When
I went to college, we still had Saturday morning classes, and first year
students were not allowed to cut them. I
remember taking an introductory geology course that initial winter term. It was fondly called Rocks 10, and it was designed
for students like myself who needed to fulfill a science distribution
requirement but would never have made it through biology since that
introductory course was designed to weed out pre-meds.
A lovely elderly
professor, Duncan Stewart, taught the course.
Each class period, he brought along his equally elderly dog who curled
up at the front of the classroom and slept through the hour and ten minute
lecture. Professor Stewart also took us
on several field trips to Minnesota outcroppings loaded with fossils, and he
always had the bus driver stop on the way back to campus so he could buy us
each an ice cream cone.
The
only problem with Rocks 10 was that one of the three weekly classes was
Saturday morning at 8:00 A.M. That meant
getting up in the dark on a weekend and making my way across campus in sub-zero
weather. That also meant sitting in a
darkened classroom trying to take notes on the slides of rocks that marched
unrelentingly across the projection screen.
Nice as Professor
Stewart was, it was not enough to keep everyone awake – certainly not me. By about the fifth slide, I would feel my
eyelids droop and my eyes lose their focus.
Sometimes I would feel my head nod forward and then jerk back up again. All in all, it was not a pretty sight – but
the course did ensure that the first third of my required science courses would
be handily reflected on my transcript come graduation
Teachers
and preachers can have that soporific effect on people – and the Apostle Paul
was no exception. He was on one of his
missionary journeys when we encounter him this time. He had made his way through Macedonia and
Achaia in Western Greece. He was headed
to Syria and most likely on to Jerusalem.
However, on the evening we encounter him, he had stopped in Troas in
northwestern modern day Turkey. Paul had
been there for a week, and this was his last night with the Christians in the
area.
As
you might expect from an apostle and saint, Paul used these final hours in a
revival sort of way – singing, reading Scripture, praying, sharing in communion
– and preaching. And how Paul could
preach! We know for sure that his
letters could sometimes be abstract and convoluted, and that brevity was not
his strong suit. One can only presume that his sermons were
along the same lines. Paul would have
been, most likely, a firm believer in the modern proverb: “Sermonettes make
Christianettes”.
In his defense, however, surely Paul
felt he had so much to say to his listeners.
After all, he was leaving the next morning and, who knows when he would
pass this way again. Yet, he clearly did
not know when to zip it and sit down.
Instead, he preached on – and on – and on – until it was well past
midnight.
United Church of Christ pastor Dee
Eisenhauer describes what happened next this way: “In spite
of (his) wish to stay awake out of respect for the speaker, if nothing else”,
young Eutychus (kind of like a modern day millennial) “is interested in the
preacher, but when (Paul) launches into a complicated excursus about the Law
being a custodian or some such, he loses the thread.
The
blazing oil lamps fill the stuffy, crowded room with soporific smoke. Eutychus
had seated himself in the window sill, hoping a breath of air would aid him,
but it’s no use. His eyes close, feeling like they were weighted with
cement. His head hits his chest and jerks up, several times. Then he
loses the battle to stay awake, and falls into a deep sleep.”
That would have been bad enough, but then the unthinkable
happened. Eutychus fell out of the third
story window and hit the dirt below.
There was a collective gasp from the congregation, enough to make even
Paul stop to take a breath. The entire flock
of Christians bolted down the three flights of stairs and out of the building,
only to find the young man sprawled on the cobbled street and apparently dead
Paul went out with the crowd as well to check on Eutychus. As one Bible translation reads, “Paul stretched himself on him,
and hugged him hard. ‘No more crying,’ he said. ‘There’s life in him yet.’
With that, Paul and the
congregation headed back up the three flights of stairs to the sanctuary. Paul served communion and then returned to
the pulpit, preaching until dawn. It is quite
amazing really. He is not thrown off his
game one single bit. And on that note,
he departed from Troas the following day, leaving the rattled congregation and
the resuscitated Eutychus to inject some meaning into the bizarre happenings of
the past 12 or so hours.
