2024-03-31 A Meditation on the Good Service
“16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (Acts 17:16-21 ESV)
A Church service ought to leave us on some level chastised in the best sense, grown and awed, the communion elements being no contract with any man or woman, but with that same spirit who showed up. With that same blessed estate: no shrill complaint, no rumor-mongering, no guilt-by-association; we do not implicate those allegedly near to us if it is our ship that is going down. Yet to the Church service: our ship is not going down. Our ship is basking in the late hour sacrament celebrated, the voice, the ethos, the pervasive delight. Met with pervasive seeking, insecurities, imaginings as to how so-and-so would see us now, the person in the pew behind us, the naysayer a few pews back, the perennial reminder: we were not always so submitted. We were not always so kosher. We did things and lived in ways that, to our own confession of Jesus were no deal-breakers, but that to others are heard as a strange and unfamiliar dynamic: that repentance is needed. That change and amendment of life is needed. That our actual sins are well beyond the manifest ones that perhaps cause consternation and aghast, agape mouths and sensitivities bewitched. The sensitivity is borne sometimes in a resentment of the same Law that the new believer is begging off of: I will not be absolved because of my testimony as to righteousness under the Law; I will not be present and accounted for because of betraying, nevermind the sins, the people therein encountered; I will not be the anti-hero and thereby bring a whole cohort under chastisement as those guilty by association.
The Church service is therefore full of learners, and we do well to practice knowing that a Christ-offering, a solemn “shift” in demeanor or prejudice or outlook, occurs in an instant, the beauteous all-souls offering an invite somewhere, somehow, to find our form-fitting place. Some contract calls on us to be those starkly relieved for the sake of having a contract, even a submitted duty-bound contract: this is our relief from harrowing emptiness and our name-on-dotted-line of a Church life, in community, in pleasing aromas and gestures and quiet declaration, testimony, people in love and at the forefront of love, if only not afraid to celebrate said sacrament and shift.
It is the shift of a flash-in-the-pan, of a deep belief no Man nor Woman other than a Jesus man, woman, is whom we are honoring with our bodies present and minds attentive. It is a forum for celebration, hands lifted and minds attesting, agreeing with the song lyrics and the sermon truth claims. Not all is error and works-righteous pedantry. Not all is a vessel uninhabited, unwilling and unable to heal. We heal because of our contract, with the Holy Spirit, with the Cause for which we live on, with the beautiful and special encounter in the environs of church, sharing a subway ride to the service or a car pool. Yet we go home and wonder: was breadth and scope and duration sufficient to “get us there”? Was it “enough” Grace? Was it “effective to heal”?
In all things the imagined service is the actual service: what goes on in our self-correcting and steering minds is what the service contributors and priestly duties are evoking. With a poem or a song, a dance or a shout. And we have faith nothing is off limits: one person, just one, needs healing this hour; one anti-hero needs to be held personally responsible but in no way impugning on those whom she or he represents. To be held responsible is to hearken to our initial testimony, wiser now to know that it is a testimony not always liked upon. Not always is it heard with judicious or learner’s ears. Not always is it the right morsel or apparition or substance for the hour. We just wanted a nothing service of church. We just wanted low-key visuals and amazement, rhyme and magisterial procession. But we were out of sight of the one fly in the ointment, the one thing that needs to be addressed; and certain healing occurs in a moment not in a duration of hours in length. Therein the service is substantive, meaningful, holy, and relevant.