ethoughts weekly- Issue 160

May 5, 2007

NYC part 2

... continued from last week...

As one visits New York City more often, one starts to feel part of the thing that makes New York a thing apart. One starts to feel proud not needing street maps as much, and knowing the difference between SOHO and Tribeca, and what a coffee regular is, compared to a coffee combo with cream, as one orders one’s fantastic obligatory freshly made morning bagel.

When we went with friend to the famous Brooklyn Tabernacle on Sunday morning, it was truly awing. It was family atmosphere despite the tens of hundreds of people gathered in what is actually the fourth largest theatre in New York City. Allow your mind to roll around on that factoid for a bit. The structure is a big and gorgeous place of worship, and the people inside are downright amazing too.

It all made me wonder about what “doing church” really means. In this case, people from all walks of life, with all different looks, with all kinds of backgrounds, with all different income levels meet, and they re-group. They sing together, laugh together, pray together, cry together, and find courage together.

This Sunday, after about an hour of music that gave us all goose bumps, Pastor Jim Cymbala talked about remembering God’s power when all hope seems to be gone. Psalms 77 is about when the psalmist cried out to God and didn’t get an answer. It's a strange passage to speak about, because at first, it's depressing. For the psalmist, it seemed like even nostalgia couldn’t help him as he prayed in the dark grim night. He had to ask the real, and the hard questions, like, “God where are you?” and “Will you be gone forever?” Cymbala said the Bible doesn’t sugarcoat. Sometimes hope feels like it’s just gone. God seems silent sometimes. And in the Psalms, the ancient writer just lays it out that way. He doesn’t playact like things are easy. Many Tabernacle congregants around me moaned in accordance. Some nodded. Some waved their hands. Some shouted “amen”.

We all feel hopeless sometimes, but would the folks in my church put up their hands and admit it, or agree about it out loud? Maybe it’s the city that fleshes that honesty out. Public transportation, among other city things, has this way of bringing life right up close. The pretense is gone. For instance, whether I wanted to hear about the girl from Spanish Harlem’s “Baby Daddy” or not, I still got to when I rode the subway. Life is right out in the open, no suburban picket fences to hide behind, for her or me.

What struck me most was when the two hour service ended, rather punctually, I might add, Pastor Jim put out an invitation to come up front, if his message was timely for them. There, they could sing and pray a bit more together. Suddenly, it seemed like a third of the attendants responded. Maybe less than that did. But men and women of all kinds, flooded from the balcony, and mezzanine, and filed up, visibly touched by the message. Halfway back, the floor was taken with them.

The hurt out there is incredible. The pain is real. I saw it in their determination that morning. But I see it elsewhere too. People, we are elbow to elbow with, strangers, in the city streets, and friends alike, have their hopelessness, their weighty issues. These people flooding the front of The Tabernacle space needed to hear that message of hope. They were comforted to know that God would come through. The same God that made a path through the mighty waters of the Red Sea, this God will make a path for them too, said the 77th Psalm. Though the waters may appear to cover his footprints, and those prints mayn’t be visible, a mighty work will happen, and they will overcome. He did it before, and he will do it again. People with little hope need to know about the footprints of God covered over by the raging waters of life. Those prints are still exists.

What surprised me about New York City this time wasn’t the City, the attractions, the sights, the sounds, the food, the fun, the bustle, and the many activities, found collected so tightly together, like nowhere else on earth. The wonderful, Big Apple things. These are the things that have gotten the most notice before. This time, the humanity of the city is what did it.

A city is a bunch of people. For better and for worse, a city is a group of people who’ve decided living close together is how they’re going to do things for the time being. Sometimes they turn on each other like caged rats. And many other times we see brotherhood emerge, community lives and breathes, and becomes its own organism, that others may admire, if only sometimes on a “visitor only” basis.

I’m beginning to realize that “doing church” is being available all the time for ordinary people, to have an incarnational experience in the reality of the physical world. It’s being able to be that source of hope and comfort, that point of grace and conduit of love, and it’s certainly not just for one morning a week. I wonder if there will soon come a day when I’ll have to skip out on formal church sometimes, or more than sometimes, to “do church”, now that I’ve realized that “doing church” is being part of something much bigger. A good metaphor of that bigger thing, is a city. We can look at the buildings, and the streets, and the buses, and traffic lights, and systems, and call the organization of it all a “city”, or we can call the people walking, and talking, and breathing, and loving, and hurting, and living, and dying in it, the “city”. It’s just a matter of what’s most important to us I suppose. And probably the same could be said about church. I've always learned a lot on field trips.

Lisa DeLay

©2007