O, happy day!

Living Holy Lives

“D.L. Moody was once asked why he urged Christians to be filled constantly with the Holy Spirit.  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I need a continual infilling because I leak!’  He pointed to a water tank which had sprung a leak.  ‘I’m like that!’ he said.”

                                  Contributed by Owen Bourgaize

“Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all.  We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another.”

                                  Barbara Brown Taylor

                                  Leaving Church

         Each week, for a least an hour, we are invited to enter into worship.  We can leave our unholy lives and be refilled with a sense of the sacred.  We can briefly experience being blessed and holy.  Yet, fewer than half of us take the time.  Barely forty-three percent of Americans attend a church, synagogue or mosque regularly. 

 

         I don’t know about you, but I leak like a sieve.  The poor old Holy Spirit has to use all ten fingers to hold on to me for more than a second.  The world is simply too crazy-mean; I am compelled to rant and rave about it.  I need refilling about every fifteen minutes.  That is why it is so important to me to go to church for one hour on Sunday and be rejuvenated, reminded, re-membered. 

         I think this is the great appeal of the evangelical, praise churches that have mushroomed into small cities across this nation.  There are several here in Birmingham with more than ten-thousand members.  Every worship service begins with forty minutes of singing—usually repetitive chants with arms waving and bodies swaying.  People enter into a trance state and then are much more receptive to whatever message the preacher brings.  There’s serious power in having thousands of swaying, praising bodies in the same room.  Everything else drops away and there’s only that sound and motion.  It provides escape from the madding race of everyday, unholy life.

         I don’t attend one of those churches.  Their theology is a little too neatly packaged for me.  I like to be challenged, and to question and probe.  I like the messiness of being leaky and rough.  I do, however, want worship to be---well, worship.  I don’t want a political rally, or an argument, and I don’t want to be told how sinful I am and how in need of salvation.  I just want to hear that God is love, and that God’s love extends to me and to everyone else in this leaky, unholy old world. 

                                  Namaste,

                                  Jane