Folding Pews
Stories
Contents
“Folding Pews” by C. David McKirachan
“Straw into Gold” by C. David McKirachan
Folding Pews
by C. David McKirachan
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Sanctuaries are rarely designed with worship in mind. Think about that one for a minute. It will make your head hurt. The first time I walked into my soon to be parish, I noticed that the front pew had a barrier in front of it. In the “old days” there had been boxed pews that families rented, season tickets. The barrier was to allow the front pew to be a box. An interesting doo dad from the past. But then I noticed there was a hinge about a foot from the top of the barrier. It folded down. I asked what that was for. No one seemed to know. Okay.
A few weeks later, I was going through the procedures for weddings and funerals and found out that when there was a funeral that folding barrier was to be put down before the service. No one knew why. Then we had our first funeral. The casket came down the aisle and couldn’t make the turn unless the folding barrier was engaged. Now we knew why.
Two years later we decided to remodel the sanctuary, make room for bell tables, bring the communion table down, etc. When we brought the plans to session, an elder informed us they were inappropriate. We’d removed the front pew and the barrier. We had to have a barrier. I asked why. The answer was simple, “How can we do funerals correctly if there is no barrier to fold down?”
Tradition is an important part of what we are. They help us remember from whence we’ve come, and they drag us into places that we need to go and probably wouldn’t if we didn’t have them. We tend to get tangled in the routine of making it through the day, forgetting the foundational truths critical to our identity. The Sabbath is such a tradition, demanding that we spend some time away from work and spend some time with each other paying attention to God.
When we get too busy to dive into the holidays, life has no rhythm, no moments of glory. So, we must treasure our disciplines and traditions. But just as we are liberated from our ruts by traditions, so those traditions can be corrupted, ossified, fossilized. They can become fortifications for our ruts.
The laws of purity had become such fortifications, motions to be gone through, ruts to be maintained. Instead of providing a regular remembrance of God’s power and faithfulness, helping the worshiper to discover humility, they had become a pietistic excuse to discriminate and judge.
Jesus was blunt as the prophets had been about people’s unwillingness to climb out of their ruts and their pietism. Such bluntness is uncomfortable for communities and it is hard on the one who’s bringing the message to the people. People don’t like change. It’s hard. I had a parishioner who told me he was tired of the four letter word I kept using. GROW. He liked things the way they were.
We are just as susceptible to ruts as our people. It’s hard to deal with negative emotional responses when we try to open the church to new things. Approval is a rut. If it’s our priority, we’re going to have a hard time preaching a gospel of grace and hope.
So we dance between building a safe place where the old, old story of God’s love and justice is dependably heard, and reminding God’s people that to be the living Body of Christ we have to be willing to grow beyond our comfort zones. Fun and games.
We remodeled the sanctuary, without a hinged barrier. But we cut off a four foot section of it and put it on display with a bunch of other artifacts that had been in boxes in a storage room. We put the elder who was worried about appropriate funerals in charge of it and established an annual heritage day. A new tradition.
He did really good children’s sermons. Go figure.
* * *
Straw into Gold
by C. David McKirachan
James 1:17-27
Luther didn’t think much of James’ letter. Grace and works. Oil and water. Being an American, I was brought up on a binary approach to reality. Paradox and mystery has little room in such an environment. Either you’re right or you’re wrong. But my father was a Socratic scholar who tended to answer questions with questions and my mother was confident that magic ran through the earth like veins of gold. So questions like “Grace or works?” were answered “Yes and No.” Dinner conversations were interesting.
James came up the first time I tripped into this epistle. Grace or works wasn’t on my horizon. What bothered me was the changeless nature of eternity, “…no variation or shadow due to change.” It sounded like a static system. It sounded kind of boring. Such were the theological issues for a ten year old.
My mother started giggling and retreated into the kitchen to work on desert. I’m not sure if she thought I was cute or she was laughing at the conundrum my father was now stuck with. The answer to that one is probably “yes.” I thought my father did pretty well. I sort of understood it, and it stuck, so that’s a pretty good answer.
