Sunday Morning Coming Down

I just listened to Rob Bell’s sermon from 3.29.09, “Stunned and Spent.”  You can find it on Marshill.org, in the teaching archives.

http://marshill.org/teaching/index.php

I would say I’m supposed to be in church.  I have a list, a task schedule with time slots–2 hours on this, 2 hours on that.  It’s the only way I can come to terms with how much is expected of me at any given time but I never really follow it.  I try, but something always comes up (like my lack of discipline).  So I’d slotted reading in my schedule last night, to be in bed by 12am, to be in the neighborhood church this morning, etc.

At about 8:30pm last night, my friend asked if I wanted to join a group of our friends in Indiana for some karaoke.  I’ve heard some of the writers in our program are stellar karaokiers, so I jumped at the opportunity.  And it was fantastic.  My friend’s  parents were in town, they covered our drinks, they nailed their karaoke selections.

For the first time I felt I could understand my surroundings; this small town, run down like my hometown, this dive bar, brown and faded with loops of tacky neon; this music, smoky country voices singing  about promised lands and cheatin’ hearts.  And these friends, who I’d heard about, they were awesome.  Incredible. They’re performing (the karaoke classics: You Outta Know, Bohemian Rhapsody, Sympathy for the Devil) and I’m thinking “Now we have to go back to grad school?”  Do you realize how much talent is in the world?  This is a world where people spend week days discussing literature, theories about how to read, how to define literary phenomenons and bend genders, etc, and then the next thing you know, it’s the weekend and they are in dive bars tearin’ it up.    I used to say I only liked Asian-style karaoke (closed off living rooms) but this was something else.    This was small-town American escape.  It was heart breaking and beautiful.  And it lasted until 3am.

Okay, so no one told me Indiana bars are open till three a.m.  I woke up at 10:15 on this Sunday morning, rain pattering on my windowsil,  and church was not going to happen.  Still, I felt hungry for God, as I do most mornings (not just Sunday) and remembered Rob Bell sermons online.

While I lived in Thailand, I didn’t have any kind of teaching in our small church fellowship (we functioned more like a weekly discussion that usually was about the Bible, but oh, not always) so I started listening to the weekly Bell/Marshill as a way to sort of stretch my God-mind, if you know what I mean.

The sermon was about lamentations.  It was about the need for lament, about how change brings some sort of loss, even if the change is good, it’s about knowing when to protest and turning those protests into poetry.

Turning protests into poetry, he said.

And here’s the point, the thing about God that I want to share.  He’s alive, and that means he’s with you when you’ve been out karaokeing, He’s with you while you’re karaokeing.  So, sure, I sat down feeling guilty, like I was in the wrong place (the place not indicated on my schedule), and so I and told God (prayer) that I was sorry, I should be fellowshipping with the marvelous folks he’s put in my life here in this church, and that I knew I had better weeks when I check in with him more often and by that I mean get my ass up for church on Sunday so that at least I have something to think God-related to about all week, at least have some nice conversations with people who love Him.  I asked him, please, please don’t let me make this a habit, don’t let me start down that ugly road psalmists mention from time to time, you know, the one where we stop praying and then start believing we have everything figured out in our lives, or that we need to have everything figured out, and when we don’t we start to grumble.

I put on the sermon, found out it was about Lamentations, thought: Okay, God.  I guess I deserve some fire and brimstone.

Fire and Brimstone?  Rob Bell?  The sermon is about Lamentations, sure, but it was so full of little things that I thought were said just for me, important to me, like little love letters from the risin Christ. Bell made points about Detroit,  about poetry.   I wonder if anyone else can relate to the sermon as much as I can–I mean, I really can’t imagine that those people in Grand Rapids felt it as much as I did–but they probably did.  This is often how God works.

This is often how God works in my life.  I find myself in a position that I feel like I shouldn’t be in, due to some choice I made, and then He hits me over the head and says: Do you think you’ve stepped outside of my love for you?  Where do you think you can go where I can’t reach you?  I’ll make you grateful for every decision you ever make.

All of this is to say God doesn’t like us to waste our time.  So he doesn’t let us.