Sundays in the City #3

“Home imagined, comes to be.  It is real, realer than any other place, but you cant’ get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it-whoever your people are.” 

-Ursula K Le Guin

Was God willing to meet me in a place I did not serve, among people I did not know, and through people whom I did pay?  It felt a little like picking some random doorway to traipse through on Thanksgiving Day and having the audacity to pull up a chair.  On any given Sunday and in any house of worship, we might have all been gratefully gathering round the table and passing the plate, but was there room for one who arrived unrelated and sans a side dish?  As Bob Goff says, “it’s one thing to be invited…and quite another to be welcomed”

In my excitement, it wasn’t until I was crossing the threshold that I remembered every side-eyed comment I’d ever heard about the proverbial “church hopper” I literally felt my face blush as I sat down and stared at an old-school bulletin I’d been handed in the hope of being mistaken for somebody’s mother.  I found myself searching the paper in front of me hoping to discover it was somebody’s turn to get baptized or memorialized so that if anyone noticed me, they’d assume I had a legitimate reason to show up on a single random springtime Sunday.

A mainline denomination, the only two things I knew about this “Week 1” church was that they operated a community preschool and opened their parking lot during the week to students at the local high school.  That seemed neighborly to me; folks who welcomed other peoples twos and teens on the daily had to be in possession of a whole lot of hope, or left over communion wine. 

As if to drive home a practical point from the get-go, the first week presented a scenario in which the pastor was away on sabbatical and half the congregation on holiday.   Any impulse to evaluate demographics or contemplate sermon skills was deftly put to rest.  This was a traditional church in an architectural sense with a pre-written liturgy that followed a predictable course, I ruefully admit to having expected little more than an hour of the ordinary and an exercise in observation.  This would not be the last time I discovered what God is willing to do with the surrender of sixty minutes. 

From the first solo during which a man of about 4-score and something held us rapt with his rendition of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” to the mid service corporate prayer led by a young woman whose boldness in petition and earnest compassion for those in the community literally brought me to my knees…I was staggered.  When it came time for the contributions, a middle aged man who looked every bit the tall Texan he turned out to be, made his way around the pews and up the center aisle with the plate in hand and began to talk to God, about what was in it.  In the habit of bowing, I found myself head up, eyes open as He spoke.

In simple words he publicly acknowledged that there was nothing rote about this giving and nothing estimable about its reach.

What has been given from You
We return in part to You,
Thereby receiving the greater gift; that is
To be minor yet joyful participants in Your gifts to others

I was half expecting the offering to catch fire right there and then on the altar like it had for Moses and Aaron.

With a humble amen, that Texan sat down the plate, turned round to face us and offered a different kind of bounty in the form of homily.  For the next fifteen minutes, he opened new rooms in the house of familiar story.

Afterward everyone was welcome to a time of refreshment across the patio in celebration of the soon-to-be-graduates and someone’s newly published poetry.  I gently declined a personal invite and for the next 51 weeks regretted doing so; since maybe these are the tasting rooms of promise.  Inherent in every commencement gathering is the “amen” that God too will carry to completion what He has begun.  Likewise when the church celebrates the publication of somebody’s art or literature or scientific discovery, do we not bear witness to the faithfulness of the One who has promised that His blessing will surpass our own agendas, rooftops, indeed our lifetimes?

On my way to the car, I began to wonder when corporate prayer had become perfunctory to me, when had a singer become a soloist rather than a companion in suffering and what had been lost to privacy and expediency by the practice of “online” giving?  Was the “offer”(ing) never really my money, but God’s own pen with which to sign my name beneath His? Was my spirit tainted by relational challenge and experiential fatigue in ways only a novel setting could overcome? 

I put the car in drive and rolled down the window to wave back to a group of ladies crossing the lawn.  I can’t tell you what they looked like, but I’ll never forget what I heard as I headed out of the parking lot that morning. My turn signal was a veritable metronome to their cheerful chatter, the clink of baking platters and their collective toast of “whoohoo!” at the emergence of their newly published friend. 

I smiled recalling a line of Chesterton’s, “Paradox” he wrote, is “truth standing on her head to get attention.”  Somehow in the company of total strangers, I’d felt curiously at home.

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