One of the things we do every Christmas Eve as a family is go to the Christmas Eve service at our church. It's a candlelight service. Every person over the age of about 10 is given a candle ... unlit ... with a cardboard ring under it to catch the wax.
At the end of the service, a single candle which has been burning throughout the carol sing, is used to light the candles of the people on the end of each pew. That person lights the next person's candle, and so on.
Our kids love to go to this. They sing the carols with gusto and their favorite part is the candle-lighting part... the pastor says a few words of inspiration and then we all sing "Silent Night" as someone plays the piano or a guitar. After that, our family goes out looking at Christmas lights in the city, and after that, we all traipse home and sing Christmas carols around the tree, and we have hot chocolate and maybe watch Christmas specials until it's time to go to bed.
I love watching the flame on a candle. Even when I was a child, I'd watch the single tongue of fire piercing the darkness when the power would go out in the evening during a winter storm. I'd lose myself in its subtle variances of colour and strength, watch how it danced and in so doing, invited the shadows to dance with it. It drew me, like some indescribable force telling me that it represented purity, passion, power. Calling me to something more, to something higher. Still does.
I remember a candlelight service I attended once many years ago in a little country church. There might have been about fifty people there, maybe less. Everyone had their candles, unlit. The pastor asked us to move with our candles to the outside of the room and make a circle all around the edge of the sanctuary. Once we were in place, he had someone turn off the lights, revealing only one candle burning at the front of the church. Then he lit the first person's candle on either side of him, and we lit each other's candles until everyone's was burning.
The pastor started by saying, "I'm not going to speak very many words tonight. All I will say is that God has given each one of us who believes in Jesus a light inside. He has reached into the darkness in each of us ... and lit our candles. Now, since these candles we've just lit tonight represent that light in each of us, and God in our lives, I would like you to try a little experiment with me to see what happens."
We all looked at him quizzically.
"Please take your candles, and keeping them upright, slowly lower them down as low as you can get them without bending or squatting." We did. The light level in the room diminished significantly. "What just happened?" he said, and we told him it got darker. He nodded. "Now, just as slowly, I want you to lift them up again, and keep going until they are as high as you can get them." We did, and we saw the light grow in the room until it was twice as bright as when they were in front of us at chest level.
"I think you get the point of my sermon," he said softly.
We did.
Honestly. I wonder just what the Apostle Paul would have thought of 20th and 21st century church.
I'm sure he would have had something to tell us.
Yes, I know we live in a different culture, I know that our government doesn't overtly persecute Christians. I know that. I am talking about the things we obsess about in the Western church. What clothes to wear on the platform. Whether to use hymn books. What version of the Bible to use. What style of music to worship to. Whether or not to just tell the undiluted gospel and minister to people's souls, or to do a social gospel and only minister to their bodies (never about both). Who is the better speaker. What colour the carpet should be.
Fifty years ago the questions were different. Whether to wear a hat or not in church. What colour the hymn books should be. Hymns versus choruses. Whether or not to go to the movies. Whether to use music in church at all. Whether to wear makeup or not. Two piece versus three piece suits. What denomination is the right one.
Hmmm. I guess the questions aren't that different.
I was recently visiting a friend's blog ( Merge the Village ) and he had put a clip on it from a keynote speaker by the name of Francis Chan. I'm including it here - it's about seven and a half minutes long and poses the question, "Does my life fit ?" It gels something I've thought for quite a while and couldn't seem to put into the right words. Have a look -
What if - just what if - we could live life the way the people did in the book of Acts? I'm not talking about the culture of the ancient Middle East here. I'm talking about living in the moment, every moment, in touch with and listening to the Spirit of God. Wow - wouldn't that be transformational not only to us individually but to the church - and then spilling out into the world around us ?
The people in our culture are just as broken - if not more so - than the people who lived in the days of the 12 apostles and so many others who lived in this lifestyle of dependence on God, like Dorcas, Aquila, Stephen and Philip. They all had families to feed too; they had stuff to do. The things they did that are recorded in the book of Acts are those that transcended those mundane details.
The human suffering is just as real. And it's not just limited to the people addicted to crack or selling their bodies on street-corners.
It's in respectable living rooms, bound up in hopeless people watching soap operas and wondering if their lives could ever matter that much to anyone. It's in church pews, stuck in empty religious tradition and "true lies" people tell to each other to keep them at arm's length, afraid of intimacy, afraid of rejection. People so afraid that someone will judge them that they pretend to have it all together - and inside they're dying, crying, sighing. Wondering if this is all there is. Wondering where God went.
The answer is not in doing more, or in railing against the way the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, or in electing more Christians to office. The answer is heart-based. It's in allowing God in to those dark places in us and shining His light, transforming us from the inside out. Accepting that He loves us - forgives us - in spite of our failures. And living in that love, being grateful enough to spend time with Him and hear His voice every day, every moment.
That's where the adventure begins.
