By Amy Butler
On Saturday evening after Thanksgiving, I stood at my stove. I’d decided to mix things up a bit — no leftovers that night — so the spicy dish I was cooking was, if I do say so myself, smelling really delicious.
The rule of the house that evening was: Whenever you happened to pass the kitchen, just stop, take the lid off the pot, and stir the food. And this system of cooperative cooking seemed to be working just fine — that is, until I passed by the kitchen and stepped in to stir the pot.
Did I mention that it smelled really good and I was hungry?
I think it was my general enthusiasm that led me to remove the lid quickly and put the spoon in to stir without thinking twice about how hot the pot was. Billows of steam came out of the pot, of course, as soon as I took the lid off. The back of my hand was red and raw from the steam almost immediately. It wasn’t a really bad burn and my hand is feeling fine now, but the experience reminded me it’s never a good idea to remove the lid of a hot pot without some thoughtful preparation and intention. You might get burned!
Later, as I was sitting with my hand immersed in iced water, I started to think that this whole experience could be a metaphor for life in the church — couldn’t it?
As a pastor I have observed over and over that people often find their way through the doors and into the arms of the community when they are actively looking for something in their lives — when they are hungry for something. There’s no doubt that people often begin or deepen a spiritual exploration when they feel a void in their lives, and church is a great place to experience the filling of that void.
In Calvary’s specific situation, we are church in a huge, anonymous, often impersonal city. It’s almost guaranteed that someone moving to this city will feel adrift and lacking in a sense of community — and life in the big city can be plenty stressful even when you have a supportive community. So, often facing loneliness or a feeling of disconnectedness, people sometimes begin a spiritual search that leads them to the church, where they find community in excess and more ways than they’d ever dreamed to fill their time.
But once the lid comes off the pot, as it were, that’s when people sometimes get burned. Depending on the circumstances it may be a minor scalding. But I have seen serious, urgent burns happen too, burns that sometimes even threaten a spiritual life altogether. See, church looks so good from the outside. Initial experiences often are so warm and hopeful and God-connected that, upon living them for the first time, a closed heart can begin to creak open again, a submerged spirit often fights to break the surface. This is a beautiful thing to see, for sure.
And when that wonderful experience touches a life, it’s easy — so, so easy — to forget that the church is a human institution. And, as such, it consists of very human members who, if we’re doing church with integrity, are encouraged to leave all the shiny facades of their outside lives at the door and come to this place where they’re expected to be fully and totally themselves.
And then they are fully and totally themselves.
And then somebody gets burned.
And then all the old memories about the failures and disappointments of the church come to the fore again.
It never fails: I can warn of the humanness of this very human institution until I am blue in the face, but somebody is always rushing in blindly to take the lid off. And the disillusion that ensues does damage not just to the person doing the rushing, but also to the other members of the community. Even worse, it harms already-damaged views of the church and fledgling relationships with God.
I wonder: How can we help people understand the very human nature of this institution, the church, and engage in the messiness of human community even on the days when that engagement is disillusioning, feels distinctly unspiritual and even sometimes hurts us?
Perhaps here’s the best place to start: To remember, especially when we feel those feelings of warmth and hope and promise at church, that it is ultimately not the church in which we place our hope.
We find our hope in Jesus Christ, and it’s to him we should hold tight, always and, most especially, when we get burned.