He said that we’re used to a world that lives in tension, energy/entropy, hot/cold, light/dark, day/night, life/death. These are all categories of our reality that we use to understand things. Eternity, that which is of the spiritual world is beyond our categories and thus our understanding. Now evil, which is of the spiritual world, seeks to corrupt, and to make us part of that corruption with fear and hate and some of the other things that keep us from making choices for the good, which is also of the spiritual part of God’s creation. He quoted a hymn “We are living, we are dwelling in a grand and awful time.” He told me James Russell Lowell thought that we’re part of a struggle that reaches from our hearts out into eternity. What we do and what we are is important literally from here to eternity (I wasn’t familiar with the movie then). But sometimes things are beyond our understanding because they transcend our categories.
Then he got back to James and told me that James spent more time on behavior, what to do and not to do than some other epistles. Personally my father liked some other letters better (Ephesians was his favorite) but James’ approach is important to keep us from forgetting how important our (fingers in the air) works are.
He asked me if I thought I was going to heaven. I said something articulate like, “I don’t know.” He told me he did. He knew I was going to heaven, because I knew that Jesus was my Lord and savior. He also knew that sometimes I didn’t think or say or do the right thing. But he was confident that I Know that My Redeemer Liveth (I knew that one). Christ came because God loves us. That doesn’t change. It’s rock solid. He figured that’s what eternity is all about, that rock solid love. Maybe that’s what we can get out of James.
By the time I went out to the kitchen to check on desert, my mother was wiping her eyes. She hugged me and told me she was proud of me. Talk about mystery. All I did was ask a question about James and I was told I was going to heaven and my mother told me she was proud of me.
I still have a hard time when it comes to James. Well, actually I have a hard time with people who want to use works righteousness to justify judging others. If my father was still around I’d refer them to him. As it is, I refer them to some good hymns and the Messiah. That usually puts a cork in their bottle.
When push comes to shove there is no neat formula to explain our confusion. It’s a mystery. But I’ll always appreciate James. I got blessed, hugged, and desert too. I’d say that’s straw into gold.
*****************************************
StoryShare, September 2, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Folding Pews” by C. David McKirachan
“Straw into Gold” by C. David McKirachan
Folding Pews
by C. David McKirachan
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Sanctuaries are rarely designed with worship in mind. Think about that one for a minute. It will make your head hurt. The first time I walked into my soon to be parish, I noticed that the front pew had a barrier in front of it. In the “old days” there had been boxed pews that families rented, season tickets. The barrier was to allow the front pew to be a box. An interesting doo dad from the past. But then I noticed there was a hinge about a foot from the top of the barrier. It folded down. I asked what that was for. No one seemed to know. Okay.
A few weeks later, I was going through the procedures for weddings and funerals and found out that when there was a funeral that folding barrier was to be put down before the service. No one knew why. Then we had our first funeral. The casket came down the aisle and couldn’t make the turn unless the folding barrier was engaged. Now we knew why.
Two years later we decided to remodel the sanctuary, make room for bell tables, bring the communion table down, etc. When we brought the plans to session, an elder informed us they were inappropriate. We’d removed the front pew and the barrier. We had to have a barrier. I asked why. The answer was simple, “How can we do funerals correctly if there is no barrier to fold down?”
Tradition is an important part of what we are. They help us remember from whence we’ve come, and they drag us into places that we need to go and probably wouldn’t if we didn’t have them. We tend to get tangled in the routine of making it through the day, forgetting the foundational truths critical to our identity. The Sabbath is such a tradition, demanding that we spend some time away from work and spend some time with each other paying attention to God.
When we get too busy to dive into the holidays, life has no rhythm, no moments of glory. So, we must treasure our disciplines and traditions. But just as we are liberated from our ruts by traditions, so those traditions can be corrupted, ossified, fossilized. They can become fortifications for our ruts.
The laws of purity had become such fortifications, motions to be gone through, ruts to be maintained. Instead of providing a regular remembrance of God’s power and faithfulness, helping the worshiper to discover humility, they had become a pietistic excuse to discriminate and judge.
