A Sunday morning God moment

By the time this past Sunday morning had rolled around, I had yet to prepare for worship. So about 9, I sat at my desk, bulletin in hand, scoping out the Scripture passage for the day and the sermon title.

Blank.

I’m sure Ken was holding out on official planning until he had known exactly what to preach on after coming back from General Assembly, at which point the bulletin had already been printed. But that gave me little to go on to try to write a prayer that might somehow reflect the sermon it would follow. (If you’re new to the blog, scroll down to October 10 and you’ll get all the philosophy of spontaneous and written prayers.) But I’m not a Sunday morning, wing-it kind of gal, so I took a guess at a topic I thought might come up in the sermon—the General Assembly.

So many weighty and important issues. So many big decisions. So much pressure on those casting the vote. But all I kept coming back to (or being brought back to?) was that it’s not up to us—the weight of the world does not fall on the shoulders of Presbyterians, of Christians, of any of us. The weight of the world is on the only one who can carry it—Jesus himself.

And so the prayer went.

Doggone it if I couldn’t have had you in my head on Sunday morning to have the Scripture passage from Mark 4:35-41—Jesus calming the storm—be the passage of the day and hear the sermon that followed. This is 5 paragraphs too long of an explanation for such a condensed and amazing moment.

Cool.

Back to the spontaneous vs. written prayers issue. Yes, a spontaneous prayer would have helped me connect to the sermon easily as well, if not more. But I would have missed the God-moment. Yes, the holy Spirit flows spontaneously, but she also flows ahead of time, preparing the way for an encounter with the Divine.

Thanks be to God.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre is troubled by bumper stickers that read: 'The Bible said it. I believe it. That settles it.' Instead, she would like to see bumper stickers that say: 'If you can't handle paradox, get out of the pulpit.' Or 'If you can't handle metaphor, get out of the ministry.' She says that the Bible is 'arguably the most mysterious, strange, challenging, complex book in the world,' and should be approached with a sense of mystery, not wooden literalism. Reading it should be considered an invitation: "'Come,' it says over and over. Come to me and I will give you rest. Enter it. Sit and eat. Dwell. Consider. Trust. Look again. The ground of all theology lies in that invitation. First and last, it is a proposal, sent in love by the heavenly Bridegroom, that summons us into a relationship more intimate than any we can know this side of heaven."

(The Christian Century quoted from Weavings, January/February)

"'If you find the godless world is hating you, remember it got its start hating me. If you lived on the world's terms, the world would love you as one of its own. But since I picked you to live on God's terms and no longer on the world's terms, the world is going to hate you.'" (John 15:18-19, The Message)

I was having a conversation about church life with a group of ministers on a retreat I was on in Atlanta. We were talking about the concept of the church as the body of Christ versus the church as the country club. One minister mentioned that for some folks the church ranked just barely above Rotary. Another minster commented, "Most of my folks actually have better attendance for Rotary than Sunday morning worship, since it's requred for Rotary." Nervous laughter went around the table.

It was nervous because we all knew it to be true.

Ken and I had a similar conversation yesterday. How are we as the church in the world but not of the world? In so many ways, we simply aren't. Even most of the programs that we as ministers find meaningful and deeply rooted in Christ are hardly counter-cultural. The closest we could come to is Interfaith Hospitality Network--welcoming the stranger in the name of Jesus Christ.

As I reflected on this throughout the day, in terms of giving, service, attendance, and genuine relationships, most of sorority members in college are more faithful their letters than the average church member in the US if faithful to the call of Jesus. There's something deeply wrong with that, a great unfaithfulness in how we understand "church" if we treat it similarly to our clubs.

"Contemplative" lets me off the hook for answers, but somewhere deep at root in this has to be how we understand the love of God--a means to an end or sheer pleasure that we are deeply cherished by the one who creates, redeems, and sustains us, so cherished that we cannot help but share that with those around us?

"I picked you to live on God's terms and no longer on the world's terms...."

In Christ,
Jess