Sunday
morning has become a place of inner conflict.
It is the time where I am forced to make my most conscious decision to
not return yet to service. It’s
comfortable; I’m well liked; I know the routine and so on because it is far too
easy to fall back in the motions and avoid missing the real journey.
Luckily,
I had a good excuse by being invited to brunch.
It’s what all the sophisticated “heathens” do on Sunday mornings
apparently. I love it. It’s a time of laughter and good food coupled
with mimosas or the like. So this is my
Sunday morning habit now and I find myself with those realistically unwelcomed
in the doors of the church.
Church had become a place to “cure”
my worldliness, yet brunch would begin to cure my religion. In a strange way, it became a better
remembrance of the Gospel. Put better
than I could, Micah J. Murray writes:
“When we
criticize the Church, please know that we aren’t ashamed of the Gospel. We are probably just beginning to glimpse
what the Gospel really is, and it’s better news than we had ever dreamed. So
when we see a stale, moralistic religion marketed as the Gospel, strangled in
tradition and politics, our hearts ache. We remember all too clearly the
bondage of that false Gospel. And we are so desperately thirsty for the real
one.” \
I could not help but remember the Gospel, while taking part
of this makeshift “love feast” I found myself a part of. Taking a step out of organized religion, I
found myself with the time to actually live life with these people I now
brunched with. I allowed myself to get
close enough to see their faults, brokenness and ultimately what made them
lovely. Yet as beautiful as this
realization was, I found myself staring at myself and realized I thought I was
morally superior in some way. Hearing
the subtle cultural droning of “us and them” over the years had found root in
me no matter how much I wanted to reject the notion. I found myself in shame taking a sip here or
there of my sacramental mimosa trying to reject this Pharisee deep in myself.
