Thoughts on a sunday morning

I went to church today.... in the morning....

this has become a more rare event since church has been an evening thing for me for a number of years now. But the church I've been hanging out at is going through transistion again & has shuffled church to a Sunday AM meeting at someone's home. I figure it has the potential to be good - a chance to start fresh, to put us in close proximity. The hope (for me) is that it'll reduce/expand us from trying to do some official thing that looks like a normal Sunday morning church service and instead move us into a community where the collective voice (i.e. the voices of everyone in the room instead of just the 'clergy') can be heard... maybe that's just wishful thinking or naive, but hey, everyone's gotta dream sometimes.....

But it was a very thoughtful, contemplative morning & so here is a collection of thoughts in no specific order or structure:

- coming down the stairs of my house to leave for church I was thinking that what holds me back from church is this sense of needing to perform. I feel like it's unacceptable to be real, to be human, fragile, average at church. I have this feeling/fear that we have become so consumed with being 'right' at church for fear that we would stray into 'error' or 'heresy' that we've left no room for humanity. And this bothers me. I'm comfortable with Jesus 'cause he knows me intimately inside & out & is comfortable with my crap. My darkness is light to Him as David indicates in Psalms 139 - He knows the stuff that is not seen, knows the crooked & twisted places in me & He loves & embraces me in all the 'light' and 'dark' parts of who I am. In the new testament, we see that Jesus is comfortable with 'sinners' & embraces & welcomes them - and I just don't feel like church really does that. We don't really allow struggle, or questions, or failures, and I think that sucks 'cause the best parts of the story are the parts where the heroes & heroines fall on the road to victory & they have to have the courage to get up & try again....

- In the past I think I talked a lot about losing your life for Jesus & I basically tried to structure life into a place of losing things in the hopes that it was 'sacrificing' for God. Looking back, I'm not sure whether that was good & healthy or some nihilistic thing fueled by my self-loathing where I just didn't like me & hoped that if I gave up enough stuff it would somehow make me acceptable to God. So now I'm questioning again what that all means. I see in Jesus a heart that had everything - intimacy with His Father, the splendors of heaven & He gave this up to suffer & die for what? For a bride that would sometimes betray him, sometimes deny him, but mostly forsake him? But to Him, through the eyes of love, He sees a bride pure & spotless & this is what he gives His life for, the glad surrender of love - taking His fullness & laying it aside for what He deems (miraculously) greater & more worthy/desirable.... us. And I think again about the phrase that "freedom is another word for having nothing left to lose" and the idea that 'true' freedom is where you've lost everything & truly have nothing & I question that and wonder whether or not the true sacrifice is when you finally realize how good life really is, but you find something, someone so valueable to you that all that you thought you had looks like dust in comparison to how much you love that one.... and you're willing to give it all away in some love-drunk, joy-mad craze of giving.....

- spent some time staring at a table in these people's house to see how it was put together & how the extra leaves actually attach & was trying to analyze the forces involved in how it would actually hold up plates & elbows (for us less cultured folks who put elbows on the table). earlier in the day I was happy 'cause I put together a page in excel that would convert text to 6-bit code to 8-bit hex numbers & I was all proud of myself for using the INT & MOD functions in excel to do this. And I realize that while I may not like the engineering job stuff, engineering is still a part of me - or maybe it's just problem solving, or being a carpenter's son, or natural curiousity.... but from my training I value the creativy in constructing things (real or abstract), I love the questions & mystery of trying to understand how things are put together.

So much of life is finding out the things you love & then doing them. Some of the discussion at church today was around gifts vs. titles. You could be called a something; pastor, engineer, teacher, etc. but there is a total difference between title & actually having the gifts or loving the activities described by the title. We as humans really ought to be only doing the stuff that we love. Life's too short to try to get titles that only weigh us down with the weight of illusionary self-importance.

- Was reminded of a Mike Mason portion of the book "The Gospel According to Job" in how he proposes the question of who is the most important people in the church. After a number of speculations as to who is normally considered 'most important' in the church - pastors, elders, deacons, people who give money, volunteers, etc. - he reaches his conclusion that those who suffer are the most important members of the church. He justifies this through the analogy of the body that Paul uses to describe the church & describes how that if one part of our body is wounded, the rest of our body's focus will automatically go to working on healing that broken part of the body. We would have a ludicrously unhealthy, non-functioning body if we didn't.... but it is so often that the suffering are overlooked in our churches. They're really uncomfortable to be around, they're huge time sucks & you feel powerless to help 'cause you really can't solve any of their problems half the time (being someone who 'suffers' somewhat I can say these things 'cause I know), but yet this is the hallmarks of a healthy body - you take care of your own (and in the mystery of the church, 'our own' is really everyone on the planet - the church is never meant to be an exclusive club, but instead an ever widening circle of friends & family).

I remember I put a half-way, pseudo quote of this on the room of a prayer room wall once & I took a not-so-christian friend down there to see the room & this thought was something she thought was cool - she liked that idea - and it just makes me wonder. The church tries to present a front that we are all sane, together, rational people. We try to advertise God and market Jesus - make Him palatable & easy to swallow. We promise happiness & health & wealth, a safe life free of trouble if only you'll join up with our little organization. And I wonder sometimes what that means to the non-churched world around us. I often wonder that if they saw us really loving each other, really showing tenderness & compassion to those around us, if they saw true kindness would they not pay attention more? Would they not believe our messages of faith when they see us trusting God to provide as we become His hands & feet & heart?

- My friend Marty mentioned how he was praying about some things at a prayer conference & kept hearing the words "perfect fear casts out all love" which is a twisting of the passage in 1 John 4 that says "perfect love casts out all fear".... but a profound & terrifying statement. It is so true that fear has this way of kiling off our psuedo-love & leaving us only our suspicions & prejudices. We as the church are called to love & it's so dangerous the way we live in fear & spread so much fear around - and all of it just makes us more miserly with our love for others....

- I left 'church' about half way through the morning to go hang out with one of my bestest friends who's not a christian. I prioritize on spending time with that friend 'cause the times with them feel more like 'church' than a lot of church services I go to. We're good enough friends that I can be totally honest, completely myself & feel loved & accepted. This is what I want - the place where you can be without masks, totally childlike & able to just 'be' without fear.

Great conversations, too. The conversation flowed from microwaves to radiation to cancer to genetics & how there are parts of the DNA that control how many times your cells can replicate to genetic diseases to abortion & hard choices to being prepared for death & how you live your life now to passions & gifts to poker to the stuff of life& the everyday to church & what it could look like to loneliness & longing - just so many things in the flow of conversation. It is so good to enjoy depth & to walk in the honest & real places with others.

Likely more, but that's a snapshot of what ran through my head today. Makes me wonder if everyone has these thoughts of if it's just me. I doubt that it's just me, but I do start to wonder how other people contemplate things.