HABIT OR HOBBY?

Bishop N. T. Wright, former Bishop of York, makes the statement near the conclusion of his book After You Believe that church going used to be a habit of the many but is now a hobby of the few. After reading the statistics of church going in the United Kingdom where about 5% attend church on any given Sunday, I can agree with his observation and certainly understand his concern being a “professional religious” myself.

Church going, however, has never been the habit of the majority in this country, at least for the last fifty or more years, certainly in the 56+ years of my ministry. And while we in this country attend church more than those who live in Europe, attendance is far from what it used to be even on the traditional two high holy days, Christmas and Easter. We simply do not attend worship services as much as we used to. 

Diana Butler Bass, a sociologist of religion, entitles one of her books Christianity after Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. In a way it is a follow-up to Wright’s observation about what has happened to the practice of our Christian faith, one aspect of it being that most Christians attended church on a regular basis certainly out of habit, most, hopefully, because doing so was very meaningful for their very lives.

Now there are those who would applaud the fact that church going is no longer a habit because they would argue that church going should come from the head and the heart. That would be true. However, we all have habits, good and bad. The good habits, like our daily regimens, are very helpful in keeping us healthful and sane. The bad habits, which we need to eliminate, do the very opposite, which is why we need to rid ourselves of them. As we have all learned, getting rid of bad habits is often more difficult than learning good ones.

Be that as it may, back to Wright’s observation, I suspect he was and is a little piqued because what is very important to him both as a bishop and as a Christian he finds so unimportant to the people he is called to serve. I get that way sometime when attendance is down especially when the weather is good or bad or for whatever reason church goers go somewhere else on Sunday morning, if the only place they go is to the breakfast table.

What Bass has learned from her sociological observations is that the situation is not as bad as Wright thinks it to be. Yes, church attendance is down and people do not come as regularly as they once did. Where once, certainly when I was a youngster, Sunday morning meant going to church whether you felt like it or not. It was an obligation become habit. Whether I got something out of the worship was not the issue. What was was that I was there, period.

Church going on a regular basis needs to be a habit, a habit of the heart certainly. Where else can we go to find a community of love and support, an opportunity to think about and pray for those we care about and who care about us and an opportunity to collectively and individually give thanks to God for blessing received, both deserved and undeserved?

IT HAS TO BE REAL

The old adage informs us that a picture is worth a thousand words. Whether or not anyone ever calculated how many words it would take to describe what is in a picture is probably beside the point. All any one of us has to do to prove the point is to hold a picture in hand and try to describe exactly what ones sees. Whether that description takes ten words or a thousand words, the point is made.

A picture, of course, is not real. It is only a depiction of something that is real. There is a difference between seeing a photograph of a sunset than seeing the sunset itself. And while one may use the same words to describe both the picture and the reality, there is still a real difference. For something to be real, it has to be real. It cannot be a description or a picture of something that is real.

This is especially true when it comes to our faith. We can expend thousands of words explaining what it means to be a Christian. I have quite a few books on my shelves that do just that. Yet none of those books do anything but explain what it means to follow Jesus even if they are loaded with examples of Christianity in practice. While those books give a real explanation of faith in practice, nothing is being practiced.

For our faith to be real, it has to be real. We can talk a good faith. We can preach a good faith. We can give examples, multitudes of them, about how Christians the world over have put their faith into practice. All that is well and good. We all need to understand and even visualize what it means to live a faith-filled life, a life that Jesus commands us to live and one he showed us how to live by his own life.

But no example and no amount of words replaces a real lived faith. Nothing. A real live faith has to be truly alive, a living, breathing life. Our faith demands that we feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the sick. We know that. Our faith comes alive, however, only when we actually feed hungry people and clothe those who are without and personally visit those who are alone.

It is wonderful and good and even necessary to have a working knowledge and understanding of what it means to follow Jesus. We need to have a clear picture in our mind, if you will, what all that means and entails. Those words and pictures, while necessary and essential, go only so far; but, in the end, they are inadequate because they do not go far enough. They need to become real, really lived out in our daily lives.

We know all that, certainly. Yet, it seems, we are often convinced that we are good Christian’s, devoted followers of Jesus, simply because we can paint a good picture of what it means to be such. We can explain what it really means to be a Christian without really being one, without actually living as one.

That is not to say that we do not live such a life. It is to say that all too often it is all too easy to talk a good Christianity without actually having to live out a good Christian way of life. Our faith to be real, has to be real and not simply a picture of the real.

TAKE TIME TO RESPOND

We live in a world, or at least in a country, where consumption seems to be the calling card. We eat more than we should, certainly eat more of the wrong foods and not enough of the right ones. We consume more of the world’s natural and dwindling resources than we have a right to while, at the same time, making it more difficult for the rest of the world to obtain its fair share.

We seem to be so preoccupied with getting, obtaining more and more. Perhaps the word “seem” is incorrect. Perhaps the truth is that we are preoccupied. We tend to think, or seem to be convinced of the truth that more is better rather than realizing that less is more. Who hasn’t eaten so much at a wonderfully delicious and even nutritious meal that the stuffed stomach mitigated against our being able to really enjoy the meal. Too many of our children have more toys than they can possibly enjoy any one of them.

All that is bad enough; and even though it is a guilt trip, this reminder that we spend too much time, energy and money in obtaining and consuming that which we deem will make us happy or happier, there is another point to all this. It is an important point and one that we all too easily overlook, take for granted or, even worse, do not recognize at all as being something of which we should be aware.

The point is quite simple: when we allow ourselves to be preoccupied, even at times consumed, with getting – getting food, getting possessions, getting money, getting – we become unable to respond to what God gives to us, freely gives to us at no cost and asks nothing in return other that we appreciate what we have been given and to not misuse that gift in any way.

One of the reasons why more is less is that when we have little, we always appreciate what we have. The more we possess the less we seem to appreciate and enjoy those possessions. We sometimes have so many possessions that we have to store them in the attic, the cellar, the garage or even rent one of those storage facilities somewhere across town almost to the point where we even forget what we have and certainly have no way of enjoying them.

Then, too, one of the reasons why we seem unable to respond to what God gives us is that we either have taken for granted what those gifts are or we can’t grab hold of them and store them away for future enjoyment. They are meant to be enjoyed all the time but can only be enjoyed when they are recognized for what they are: God’s free gifts to us. Once recognized, then and only then can we respond appropriately.

What are those free God-given gifts? They are too numerous to mention, but consider some: life itself, each day, the sunshine, nature in all its glory, the fruits of the earth, God’s total love for us and the ability to love God and others and be loved in return, God’s forgiveness and the ability to forgive and be forgiven. Each of us can add to that list of the gifts God gives to each freely, unasked, with the only request that our response is to recognize these gifts, to be thankful and never, ever take them for granted.