Church

February 14, 2010

This morning I am having church in my studio. I’m playing good music (a variety), I’m pondering, and I may even pray before church is over. I guess I’ll have to do the sermon myself, but since Dave can sometimes hear me upstairs if I talk down here, I’ll just write it down.

It’s snowing outside. Nothing on the ground yet, but the weather people are promising something. My gas wall heater is on – I can hear it running, but the windows make me cold in spite of my double layers, top and bottom. I know now why Guy, Jr. had his TV under these windows. He was just staying further back in the apartment where he was warmer, either in the bed or in his brown recliner. I wonder if I’ll be hot by the windows this summer…

Wait – maybe I’m not having church; maybe I’m avoiding church. I don’t like church these days. Thursday, Peggy and I talked about each other’s “crisis of faith.” I said I thought I was experiencing a crisis of church. “Not me,” she said, in so many words, ”I am having problems with faith.” Peggy’s sister, Nancy, died of lung cancer two days before Christmas last year. Nancy’s husband, Paul, died the first of the year – January – and, just six months before that, Peggy’s husband, Ronnie, died of a heart attack. I think it was just six months before that one, Ronnie’s mother died. Peggy is sick of funerals, tired of death, weary of losing, perplexed about the future. And her crisis reflects our age-old questions, “Where is God…What kind of God…If there is a loving God…”

Not me. My crisis stems from not even wanting to think about these things, even faith. I mean, I’ve seen where thinking about these things leads. Good church people sending me emails telling me that the President is a Muslim. (Like I’d care if he were…) Or even worse, demonstrating how their hidden brains resent this black man in one of the highest offices in the world – and failing to see the good the United States can do by dialogue and understanding. Which Jesus are we following here? Church people, as a whole (at least here in the South), rejecting the humanity of same-gender relationship. Allowing ordination of a homosexual in a committed relationship is reason enough to change denominations. Wearing the name that we have chosen to set us apart as those who follow The Way – and not ever considering that Jesus fed, and healed, without qualification. People with whom I’ve shared the Bread and Wine re-writing past events in the congregation in order to have things make sense to them, or to rescue their own reputations or those of their family members. And then the community proceeds as if these accounts were fact… An interim pastor plodding through “training” of worship assistants to make sure these lay-people don’t say something in a worship service that is reserved for ordained pastors to say. We must have order… Bussing a few Berundis across town in order to provide a monthly worship service in Swahili, putting on a big feed, and outfitting some sort of “store” with our leftovers so that they can “shop” on each of these trips; meanwhile, no one ever addresses the question “Why don’t any of these Christians come to the Communion Table?” And, further, we will not find a way to minister to the community just outside the church doors. Arguments about what sort of music - or prayers, or sermons, or words spoken, or sequence of events - makes a worship service. We don’t really need any music at all – Is not the Love of God, expressed to each other, enough?

Peggy and I agreed that we will both make it through these current crises, and that God will use her sadness and disappointment – and my anger and disappointment – for good. We also agreed that it was a good thing that we could yammer-fuss-and-cuss with each other.

Posturing. I’m tired of the posturing. If there were a group of Friends anywhere close, I’d be at a Quaker meeting today. Music, yes. Speaking, usually. Reflection, invited. Silence, certainly.

So I really am having church in the studio today.