There you have it! This untoward event is the first historical
evidence of someone being literally bored to death by a sermon, bored to death
by church. And that is also undoubtedly why
church sanctuaries are always on the first floor.
One pastor/blogger I read while preparing this
sermon shared his church experience growing up.” When I was a teenager, (he wrote,) I
went through a phase when I found worship a little boring. Not all of it was
boring. The church I grew up in had an organ, and I liked that. I enjoyed the
hymns, and the choir. And the communion services held a certain mystery and
fascination. And the offering--I enjoyed the offering in my church, because it
was very dramatic. The organist would suddenly transition from nice quiet music
while the plates were being passed to the stirring opening chords of the
doxology and the congregation would rise and sing heartily while the ushers
marched smartly down the aisle bearing the plates. That was very exciting.
But the sermons, I tended to find boring.
Our pastor was a nice man, but his sermons were just not very captivating. And
they would kind of just go on and on. So once I asked my parents whether I
could take my Hardy Boys mystery novel along to read during the sermon. They
didn’t think that would be a very good idea.
But the thing is, my parents also found the
sermons a little boring. So sometimes we’d skip out. My father sang in the
choir, so occasionally, when the choir had finished its anthem, and before the
pastor stood up to preach, he would duck out the side door of the choir
section, and my mother, sister and I would slip out the back of the church. And
we’d scamper down the basement hallway and exit by the back door so that no one
would see us. And that was really exciting, the kind of thrill a young
adolescent feels when they break some stodgy rule. “
He goes on to note that “today more and
more people are finding not only sermons, but worship, and church in general to
be boring. And they also are slipping out the back door—or, kind of like this
young man Eutychus, they are falling out of the church window.”
So – the question for us as we seek to
figure out just what role our church here in Raymond can and should play in the
post-modern world is this: Why are
people slipping out the back door or falling out of the church window? What makes church seem so darn boring and
irrelevant to folks today? I have a
couple of thoughts.
It could be that those individuals and
families who choose to remain outside these walls think that all we who are
inside these walls do is sleep our way through the world’s problems. It could
be that they think that all we do is talk about – and maybe pray about - the pain,
the hunger, and the brokenness that abounds all around us. It could be that they think that we think that
committing our lives to Christ means little else than assuring ourselves of a
ticket on the train to heaven and that what Jesus stood for is secondary to our
own self-interest. It could be that they
think we are more concerned about getting more people in the pews who will make
a stewardship pledge, so the church can keep its doors open than we are about
living in meaningful and authentic ways.
It could be that they think we are having one big slumber party in here
– safe in our own little world.
In the weeks to come as we define a vision
and path forward for our church, if we take nothing else from this little story
in the Book of Acts, we should take from it that we need to stay awake. We need to remain awakened to the needs of
the world around us and, with God’s help, respond to those needs in a
meaningful and intentional way. We need to
wake up and move outside of our own little world. We must not snooze away into cynicism,
apathy, and jadedness. We must not
snooze our way into indifference or downright antagonism toward and distrust in
those who see the world differently than we do.
Instead, we need to be awakened and
cognizant of and above all trusting in the workings of God’s redemptive spirit,
a power that will surprise us even in the most tragic and seemingly broken of
circumstances.
Surely we need to wake up to the world
around us – and reflect that wakefulness in our worship. So – let me ask you this: What if our worship
together was a time to think less about ourselves
and more about our faith in the power of the love of God, a time to think less
about our personal comfort and more about all that Jesus stood for, a
time to think less about maneuvering God into the leftover parts of our busy
lives and more about molding our lives into God’s dream for the world, in
short, a time to recognize and celebrate all that God is doing in our midst
even as we become renewed and refreshed, so we can move outside of our little
world to love and to serve?
In the end, if we are to
survive and thrive as a church, we need to wake up, step out of our own little
world, and embrace all that Jesus’ stood for.
Author Rachel Held Evans said it well in her blog when writing
about the church and the millennial generation.
Let’s be the church that
wakes up – and finds Jesus in our midst.
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