Dry bones

I don't know about you, but I have found being a Christian to be difficult over the past year and a half or so. Between the pandemic and the societal divisions, I have often found myself seeing what other people post or say or share and wondering how on earth they can reconcile those things with what Jesus said. Personally, I find much of it so mutually exclusive that I wonder if I even knew these people at all. I know I am not the only one to feel this way. Who have we become? I didn't want any part of it. Jesus yes, but so much has been done and said as representatives of Jesus that the disconnect became too much. 

Except for outside services for major holidays, we haven't been to church in over a year and a half. There were many reasons for this. Lock downs, concerns for the health and safety of our children, overwhelming fatigue from any number of sources, and at least for me, feelings of being very much in the wilderness. 

I really struggled with questions such as "What does it mean to belong to a church?" and "What is most important in a church?" and "Where is our line in the sand of what we are tacitly agreeing with?" These are not quickly answered questions. I find so many of the answers to these questions boils down to relationship. God wants a relationship with us. He wants a relationship with us so much that Jesus came to ensure that relationship would be permanent. Much of the New Testament deals with how believers are to be in relationship with God, with each other, and with society at large. Building relationships take work. It is not easy because people are messy and imperfect. That work means that people are involved in each other's lives. This is more than an hour on Sunday. This is more than signing up for programs and events. This is more than getting people to volunteer. This is being vulnerable with each, supporting each other, sharing each other's joys and grief. This is the hard work of building connection and it is actually not very different from the work that parents and children do, just on a broader scale. Then, when you have that base of relationship, you have the support and scaffold from which to begin to reach out and build relationships with others... those are different from you. Who might not look like you or speak like you or believe like you. Who might make you uncomfortable, who might challenge what you believe, who might be unlikable. But we do this anyway because these people are also God's beloved creations. We are not more important than they. Here is the work of the Gospel. Not to get another convert notch on your Bible cover but to love another of God's creations regardless of the outcome. People are not projects. 

This is what I was sorely missing, this sense of connection and by extension, purpose. I felt dry. I felt day and lonely and forgotten, frankly. 

We went to church today for the first time since the lock down at the beginning of the pandemic. It was a different church. We decided to try the local Presbyterian church. If I'm honest it was for the sole reason that maybe it would feel familiar, maybe it would remind me a little bit of home. 

The text for the morning was Ezekiel 37, where Ezekiel has the vision of the valley of dry bones and describes how God can take those dry bones and give them life again. It did not feel coincidental. The whole service felt like a drink of fresh water. I hadn't realized how very much I had missed liturgy, familiar hymns, corporate prayers of the people and confession, the doxology. We were greeted. Not just by the people whose job it was but by many people in the congregation. I actually lost count of how many people introduced themselves to us and welcomed us. The church isn't huge. It isn't modern or fancy (though it does have a small pipe organ).  There was no worship band, no guitars, no fancy graphics. The demographic does skew a little bit older than us. But there was Jesus there and a concern for Jesus' people... all of them. And it did feel a little bit like home. 

I don't know if this will be permanent for us; we're taking it slowly. We'll go again next week. We'll see. God didn't take those bones and bring them to life in one fell swoop, He did it in stages. But everything has a beginning and I'm going to appreciate that for now.