the world has seen a great light. in the darkness…
I have often pondered what the writers of Genesis in the first creation narrative and in the Gospel of John understood darkness to be. Is it a bad day now and then? Is it an ongoing depression? Is it 9/11? Is it a fire that began with some fireplace ashes outside your door, that burns your house up with your 3 children and parents inside (as happened in Stamford, Conn right before Christmas)?
My hunch is that the darkness is all of this and everything else of pain, suffering, evil and death that has been known in human history.
I come upon times every few years when I just don’t feel the spunk to do what needs to be done basically, let alone to have the greater enthusiasm that as a pastor I am expected to have. It is that kind of seeming “soft” darkness I find the hardest to deal with. It creeps up on m slowly and I keep expecting that “tomorrow” it will all go away and everything will be alright. But things linger and they take root and after a while I find I am in a more extended funk. Funks are times when I find myself asking why I am doing what I am doing. I am not clear that there really is a greater purpose to the things that I do. I am reminded of the comment in the book “Growing Up Absurd” which was written in 1960 by Paul Goodman. He was talking about the disaffection of the 1950′s Beat generation. That was even before the more pronounced disaffection of the 1960′s hippie/protest generation.
What Goodman wrote was that the disaffection felt by youth in the 1950′s was due to the meaninglessness of a significant portion of the economy and jobs in the US society. He put the figure at 50%. The question being asked by those youth were why bother just to do meaningless jobs that really don’t add worth to the wider world, but only provide you a means to get an income so you can live a fairly comfortable life?
It can be argued that this is an exaggeration. Many have. But there is still something that rings true in my own life and in the lives of many people of multiple generations that I have known over the years. I heard it in the voices of the World War II generation of my parents who as they got into their late 60′s started to murmur and then complain that young people weren’t joining the church and starting to take over responsibilities for it. Then in a few years they began to say how they were tired of doing church work or running the church and how the younger people had to take over. Then, that generation just began to leave the church. Statistically the World War II generation is the fastest growing percentage of those who are not involved in the church.
This situation of that generation seems to say the same thing about meaninglessness as Goodman was writing about. If we were serving the Lord with our life and finding the whole truth of death and life being answered for us in that service, whether we were tired or not, we couldn’t let go of the experience, truths and meanings we were finding in that service. But what happened was we sold people on being in the church rather than to give their life to Christ. And thus serving in the church became a job. And in time it became a pain in the rear. So why were they doing it in the first place? Why are we doing it?
“Someone has to be responsible!” which I heard my father tell me on his death bed and I have heard reiterated in many other forms over the years by others. The question is, though, are we being responsible for those things that are essential? Or are we as Goodman wrote over 50 years ago trying to be “responsible” for things that really don’t add meaning to the world, nor true value? I suspect the church is a microcosm of the wider society and the wider world in this vein. We keep doing the things we are doing because we keep thinking that they must be done and “someone has to be responsible for it!” “We always have done it that way.”
Someone is responsible! Jesus Christ! We need to be more clarifying and patient in discerning what is the Lord’s work and what is our busy work? It takes time and prayer. A lot of what we do “for the Lord” is far more about us and what we want than furthering the Kingdom of God. That’s why prayer, meditation, listening and patience are very important things for all of us in 2012. We must all grow in discerning what is loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and loving our neighbor as ourself! If what we are doing does not further or grow this mission, then why are we doing it?
I have seen over 37 years of local church ministry and prior to that 25 years of growing up in the parsonage as a preacher’s kid too many people get angry, conflicted and burned out in trying to do “the Lord’s work.” It isn’t worth it! At this point I am talking both about our individual lives and our lives in the church and the wider world. It isn’t worth it! Because in our anger and lethargy we are farther away from God and disconnected from our neighbors.
I am finding at age 63 a lot more patience than I had in my younger years. Over all these years I have attended so many meetings and been part of so many programs that were all planning to accomplish something great, or at least things worthwhile. I have seen too many attempts to recreate what God has already created. I think much of the church has tried to become the Light rather than to point to the Light.
Take a break…otherwise known as sabbath. It is a commandment. But even more so, it is the core of our relationship with God and our neighbor. Without the re-centering of sabbath to let our life be focused in, around and through God, we become overextended, exhausted, non-friendly disciples of Jesus. Wait a minute…that’s an oxymoron. At that point, we can not be servant disciples, but rather are the mission field where Jesus is calling disciples to go find the lost. At that point, we are the lost! We have lost our way to God and our home in Christ’s body. We are homeless! There are many people today who have wonderful physical homes who are lost from God. Please come home to God in 2012!! Pray, practice patience, listen, meditate…observe sabbath.
