Open the doors and see all the people

We crawled out last Sunday from our confinement into the morning light after fourteen long months.  The light and the experience almost blinded us at first.  And while we had been faithful in attending church on a screen during the pandemic, and while worshiping God is always "in person," now that we are vaccinated and given the official go-ahead, it was time to go to church.

It has been so long since I have been in any kind of group of people in real life, not just on a screen, I was admittedly a bit anxious about it.  Staying home was comfortable for me.  Staying apart had become our new ordinary.   Zoom sustained us when we had nothing more, and what would we have done without it?  But it is not a substitute for the real thing.  Zoom has content and faces.  It is two-dimensional, having the appearance of length and breadth but has no depth.  It is missing a vital dimension.  Church is not just three-dimensional, being with people, but the limitless reality of the spiritual.  Zoom has not the capacity to love like "being the Body" does.  Zoom is an informational event.  Church as it was intended is a transformational experience.

We went to church.   And while people were still careful, scattered about the sanctuary, there was something very different being there.  You are able any day of the week to get a sermon on YouTube or a podcast.  But we stood not just in that physical building, but among God's people there, and worshiped. The music, even songs and hymns I could sing without words on the screen, embraced me.  Singing the ancient words of the Doxology made tears come to my eyes.  Not by an emotional reaction, but a response to the reality of church.  There is not just community there. Community is being built there.  We saw people that morning, not just faces on a screen.  We met others for the first time that we had come to know just on Zoom.  We interacted with some acquaintances we hadn't seen since the winter before last.  God invented the Church.  And the church did not just survive the pandemic, but thrived in spite of it.  I realized standing in that age-old sanctuary, how much we had missed.  And how much we need the church...and the church needs each one of us.

We have become once again the early Church.  We need each other.  We need to worship.  We are wired to worship.  If we do not worship the Almighty God, a lesser god will take His rightful place.   If I don't see the need for church, something else will infiltrate.   If we "don't have the time for that," we will live poorer for it and wonder at the emptiness.  Our own self-proclaimed "freedom" becomes another outpost of our enslavement.

 

And they devoted themselves

    to the apostles' teaching

and the fellowship,

to the breaking of bread

       and the prayers.

And awe came upon every soul...

                 Acts 2. 42-43 

 

I realized that awe on Sunday.  Until those moments, standing in that sanctuary, I didn't realize what I was homesick for.

 

And let us consider how to stir up one another

          to love and good deeds,

not neglecting to meet together,

as is the habit of some,

but encouraging one another,

and all the more as you see

       the Day drawing near.

           Hebrews 10. 24-25