The Church at the Center of Everything
The life of the (local) Church is like any other family. There are highs and lows, seasons of joy and of sorrow, times of planting and harvesting and times of plague and crop failure. The baby is sweet and cuddly one month and a colicky insomniac the next. You’d like to enjoy the 21 waking hours you spend with your little one, but the truth is Mom feels like a candidate sleep-walking through Day Four of Motivation Week. Dad has high hopes and big plans for being a hard-charging, psalm-singing, high-performing postmillennial in the workplace, but his boss and co-workers and kids don’t seem to be onboard. The joy of the Lord’s Day is followed by the hard crash and reality check of Fallen Monday, a weekly reminder that we still live in a sin-cursed world.
In earlier generations of Christendom, the local church was located at the center of town. It had a steeple so that you could always find it on the horizon. It oriented you within the community. God’s house was at the center of everything; not only your town but your life was structured around the worship of the Lord. Now we get church property wherever we can find and afford it. Sanctuaries for glory and beauty have been replaced by structures focused on utility. Most of our churches are… ugly, even if the people inside reflect divine glory. But as many of us learned in Sunday School as little children, the church is the people, not the meeting place. Many of those beautiful cathedrals in major cities are now empty. The Shekinah has moved to the joyful, rowdy, psalm-singing group meeting in a strip mall on the outskirts of town.
Whether the meeting place is at the center of town or not, the proper place of the Church is at the heart of our life and family. Our entire lives should revolve around the assembly to which we belong, both in heaven and on earth. You are striving alongside saints from all nations, tribes, and generations. You are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, saints and martyrs, fathers and mothers, who have entered into glory long ago. Our daily work may not seem very important—Polycarp faced the stake and flame, but we are just trying to get through quarterly reports and a toddler who resists toilet training—but there is nothing insignificant in the Christian’s life. Everything has been brought into submission to and become an expression of our relationship and responsibility to our covenant Lord and kinsman Redeemer.
The Lord’s Day re-centers us, grounds us, and engages us in the very work for which we were made and to which we are called. It is not merely a day of preparation, as though the “real work” happens during the week, but neither is it the only day that matters. Your calling Monday through Saturday is as much a part of your reasonable service of worship as the prayers and praise of the Church on Sunday. But that is the day that gives purpose and power to every other day and every other thing we do. If there is no Church or worship at the center of our lives, we live and work without the Spirit and the blessing of God he brings.
Some of you may be allowing your weekly vocation to override and crowd out your priestly calling. You know you have been appointed by God to faithful labor as a spouse, parent, worker, builder, and king, but your pursuit of that task has overshadowed the prior and primary calling as a priest in the house of the Lord. We have little time or energy for the (local) Church and worship. There are too many important things to do! But there is nothing more important than the worship of God and the communion of saints. I am continually amazed as I read the Gospels at how often the busiest, hardest working man in the history of the world goes away to pray.
Every Lord’s Day we have the opportunity to spend and sanctify the entire day in holy rest and rejoicing. The rest of our work can wait. This is the work God made us and saved us to do. It is the center of everything else, the priestly work that empowers our prophetic and kingly vocations the rest of the week. The place where you worship may not have a steeple in the middle of the public square, but if you look closely, with the eyes of faith, you can find it there, in the middle of everything, with a cross lifted high above everything else that surrounds it. The bell is ringing; it is time to worship. Let us come and celebrate with our brothers and sisters the goodness of our God.