Something bloggers do is read other peoples' blogs. It keeps us fresh, prevents us from stagnating, and spurs us to think.
I ran across this one person's blog lately and I must admit I go there often. She herself is a committed Christian whom I admire. She posted something about the modern church, the way it turns people off of God, that touched a deep chord with me.
Here's an excerpt:
The church has this way of making it seem like the journey is over once you have entered its doors. Poor you, all lost and weary, come with us, we can show you the way, trust our path. If only it were that simple. I know that the message is well intended but the relationships between the "saved" and the "lost" are all too often tainted by agendas and expectations. Why focus so much on me? Save yourselves! Let your good works speak for your faith, or if you are feeling lost and broken then share that with me, or how about we all just shut up and listen? There were a few times I really wanted to say aloud what I was thinking. (Source: http://www.livinginthemystery.blogspot.com/ )
I responded in a comment to that blog entry. But my response turned into more of a blog in and of itself.
I know very few people among my circle of friends, Christian or not, who haven't been hurt by the church. So here (in part) is my reply to my fellow-blogger...
I've felt for many years that the church is shooting itself in the foot by telling all and sundry that the problems of addiction, struggles with temptation, and day-to-day "blahness" will all be over once a person has "accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior" - ughh. As a matter of fact, being a committed Christian guarantees you MORE trouble. (All those who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution). The devil's crosshairs line up on the person who loves Jesus so much that it he or she is making a difference in his or her world. Not the kind of difference the modern church seems to think is "making a difference" - passing out tracts, spouting religious platitudes, and being (pardon the cliché) so heavenly minded we're no earthly good. In other words, out of touch with the "real world."
That brings back some pretty vivid memories of when I was a Bible-thumping raving lunatic...in senior high no less. People looked at me like I had 2 heads but I just viewed it as "persecution."
I wasn't being persecuted. I was weird.
No - the enemy doesn't waste his time trying to "get" these folks. They're already bound up in the grave clothes of the great god "Should." Old satan concentrates his firepower on those few who are walking with God the way Enoch walked with God. The way King David walked with God - in openness and honesty, warts and all, receiving love from God and loving Him back (sometimes even willing to make a fool of himself to do so!!)
Sometimes the problem with the church is that the Vision is lost. Jesus came to the down-and-outers, the addicts, the prostitutes, the guys who took money under the table. When we come to Jesus, we may feel uncomfortable about our past life of degradation so we surround ourselves with people we want to emulate. Problem is, we become a sub-culture and lose touch with what speaks to "regular people." There's a we-they mentality and it can easily turn into a siege mentality. We become so obsessed with reaching everyone possible before Jesus comes back that we forget to spend time getting to know Him more intimately, hearing His heart about the broken and the fallen. I've fallen into that trap. There's a tendency to do that the longer one is a believer. That wasn't what Jesus intended.
That's what the enemy intended. And if we're not careful as believers, we can fall into the trap of thinking we're doing God's will when what we're really doing is playing right into the enemy's hands.
Thanks very much for putting your finger on my tendency to let the pendulum swing to the extremes. In recent days, I've been railing against the same body of Christ that I'm a part of. In doing so, I'm in danger of becoming the loose cannon nobody wants to listen to. In my zeal to call Christians to a deeper life in God, I can come off all "holier than thou" as well. Or downright obnoxious. (Like the guy who leaned right into my face and sprayed little spittle drops as he spoke the words, "Do you know Jesus as your personal Savior?") - I shudder. Sometimes my firebrand tendencies are just as offensive to the unsaved and even to believers (who are either new to the faith or satisfied with their walk with God), as that person's "witness" was to me.
The truth is, stepping into a relationship with God is only the beginning of an adventure, not the end of a struggle. There's a whole new struggle - but one with a purpose. Contrary to popular belief, the struggle isn't against the people in the world (or even the church - haha). It's against the spiritual forces that will do anything to keep us from developing that intimacy with God that He so desires. The outward stuff (to which I sometimes refer as the "Do, do, do") will not be forced if we just concentrate on the inward stuff (the "be, be, be") and listen to His voice.
That was my comment.
Now - to clarify a bit. By "making a difference in his or her world" I don't mean what most church-going believers think of. I am talking about a life of love and joy that comes from a growing intimacy with God. This kind of life overflows in love, God's love (since He loved us first) - primarily back to Him - and then spills out into the lives of the people with whom we come in contact. It has nothing to do with the people we hang out with or don't hang out with, the kinds of clothes we wear or don't wear, the kinds of places we go to or don't go to, the kinds of music we listen to or don't listen to, the kinds of movies we watch or don't watch. It has to do with real people with real heartaches, real joys, real lives.
I posted earlier on Intimacy with God: "Oh God, into me see." That's the life to which God is calling me. In a more recent post, I talked about the walls coming down, but I failed to mention that this is only the beginning of the journey.
God has such amazing, sometimes heart-stopping adventures for us, even after He's taught us to fly.
