Why bother coming to Church? Sermon Sunday 20th September 2020
Why, exactly, do we bother coming to church? Why aren’t you playing tennis or football this morning, or going for a walk or reading a Sunday paper?
In our Bible study a couple of years ago, we came across this verse from the epistle of Hebrews:
…And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another… (Hebrews 10)
I’m glad that phrase is in the NT because it shows it isn’t a recent issue. Clearly, in the early church, some Christians wondered why should they bother doing something that’s very similar week after week? What’s the point? It’s a good question to ask as we start a new academic year.
Timothy Radcliffe asks exactly this question in his book, Why Go to Church?. He quotes a teenager: ‘Attending the the Eucharist is like to sitting through an endlessly repeated film, and you know exactly how it ends’. So why do we do it? Does it make any difference? I wonder what it is that brings you here Sunday by Sunday? Isn’t church, well, a bit boring?
There are many important reasons to come to church: studies have shown that doing so generates better mental health; it creates community in what can be a populous but lonely city; we encourage our children and ourselves by discerning what makes for a good life, how are we to live life in all its abundance.
Apart from those very good reasons, two dimensions I’d like to focus upon this morning is ritual and boredom. First ritual.
The former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, suggests that it’s ritual that is transformative. People tend to think that what makes religious people different from those who have no religious faith is that they believe different things. But that’s less than half the story. People in most religions behave distinctively. I don’t think that Christians are more moral than their non-religious counterparts. Although I would hope that our faith transforms us, little by little, on our pilgrimage of faith.
The difference is that religious people engage in ritual. We do certain things like praying over and over again. Ritual is the religious equivalent of the ‘deep practice’ of accomplished athletes or musicians. It makes certain forms of behaviour instinctive. It reconfigures our character so that we’re no longer the people we once were. Engraved into our instincts we have a certain way of being and of living. For example, prayer engenders gratitude; regular charitable giving makes us generous; being kind helps us feel less anxious; the experience of abstinence in Lent teaches us self-control; chatting to others after the service takes us beyond our own world and needs.
Each week, we hear again and again of the importance of love of God and love of one’s neighbour. The transformation of our character, our lives, and our habits, quietly happen as we come to church week by week. We weekly hear God’s word and receive simple yet profound gifts of bread and wine, and we are reminded that we, here in Campden Hill, are the body of Christ. Ritual, what we do Sunday by Sunday is what Cardinal Newman described as ‘God’s noiseless work’. That’s the first point: ritual changes us. It slowly transforms us and our community.
What about church being boring? Yes, it often is boring. A couple of years ago, I took my son to see a football match at Wembley Stadium: Spurs vs Fulham. It was quite an exciting game but a lot of it was actually boring. I’d like to suggest that it’s okay to experience boredom in church. In fact, it’s more than okay. In our society we are surrounded by constant activity, lots of stimulation, we’re bombarded with adverts, as well alerts from things like Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Twitter (or if you’re really old, Facebook!) all demanding our immediate attention.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when we are faced with an hour in church without phones or computers or television or simply things to do, we naturally feel a twinge of boredom. And this reason for that is that we are being detoxed. And the experience is uncomfortable.
I once decided to do a three day food detox. It wasn’t a happy experiment. I only ate fruit and vegetables for three days. No coffee, no alcohol, no salt or pepper or sugar, no butter with a baked potato, no salad dressing to make salad actually nice to eat. It was so difficult.
In fact, it was a disaster because by the end of it I was so sick of the diet that I went out and bought a MacDonalds… clearly undoing all that good eating!
The experience was deeply uncomfortable because of years of a particular diet isn’t easily shifted in three days.
During our weekly detox here in church, perhaps sometimes feeling a sense of boredom, unseen things happen. It interrupts our regular life pattern and encourages a state of deeper thoughtfulness and creativity. Many parents will tell you that children with ‘nothing to do’ will eventually invent some weird, fun game to play—with a cardboard box, or a dance routine.
The problem in today’s world is that we don’t wrestle with these slow moments. We try to eliminate moments of boredom with mobile phones.
Winnie the Pooh has some wise words. He says to the overworked, stressed out, middle-aged Christopher Robin: “Doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.” In other words, right action emerges from long and slow deliberation.
So, what we are doing on Sundays (and for those who can manage a daily time of meditation, which I highly encourage!), instead of always fleeing boredom, lean into it. This is what we can experience as we relax into the liturgy: space to think, to question, journey together and inhabit the tradition.
Timothy Radcliffe writes: ‘…the liturgy works in the depths of our minds and hearts a very gradual, barely perceptible transformation of who we are, so quietly that we might easily think that nothing is happening at all’.
But something is happening: we experience a very gradual barely perceptible transformation of who we are. Ritual, and the boredom we might feel in these moments, gathered around this altar, changes the world by changing us.
References
Lord Sacks, http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical1785.aspx
Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?