So Who Went Home Justified?

I attended church last Sunday. That in itself is not momentous, but it was different since my wife and I had two of our grandchildren with us. Their mother, our other daughter, and the other two grandchildren were buried somewhere on River Road in Bethel mucking mud out of people's flood ravaged basements and first floors. The service was too long for the two grandchildren's limited attention span (even with coloring books, goldfish crackers, and juice), especially choppy, and pretty much unremarkable except for one statement I heard at some point during some congregational sharing about the flood. A Christian congregant stated that a lot of people had turned out to help respond to the flood and that their volunteer service was really great. She then expanded it to say that many of the volunteers were not even Christians. Imagine that! I wondered if that were really a pre-condition of sacrificial service and volunteerism? Are non-Christians incapable of good, of heartfelt concern, of real service (i.e. are all their works just fithy rags in the sight of God)? Now I know the woman that said this, and she is right up there as far as being a legitimate and genuine follower of Jesus, but somewhere along the line she has picked up this us/them terminology that pokes its head up every now and then.

And then I wondered why I had insisted on going to church this morning with so much going on. And then I started thinking about Jesus' parable of the man on the Jericho road who fell victim to robbers, and the priest and Levite who passed him by leaving him for dead, and the Samaritan who was the only one moved with compassion. And I remembered the other story of the Pharisee and tax collector praying in the temple and I got to wondering who was going down to their home today justified in the sight of God....all of us Christians who were faithfully attending church and doing those things that Christians tend to do on a Sunday morning, or my daughters (who are Christians) who worshipped God today by shoveling mud for their neighbors alongside countless non-Christians who were not necessarily offering service in the name of God, but doing it out of genuine concern, compassion, and grace for those less fortunate? Who gave the greater testimony to the love of God in a time of despair and loss? I did go down to my home after church was over but the service gave me pause to consider what is it that God really wants to see when we propose to gather in His name.

Church Services and Musicals

So today I found myself in a slightly irreverent mood as Kathy and I went to church. We are in that ackward position of being in between churches, and even more so being in between what we know the church of Jesus Christ to be and what is available in our immediate area. Let it suffice to say that I, at least, have grown disenchanted with entrenched denominationalism.

So back to my irreverence. We went to a local church today because it is the first Sunday of the month and in most Protestant churches that is Communion Sunday. Kathy and I seek out every opportunity to participate in communion, regardless of the church or denomination. But as I found myself sitting through what passes in New England for a traditional church order of service I found myself wondering why the church service was so much like the musicals I have seen. Whenever there was a pause in the action it was time for another song, whether it fit into the overall flow or not. Tradition is a terrible task master and we must obey without question!

Anyway the topic is irreverence. I read some articles in the recent Christianity Today about the trends in worship and the debate over whether traditional music or praise choruses are most suited for today's church. Of course people are split into the two camps resulting is ridiculous things such as "blended" worship consisting of both types and not entirely satisfactory to either camp. I believe in an unchanging gospel message and the need to bring it into the cultural setting in which it is to be proclaimed. And while I love traditional hymns there are some dogs in the hymnals. That makes me wonder how these if these really bad hymns made it into the collection, how many worse ones are out there that were not considered? I apply the same question to contemporary praise music which sometimes seems written only to fill out an album. And don't get me going on the "business" of publishing worship music. Isn't there a word like simony out there anymore? So here's the point. Irrereverently I started to make a test of cultural user-friendliness. I looked at the first 311 hymns in this nice collection published in 1985 (recent publication) and 235 of the hymns were published a minimum of 100 years ago, some 150 to 200 years or more. Can we expect such hymns written by Christians living in a different society and culture and somewhere between 3 and 5 generations ago to speak to the hearts of the unchurched visitors coming in for the first time? They sometimes barely speak to me. I mean, what kind of word is portals, and why is Jesus waiting on them?

So much for my Sunday church irreverence. Just making observations of what it must seem to others who have even less of an idea of what they are doing in church than me.