BLESSED SUNDAY MORNING
Who are these that gather together on Sunday mornings? Old and young, women and men, slow and quick, smiling and frowning, glad and sad, sick and well, alone and with families. Who are they? In their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes or in their casuals, from out of town and just around the corner, the eager and the subdued, the tired and those with too much energy, the bored and the expectant, on time and running late?
And what do the neighbors think as they peek out from behind their curtains, pass them in the streets or nod at them from the doorstep? What do they think as they hear the hymns dancing or marching or struggling through the air? What do they think when they note the silences between the hymns and know that this is probably the moment when prayers of confession, praise, petition, thanksgiving, adoration and lament are going up to God?
And why do these people come week after week, month after month and year after year? God knows. At different times they come with different moods, from different motivations and for different reasons. To see friends, because parents require it, because it’s expected of them, because their children and their friends need them to be present maybe even because there’s a certain boy or girl there, because…
I suppose we’ve all shared in the poor, bad or doubtful reasons for congregating, but there are times when, by God’s grace, we get it right and we gather for very good reasons—the best reasons.
We’re never so visibly one as when we make an appointment at a given place and a given time for a given purpose—and keep it!
Sometimes we gather simply to thank God! And millions of us have so much to be thankful for! (I have nothing to say at this point about those sorrowful people whose lives are so tragically hard that they feel they have nothing to be thankful for. And I get that! I’ve said a little about that elsewhere.) I’m speaking now about us who have food, clothes, clean water, parks, rivers, friends, loving children or parents, jobs, health to work, financial security—enough to see us through, tiny grandchildren who must have our spectacles to eat or husbands/wives to make lovely days even lovelier. Sometimes we just want to thank someone for rain and warm sunshine for friends to love and be loved by and so we gather to sing our gratitude.
Sometimes we come to apologize for our wrongs. We don’t come to grovel and crawl before God, pleading for forgiveness as though he were tightfisted and miserly and had to be begged into a good mood. The cross of Christ! Imagine him speaking from the cross—this Savior of ours—“Do I look like you have to grovel and crawl to find forgiveness? Has the Holy Father who sent me here to this place and for this reason strike you as one you must crawl before, like some petty and heartless tyrant?” Were we to crawl and grovel would it not be an insult—would it not? The cross shows he views our sin with profound seriousness but it shows that the last word with him is, “I delight—yes, delight in forgiving your sins.” (Micah 7:18-19 with John 3:16-17) And it’s centrally because he in generous righteousness forgives us freely and fully that we can’t help apologizing that we sadden him. “Yes,” he would say, “it’s all right to apologize but don’t grovel. Get up and move on toward a better heart and a better day and I will help you.”
Sometimes we come for challenge and kind rebuke. We don’t want your smugness and self-righteousness whitewashed, we don’t want to be forever babied or spoken to in that “there, there, it’s all right” tone as if we were little children who were a little naughty. God’s Holy Son didn’t come nor did his Holy Father send him to make it easier for us to sin or to blind us to the destructive power of the evil that feeds like a slimy parasite on the entire human family and vulnerable Christians. We want to be awakened out of our christianly sleep and lolling to engage in war with the “world” (organized cosmic corruption) for the human family as our Master has done and is doing.
We wish to be made bold in our praying; we want to be transformed so that we pray less for trivia and more for strength to engage in kingdom living—the kind of living that’s described in Revelation as war against red Dragons, seven-headed sea monsters and all the earth’s allies of brutality and human enslavement. We want to hear preaching and teaching that will stun us with the truth of who our God is and what it is he is up to and having stunned us it will then galvanize us to join with him in his cosmic rescue!
These and more are reasons we gather on Sunday morning!
(With permission I borrowed the drift of this from my little book called, Where the Spirit of the Lord Is…)
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