I am sure that everyone has, at some point in their life, participated in activity that demanded training and practice. Whether you wanted to start running long distance, play chess, learn a language, or play better tennis, the only route to improvement is practice. So daily and weekly we put on the running shoes or drive over to the tennis courts. We take classes and lessons. We start slow of course, since none of us, when first starting out, can run an 8 minute mile. Yet slowly but surely, at our own pace, the time improves, more backhands land in the court, and sentences in Spanish start to make sense.
Deep satisfaction probably drives the each of us to push a little harder. Sure, we all fail. Many, many New Year’s resolutions fall by the side. Sometimes weeks go by while the training clothes lay buried deep in the clothes hamper. But that feeling of accomplishment, knowing that we moved just a little past the inertia of our daily lives brings us back. Except of course, the weekend warrior.
You know what I am talking about. While we all engage in the weekend warrior battle occasionally, some folks just never seem to get past Saturday or Sunday. The weekend rolls around and the basketball court calls. Sunday night comes and ice packs and aspirin calls even louder. Two, three, maybe four weeks pass and we are back out there, pushing as hard as ever. The weekend warrior isn’t limited to sports though. What about those times we start a class, often several times, only to quit a few weeks into the semester because we just can’t find the time to daily learn vocabulary? So is it any surprise that on the Sunday after Easter the pews and chairs are far emptier than the week before?
Being a Christian is a funny thing. For some, it means walking down an aisle, saying a prayer, and getting really wet in front of everyone. For others it was a series of classes 30 years ago, followed by a short ceremony in worship. But for pretty much everyone in today’s church, being a Christian means first and foremost to agreeing on some set of statements, doctrines, or affirmations. We have to mentally agree. Yet it wasn’t always that way. Karen Armstrong, the well known religion scholar comments that for the Jewish faith, religion isn’t about what you believe, but what you do. Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, was approached by a group of pagans who said they would convert to Judaism if he would recite the entire Torah while standing on one leg. He stood up on one leg and said “Do not do to others what you would not have done unto you. The rest is commentary. Now go study.” For Judaism how we treat and respond to those around us is far more important than reciting kosher laws. Christianity, one of the children of Judaism, is slowly rediscovering this heritage. Phyllis Tickle, in The Great Emergence, (shameless promotion alert!—don’t forget the adult Sunday School book discussion on The Great Emergence this summer) describes churches exploring “center set” and “bounded set.” Bounded set is believe-behave-belong while center set reverses this path to belong-behave-believe. A new book series currently being published, “The Ancient Practices Series,” leads off with Brian McLaren’s Finding Our Way Again, to be followed by books on fixed hour prayer, fasting, keeping the Sabbath, and the sacred meal, among others. Hillel’s response to the pagans holds an important key. Do keep the Golden Rule, but if you want to be consistent and have the knowledge, strength, and wisdom to live it out, you will have to practice and learn. So, is it really that odd that on the Second Sunday of Easter we find far fewer in the pews? After all, Easter and yes, Christmas, are Christian equivalents of weekend warrior dates. These good people arrive on Easter morning but are quickly overwhelmed by the liturgy, the new music, and the literally otherworldly concepts of grace and love. Getting out of bed the next week just doesn’t seem worth it.
So what is the answer? Do we minimize the service to something painfully simplistic, so that even a 5 year old could easily follow? Do we remove any sacred symbols? Do we make sure that the sermons are cute and funny, more like a monologue found at Comedy Central? I don’t think so. Jeremiah says “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” And when we walk these ancient paths, we will be as the fragrance of Christ, irresistibly drawing our friends, the weekend warriors, to walk along side us down these ancient paths.
