Chaplain’s Corner: Unboxing our Faith
It seems to be a fairly universal human trait to want to know exactly what goes in each box. We have a work box, we have a family box, we have a faith box and so on. This pandemic year has turned our boxes upside down into one pile in the middle of the floor and the experience has been overwhelming to say the least.
The box we guard most closely and tend to be most protective of however, is our faith box. We like things a certain way and we like them predictable. There has been nothing predictable about church this last year, which has ranged from distanced indoors with masks, to drive-in, to pre-recorded, to Zoom from the couch, to no church service at all.
It has been a year of frustration, but also a year of stretching, and as it turns out, sometimes in stretching we find new growth. We have become more creative in finding meaningful ways to sing, worship and fellowship from digital spaces. We have involved the gifts of more people instead of leaning only on one pastor. We have supplemented our Sundays with intentional spiritual practices during the week, leaning on friendships and taking advantage of the quiet spaces that isolation has given us. We have lived into the phrase “the building is closed but the church is open.”
Pastor Meghan Good, in an article called Taking Jesus Out of Your Box, brings to our attention our tendency to “become wedded to the vessel instead of the thing it was made to contain.” She writes: “We see God somewhere, build a box around it, and celebrate the divine capture, never noticing that God is standing behind us, tapping on our shoulder.”
All of us are looking forward to the day when we can return to our sacred spaces, embrace each other without fear and sing praises to God without masks. And hopefully when we do, we remember the ways we have been stretched. May we be willing to shed some of the of the old that has perhaps been holding us back, and embrace some of the new that surprised us with meaning during our pandemic worship. May our boxes of faith serve to hold, but not to contain the wild and living God that is always revealing to us something new.
