Mixing Up TNT on a Sunday Morning
Photo Credit: Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
Sitting in my plastic folding chair at church, I often think of Annie Dillard’s reflection on how little those of us in church services comprehend God’s fiery power:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.
Too often, I enter the YMCA gym serving as our sanctuary with only the faintest conscious understanding of what it means to be in the presence of God. Each Sunday, I walk the same routines: dampening my hands with hand sanitizer at the entrance, pressing my name tag just below the collar bone, passing my son Jeremiah into the arms of a nursery volunteer, trying to shuffle discreetly into a backrow seat so as few people as possible notice my husband and I are late. The rhythmic steps in the weekly routine can easily lull my spirit to sleep.
Too often, I am distracted by the new hairstyle of one of the singers or the baby staring behind her mother’s shoulder. While singing lyrics like Heaven, Heaven fall down / Spirit, Spirit pour out / On us all now / Heaven fall down, I can’t stop thinking about the afternoon’s lunch menu or how I didn’t greet the gracious greeter standing near the hand sanitizing kiosk. The sermon can be a battle to lasso my bucking mind, bring it back to the truths belted from the pulpit. Whole Sundays pass in the distracted enclosure of my own mind, and I miss the awesome reality of God passing by, as if I’ve been sleeping through a cyclone.
But what if I imagined church more like Dillard does? As a place reverberating with a power infinitely beyond us. A power more tumultuous than any looming hurricane. The Power, in fact, who holds hurricanes in the hollow of His palms?
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Throughout the Bible, the glory of God is a fearsome spectacle. The cloud of divine glory flooding the newly-finished tabernacle is so overpowering, Moses can’t even enter. (Was he choking on vapor? Blinded by fog? Afraid?) Before the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, falling holy fire incinerates a slaughtered bull and wood and stones and dust and even the water poured from twelve large jars. When heralding angels flare out of the night sky over Bethlehem, the shepherds are just plain terrified.
Maybe wearing a crash helmet to church is not such a bad idea.
Gathering on Sunday is rather risky business. It’s as if those ordinary fingers strumming guitars and pressing keys and pounding drums were all striking matches. Flinty breath–in the form of prayers and sermons and benedictions–striking steely vocal chords. In the friction of skin on steel, air on muscle, flames could ignite and the sudden flare of divine power might set something on fire. Bystanders could get singed. Someone might be changed. What if we came into the presence of God prepared for falling flames?
This past Sunday, God gave me the grace to feel His presence trembling the wooden floorboards. As the congregation–the widow and the pregnant woman and the hoodied teenager and the man in a wheelchair–sang of God’s splendor. I felt tears drip past my eyelashes, stopped singing just to bask in the force of a presence beyond our frail frames. Something was burning, I was getting singed. Maybe it was my illusions of self-sufficiency. Maybe it was my pride shifting to ash in the holy heat. As I stood, barely able to whisper, I realized that this–the reality of this God, this one tumultuous and torrential God, this Jesus is all that matters and all that really is.
Photo Credit: Christopher Burns on Unsplash
Aslan, according to Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “isn’t safe. But he’s good.” After the song ended and I sat down my weakened frame, skin still warm from the fire, I felt clean. The burning, it turns out, can be painful–but it is a good burning from a good Light. And there is nothing better than to be with that Light, glow in the overflow of its luminescence.
God is present in living rooms and gardens. God is present in forests and meadows. God is present in hospitals and schools and prisons. God is present at McDonald’s and St. Elmo’s Steakhouse. God is present everywhere. But there is something unparalleled, I believe, about the unique revelatory presence of God in embodied gatherings of human beings jumbled together on Sunday mornings in search of the Holy One.
May we not give up the habit of meeting together, fully aware that when we pray heaven come down, we are playing with matches, mixing TNT on our church floors–and may we brace ourselves, life preservers and all, for when it does.
References: Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk; Phil Wickham, Response; C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Hebrews 10:25
This essay is part of a series called “Dwell,” which meditates on the spaces where God dwells with us.
