TV Dinners

I was raised on TV dinners. That's not an indictment of my mother. It was convenient and easy to clean up. Salisbury steak was my favorite. It was a special treat for me, a neat freak. I couldn't stand it when the food on my plate ran together. My dad would always chide me saying something like, "it all ends up in the same place doesn’t it?" But the whole idea of the TV dinner just seemed to fit me.

My TV dinner kept everything neat and tidy in its own space. The meat stayed meat. The gravy stayed out of the cherry surprise. The peas didn’t have cherry sauce all over them. Each compartment held its own wonderful moment. Moving from one compartment to the next allowed my pallet to make the adjustment from one flavor to the next. No mess. Each item in its own place. Simple.

I grew up in church. A very conservative church.

Sunday was for church. We “rested on the Sabbath,” which meant religious activities all day, even though “Sabbath” was technically supposed to be Saturday, but I wasn’t supposed to ask questions. I was not a morning person. We would endure the torture of putting on our dress clothes. My three other siblings and I would fight over the bathroom, the cereal, even the best seat in the van. It was chaos. We fought tooth and nail against this Sunday ritual until the very last moment. But once we exited the vehicle, the time to fight was past. We were “at church.” By exiting the van we had somehow left the compartment of home, and entered the compartment of “church.” This compartment belonged to God. We would sing songs about God. Listen to people read stories about God. Pray to God. And then give our money to God. Then after a couple of the slowest hours I could remember, it was time to leave the God compartment and reenter the home compartment. This, of course is not what I was meant to learn from my foray back and forth “to church.” But for me, growing up in “the real world,” outside of the church walls, there was this real sense that even though I was taught that God was everywhere, we met him primarily at church on Sundays during a semi-private ceremony.

Somehow there was this disconnect in which I lived. I have come to know this disconnect as the sacred versus secular conflict. It’s as if God was different once I left the church building and entered a new compartment. He didn’t seem the same in the other compartments. He always seemed distant; like I had left him behind at “church.” So I went about ordering my life into compartments. There was one for home, one for school, one for work, one for entertainment and so on. It’s as if there were a different set of rules in play for each compartment. For instance, in Sunday school we learned to love your enemies, but then, my enemies were my brothers, and that would never fly in my home compartment.

And I certainly didn’t want God to follow me into the movie theater. That was my entertainment compartment. Religion had nothing to say to me there. And at work and at school, I wanted to be liked and admired so it was easy to follow the crowd and pretend I wasn’t a Christian at all.

And I was allowed to listen to music only if it meant Christian music; which I readily compartmentalized into the church compartment, and readily opened a new music compartment containing Zeppelin, Journey and their friends who were really good and moved me to explore some of the deeper things in life.

It became easy to keep everything in its place, neatly tucked away, ready to switch from one to the next at a moments notice. After all, people in the “real world” could never fit in my church compartment, and the people in my church compartment seemed eager to pretend the “real world” didn’t even exist. It was like a bad episode of the X-files.

Nowadays, I’m trying hard to follow Jesus and actually live the way He calls me to live, instead of just aspiring to be loving and kind and patient, etc… But as I have been struggling through the ramifications of God calling us to be the church instead of just going to church, I find myself trying to come to grips with the compartments I created years ago to deal with the disconnect between what we called “church” and “the real world.” And one of the most difficult things to deal with is the impact this change has on what I do in the “church” compartment. I am learning to practice loving my enemies, and helping people in need, and living wisely, but what do I do about the event we call worship?

Where does it fit? Does it even fit at all?

Jesus once had a conversation with a woman about how worship was to be done. It turns out that the worship wars have been going on a long time. She complained that her and her ancestors worshiped God in a certain way in a certain place, but that the Jewish people claimed that their way of worshiping God was the only right way (sound familiar?). Then Jesus replied, "Believe me, the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father here or in Jerusalem. But the time is coming and is already here when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for anyone who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth (see John 4.”)

Jesus was referring to the day he would give his life as the final sacrifice to bring us back to God. But when Jesus gave up his life the curtain in the temple that used to separate God from his people was torn right down the middle. In effect, God was no longer confined to a building. He is now always present with us. And he longs to live in us and be with us. After all, we are his creation.

I used to think that Jesus meant that we are supposed to be real with him while we are singing to him at church. But Jesus basically said that it’s not about where you worship God. It’s not even about singing songs to him at all. It’s whether or not you worship him Spirit to Spirit. It’s about letting him in. To allow Him into your mess; into each compartment. Could it be that we have created elaborate rituals and practices in places that really don’t matter much to God, and in fact, keep him separate from the other compartments in our lives?

In Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways, he makes the following statement…

“If we take the advice of the current alternative worship movement, of which I am generally greatly appreciative, one of the tasks of the church in the postmodern context is to make “sacred spaces,” places filled with rich and fresh symbolism expressed by new forms of media, where people can reconnect with God in new ways. This all sounds right, but when this impulse is divorced, as it often is, from the overarching task of mission (being the church), then it simply becomes another way in which we separate the sacred from the secular. By setting up a place that we call “sacred” because of the lighting, the incense, and the religious feel, what are we thereby saying about the rest of life? Is it not sacred? We cannot escape the conclusion that by setting up so called sacred spaces we, by implication, make all else, “not-sacred,” thereby assigning a large aspect of life in a non-God, or secular area… our task is to make all aspects and dimensions of life sacred- family, work, play, conflict etc.- and not to limit the presence of God to spooky religious zones.”

Come to think of it, Jesus never proscribed a style of worship to be followed. He never even attended a “church service” as we know it. He simply said, follow me. In other words learn to live the way I do. Come to think of it, God never proscribed a worship service for Adam and Eve. He simply asked them to enjoy life that was dripping with God’s presence, and walk with him every step of the way.

Could it be that worship has less to do with singing songs in a “sacred” space than learning to submit to Jesus as Lord in every compartment in our lives as a path to be walked? Maybe God is trying to get us to take down the walls of our compartments and give him rule over every area of our lives? Maybe God is more concerned with our, actively, knowing him rather than meeting together to just, passively, learn about him. Maybe that’s what it really means to be a follower of Jesus. One and the same God over every compartment. The same relationship in every area. One kingdom. One Lord over all

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1. What is your first reaction to this?

2. Do you have compartments?

3. What does that mean for how we worship?

4. Does this mean that our idea of worship is unnecessary or even wrong?

5. Are we asking people to attend something that isn’t as important as we think it should be?

6. What does this mean for you in “the real world?”