thing.

There is an old saying, "be careful what you wish for." Perhaps we should add, be careful what you sing for.

Graduation Reflections

Just a little less than four years ago, we brought our daughter to the soil of Hope College in Holland, MI. Like many freshmen, she was excited and a little afraid.

Sometime that weekend, we went to a worship service with her led by the chaplain. He preached on Psalm 1, one of my personal favorites. It begins:

            “Blessed is the one who does not walk in the way of the wicked, 
            or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.

            Her delight is in the law of the LORD and on his law she meditates day and night.

            She is like a tree, planted by a river which bears its fruit in season.”

He said that he sometimes would go to a particular area of the campus called “the pine grove” and would pray, 'Lord, make me like a tree.'

I remember him with his hands up, swaying, and thought he might be a little nutty.

But he instructed the parents assembled that day with those words. He said that we should pray, ‘Lord, make him/her like a tree.’ Of course the idea behind that prayer was that God would work in our children, growing them into people like that righteous person in Psalm 1, a person who lives in communion with God and flourishes as God intended.

So that is what I did these past four years, perhaps more earnestly at the beginning than at the end. 

We, like many other parents that day, brought a vulnerable little sapling and planted her in the soil of Hope hoping her roots would grow deep. Storms came and went and many times I worried whether the little sapling would survive. Sometimes, my little sapling bent so hard under the weight of a stormy blast, I feared she might snap.

As it turned out, the storms did not break her. In fact, they made her stronger, as they often do. And now, at the end of four years, with roots now deep in the soil of Hope, she is a strong young tree, the sort that Psalm 1 envisions.

And I could not be more proud.