When the Church is Better

I was having a conversation with another minister. Us minister types like to use one another to talk shop, and to say the things we would never say to others. Well here I was speaking to this minister and he says, “You know what? Our churches about to get fuller because for some reason people always come around the holidays. I don’t have any idea how to bring them in at other times, but around the holidays there they are.” He said that like it was a bad thing, and I am not sure that it is. Just today I have been on the phone with some people who know this time of year as a hard time of year. It is hard because they have lost loved ones. Some of have lost children, others have lost parents, and they are learning to cope. It is hard to make it to a time of year when we are used to having someone in our life and that person is gone. Our memories are all we have left, and there will not be new memories with that person, and that is hard. The grief, even if it had been well managed, can come back then. And I wonder if that is why some people come to church around this time of year. Do some come back because they are looking for support, friends, maybe even family? Maybe they do not know that is what they are doing, but it is part of it. And yes, us minister types can get frustrated by this because we wish that they would be there year round, but we probably should not be. It is best to love in these next couple of weeks. I know I am praying that there might be more love in me, more love for the people that might grace the doors of the church, more love for the people who are always there but are hurting more at this time, and more love for the larger family of God that congregates to hear the old story again. At her best the church is a place where people who are in need can come in and be loved. Now I am the first to admit the church is rarely at her best, but the church is broken too. Therefore, while the church is not always at her best, the church is true when it is full of people who are hurting and who need to know they are not hurting alone. Only God is good, the church is still being reworked and reformed by that good God. But what I do know is that church is better with people together. Church is better when the huddled mass of broken humanity that we are come together and believe that with God we can still find wholeness and love in a world in which there is pain and grief. Mind you that is church that is better, not church that is at its best, but better is something. I suppose, in short, I am praying that my church, and your church if you have one, might become better this holiday season. Not trying to guilt the people that enter our doors we would never otherwise see to come throughout the year, but trying to see them as those that are seeking solace in a difficult world. After all, that is what the miracle of the Incarnation, God becoming human, is all about. We are not alone! May all churches become places where those who feel alone at this time of year find they are not alone. And who knows? Maybe they will come back because they discovered the wider net of love that they needed.

What is Merry?

When Christmas comes around we begin to throw out words like “merry.” Merry is an older word, out of use until we get to this time of year. It means full of cheer and glee, and it makes sense that we associate such a word with the time of year we celebrate God coming into the world as one of us. But in our own celebrations I always try to remember that there are those for whom this time of year is not so merry. It probably has nothing to do with religion that makes this time of year hard on some. Instead it is simply the truth that life is hard for many of us. The difficulties of life always become magnified in times when cheer is what is expected of us. It is hard to be cheerful and merry and happy and whatever else when there are gapping holes in our lives. When loved ones are lost and we find ourselves alone. Solitude is easier to feel when we believe there are so many others wrapped up in the love of their families. And yet we do not see the problems of other people’s lives as easily as we see the problems in our own lives. That makes sense because everyone tries to hide their problems. I know I do. I am afraid that if people knew all of my secrets, the skeletons in my closets, they would judge me and ostracize me. It is a common fear I think, and so each of us wears a mask, an image of who we want the world to think we are. We portray ourselves as happy, successful, put together, in a problem free marriage with children who are perfect, and most of the time people believe it. Or perhaps they let themselves believe it, because they are trying to believe their own stories. That happens too. We put on these facades for so long, and do it so successfully that we begin to buy our own stories. Then something like Christmas rolls around, and we believe that everything should be merry in order that Christmas can be said to be merry. But as we have admitted there is something about forced merriness that magnifies life’s difficulties, and the facades are harder to keep, and the stresses pile up, and we wonder how others can do it when we cannot. The truth is they cannot either. Life is hard for everyone. But this is Christmas, and there is something to be merry about. It is obvious in the little broken family into which Jesus was born. He was born as a bastard to an unwed mother in a place where animals ate and defecated. There his soon to be step-father did his best acting as a nurse, and his teenage mother cried out in drugless pain as he entered into the world. This was the kind of family that is easy to judge. If we were to consider how God would come into the world, this is not the story any of us would have chose. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe God comes into the mess, the filth, the mire, the brokenness, and too frail and all too human to let us know that at Christmas time we can take off our masks and put away our facades and just be free of it all. God knows who we are with all the skeletons in our closets, with all the things we judge ourselves for and all the things we know others would judge us for that we try to hide. God knows all of that and comes anyway, comes to redeem the messiness of it all anyway. And you know what? I am pretty sure that means I can have a merry Christmas. Go ahead and judge me for my faults, God has chosen to redeem me anyway. I will do my best not to judge you for yours for God has chosen to redeem you too. I will not hide anymore, for in my hiding God has found me and says, “Be merry for I am here to redeem you.” Yes Christmas is hard for many, but that is simply because we do not know the good news yet. Into our difficulties Christ shows up and loves us through them. He is born right there into the midst of it all, and that is good news no matter how you slice it. So have a merry Christmas for you have every reason to be merry!

