First there was the 10-yard dash, a/k/a the offering plate relay. My fellow officer and I were going along in a stately manner, pew by pew from front to back, keeping pace with each other as mandated by Official Collection Rule 73b-12(iv), when suddenly the familiar opening strains of the Doxology started up. We were just halfway down the aisle... and the bulk of the people in our section were in the second half. We broke ranks and went as quickly as we could, shoving the plates into each row where people were tendering envelopes or bills. The Doxology was in full swing and the other officers were marching to the front down the center aisle. We made it to the end of our section after the Doxology came to a close and the offertory prayer began, so we circled around to the side and SPRINTED to the front. We just barely managed to intercept the officers who were about to take the other plates out for counting, shoving our plates into their open arms. (My parents both independently suggested that if we hadn't made it in time, we would have been entitled to keep running with the money as far as it would take us....) Soon afterward, I took my place, next to the senior pastor, to help serve communion for the same section. I have never seen so many people smiling at this point in the service. Humor does bring down a lot of barriers, and I'd love to think that someone who was on the fence about God in general, or about this church in particular which can be ... er ... a little formal at times, might have found himself or herself a little more open to grace.
Today it was a somewhat different situation - I had only the role of an understudy, and all the main actors had confirmed that they would be there. So I checked in as an usher and started handing out bulletins before the service began. An innocuous activity, one might think. Except that about 20 minutes into it, two dissatisfied customers came back to me. Did they want their money back? Surely not, since I didn't charge them for the bulletins in the first place! Alas, even though they'd paid nothing, they still wanted non-defective bulletins. Theirs showed an order of worship that stopped at the Offertory - no Closing Hymn, no Benediction. It turned out that a large portion of the bulletins shared this defect. The missing sheet didn't add much bulk, so it was hard to tell which bulletins were complete without opening and inspecting each one. This of course at the height of the influx of parishioners. So I tried to weed out the defective bulletins and failed miserably, giving up and handing each person a bulletin and just hoping for the best. Then, about 1 minute and 45 seconds before the service began, a messenger approached me. The prayer person was nowhere to be found. Could I sub in? But of course! The messenger handed me an offertory prayer, and I abruptly abandoned the bulletins and slipped away to march up to the pulpit with the pastors. If only I'd worn motley! I read the Call to Worship cold, then tried to customize the offertory prayer on the fly based on the sermon and a hymn. After all, why not?
The biblical passage and sermon were particularly challenging (we are to see each other with more than human eyes) and thought-provoking. The senior pastor shared a message from a disgruntled parishioner, or perhaps an ex-parishioner who still receives the weekly e-newsletter, who had rated us on how we were doing on each of the Six Great Ends of the Church. For item #6, we received a failing grade -- an F -- with a comment advising us that we were a "disasterous representation of humanity." Indeed. None of us deny it. We are hopelessly flawed.*
And yet... we also do the best we can, with God's grace, to see Christ in each other and to be Christ to each other and to the world at large.
FN* I keep coming back to Tim Keller's suggested prayer of belief: “I see I am more flawed and sinful than I ever dared believe, but that I am even more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope. I turn from my old life of living for myself. I have nothing in my record to merit your approval, but I now rest in what Jesus did and ask to be accepted into God’s family for his sake.”
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