Jesus was blunt as the prophets had been about people’s unwillingness to climb out of their ruts and their pietism. Such bluntness is uncomfortable for communities and it is hard on the one who’s bringing the message to the people. People don’t like change. It’s hard. I had a parishioner who told me he was tired of the four letter word I kept using. GROW. He liked things the way they were.
We are just as susceptible to ruts as our people. It’s hard to deal with negative emotional responses when we try to open the church to new things. Approval is a rut. If it’s our priority, we’re going to have a hard time preaching a gospel of grace and hope.
So we dance between building a safe place where the old, old story of God’s love and justice is dependably heard, and reminding God’s people that to be the living Body of Christ we have to be willing to grow beyond our comfort zones. Fun and games.
We remodeled the sanctuary, without a hinged barrier. But we cut off a four foot section of it and put it on display with a bunch of other artifacts that had been in boxes in a storage room. We put the elder who was worried about appropriate funerals in charge of it and established an annual heritage day. A new tradition.
He did really good children’s sermons. Go figure.
* * *
Straw into Gold
by C. David McKirachan
James 1:17-27
Luther didn’t think much of James’ letter. Grace and works. Oil and water. Being an American, I was brought up on a binary approach to reality. Paradox and mystery has little room in such an environment. Either you’re right or you’re wrong. But my father was a Socratic scholar who tended to answer questions with questions and my mother was confident that magic ran through the earth like veins of gold. So questions like “Grace or works?” were answered “Yes and No.” Dinner conversations were interesting.
James came up the first time I tripped into this epistle. Grace or works wasn’t on my horizon. What bothered me was the changeless nature of eternity, “…no variation or shadow due to change.” It sounded like a static system. It sounded kind of boring. Such were the theological issues for a ten year old.
My mother started giggling and retreated into the kitchen to work on desert. I’m not sure if she thought I was cute or she was laughing at the conundrum my father was now stuck with. The answer to that one is probably “yes.” I thought my father did pretty well. I sort of understood it, and it stuck, so that’s a pretty good answer.
He said that we’re used to a world that lives in tension, energy/entropy, hot/cold, light/dark, day/night, life/death. These are all categories of our reality that we use to understand things. Eternity, that which is of the spiritual world is beyond our categories and thus our understanding. Now evil, which is of the spiritual world, seeks to corrupt, and to make us part of that corruption with fear and hate and some of the other things that keep us from making choices for the good, which is also of the spiritual part of God’s creation. He quoted a hymn “We are living, we are dwelling in a grand and awful time.” He told me James Russell Lowell thought that we’re part of a struggle that reaches from our hearts out into eternity. What we do and what we are is important literally from here to eternity (I wasn’t familiar with the movie then). But sometimes things are beyond our understanding because they transcend our categories.
Then he got back to James and told me that James spent more time on behavior, what to do and not to do than some other epistles. Personally my father liked some other letters better (Ephesians was his favorite) but James’ approach is important to keep us from forgetting how important our (fingers in the air) works are.
He asked me if I thought I was going to heaven. I said something articulate like, “I don’t know.” He told me he did. He knew I was going to heaven, because I knew that Jesus was my Lord and savior. He also knew that sometimes I didn’t think or say or do the right thing. But he was confident that I Know that My Redeemer Liveth (I knew that one). Christ came because God loves us. That doesn’t change. It’s rock solid. He figured that’s what eternity is all about, that rock solid love. Maybe that’s what we can get out of James.
By the time I went out to the kitchen to check on desert, my mother was wiping her eyes. She hugged me and told me she was proud of me. Talk about mystery. All I did was ask a question about James and I was told I was going to heaven and my mother told me she was proud of me.
I still have a hard time when it comes to James. Well, actually I have a hard time with people who want to use works righteousness to justify judging others. If my father was still around I’d refer them to him. As it is, I refer them to some good hymns and the Messiah. That usually puts a cork in their bottle.
When push comes to shove there is no neat formula to explain our confusion. It’s a mystery. But I’ll always appreciate James. I got blessed, hugged, and desert too. I’d say that’s straw into gold.
*****************************************
StoryShare, September 2, 2018, issue.
Copyright 2018 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