Hope On

Christians are often a wildly pessimistic lot. Anyone who knows much about the Bible would find that kind of strange I would imagine. How could those who profess faith in a God of promise, in a God who declares, “Behold I make all things new,” and “All things are possible with God,” and who believe that God loves the world, think so little of the world? Many Christians believe that world is going to hell in a handbag, which means that it is going to hell quickly and easily, like carrying a handbag. They speak of destruction and judgment for all people who do not believe like them. Then they do not do much for the world, because they see no purpose in it. It is no wonder the prophets of atheism have been declaring the death of the church. It is no wonder those same prophets appear right as religious affiliations decline. And yet there is a fascinating bit of information about those who claim no religious affiliation. While some are indeed atheists, many are not, and neither are they agnostic, they simply have no need to go church. And really who can blame them? As I have admitted we are a wildly pessimistic lot, and to be so pessimistic suggests that perhaps we do not believe in God. There I said it, I was afraid to, but it is written down now and I am going to let it stand. Maybe Christians do not believe in God. I am not saying we do not believe in something. We believe in our doctrines, in our one-sided interpretations of Scripture, in the god we can box up and fit to suit our desires. But the God of those Scriptures, now that is harder to believe in. The God who told Abraham, “I am going to make you great,” and Abraham believed him even when he saw no evidence of that at all, that God is hard to believe in. The God who made a promise to Isaac, and Jacob, and said, “you will be a blessing to the nations,” that God is hard to believe in. The God who said through prophets, “I care about how you treat each other, I care about how the poor and needy are dealt with, I care about this world in all its fleshiness,” that God is hard to believe in. The God who took the time, at the right time, to become flesh and dwell among us, that God is hard to believe in. The God who says, “I love the world and I will save it,” well that God is hard to believe in, because look around. So we Christians have decided to focus on the pie in the sky and simply judge the trip to hell in that handbag. We talk a lot about God loving us, but to talk about loving God, maybe we need to do that some more. To love God means to love the world. To have hope in God is to have hope for the salvation of the world. Yes there will be the fall of nations. Yes there will be the demise of societies. Yes the world will change and many will cry out in despair. But as a Christian who knows that Sunday always comes I will not lose hope. As a Christian who still sings of God having the whole world in those divine hands I will not lose hope. As a Christian who believes that Christ alone is King I will not lose hope. As a Christian who knows I am blessed and favored because with me is the light that the darkness cannot overcome, I will not lose hope. Instead when the days appear dreary and the work moves slowly I will sing my thanksgiving. When the trials are many and the temptations get to me I will still sing my thanksgiving. As long as there is goodness to be done, as long as one person can benefit from the words of my mouth and the work of my hands, as long as the crown of life is still offered to the one who overcomes I will sing my thanksgiving and believe that hope for the world still has a place in the church.

Bad News and Good News

There was a saying that newspaper reporters use to have about their work. “We are here,” they would say, “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” It is an admirable work. To dive into the dark places of society and let people know what is going on. To inevitably cause change through reporting. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when hearing this saying claimed, “Such is the work of Christ and his Church. The Church is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Again it is an admirable work, this work of finding those who are oppressed and beaten, and bringing them comfort and hope. Likewise pointing the finger at the comfortably unjust and oppressive and taking away some of that comfort. We live in times when newspapers struggle for readership and struggle to survive. We also live in times when church membership is declining and now one out of five people do not believe themselves to be at all religiously inclined. Perhaps people do not think there are those that need to be comforted any longer. Perhaps we have grown weary at all the evil that is out there. What is there to do but to turn away from it, or be driven crazy by it? In the church we talk about compassion fatigue. We are afraid that people will simply be overwhelmed by all the need and shut down, grow tired of it all, say, “Enough, I’ve had enough, I can’t do this anymore.” When that happens preachers sometimes become instruments of ease. Easy, uplifting, self-care messages are substituted for sermons that will still wrestle with God and leave us changed by the encounter. I speak, of course, of Jacob’s time of wrestling with God. He limped for the rest of his life. He was never the same, and every time he walked he remembered that he wrestled with God. But limping is not easy so let us make the messages easier, right? “Why isn’t there more good news on the news?” people ask one another. Maybe the answer is we need to know the bad news. Good news is all around us. I am up and breathing and well, this is good news! My children are beautiful and I love the way my little girl runs up to me with arms open in her little toddler way and nuzzles her head into my shoulder, this is good news! My son and I are having fort night tonight. We are building a fort in his room and we will sleep in there after we are done telling scary stories and watching cartoons, this is good news! A stranger helped me when my hands were full at the supermarket today, that is good news! My neighbor came by with tomatoes from his garden, little ones that my son loves, because he knows my son loves them, this is good news! This is news from just today, and from my own life. You have your own good news, we all do. Our lives are filled with goodness if only we take the time to notice it. But the bad news is often hidden unless exposed and the people affected from bad news are still in need. We need to hear about it, we need to act, we need to care and know and that God is calling us to look out over a world full of goodness from which we can give comfort, and full of comfortable evil that we must afflict. If you are looking for a place where you can join the good fight of faith look for a church. There are many. I personally invite you to mine. Our services are at 11 am on Sundays and I know that it would be better with you there… ah that is good news too!