Hello,
Why bother going
to church?
When I speak with
people about going to church, I say this, “God is not going to love you any
more or any less if you go to church every Sunday or if you never go at
all. He gave his Son to die for
you. How much more could he love you?”
So, why bother
going to church?
Here’s why: the
more time you spend in the barn, the more you smell like the barn. During my college years I, a Chicago
suburbanite, lived fraternally with a lot of guys who grew up on a farm. Occasionally, I would visit my friends on
their turf. One such weekend I went to
stay with a friend who was a dairy farmer.
I discovered that there were two milking times during the day, the first
around 6:00 a.m. and the second around 4:00 p.m.. I don’t know what the 6:00 a.m. milking was like,
because I was dozing while the cows were donating. In the afternoon, however, I joined the
forces in the milking adventure.
As you can
imagine, when milking cows one gets pretty close to nature, nature that has a
unique smell. Dairy farmers say it is
the smell of money.
As it happened,
many of the dairy farmers in that part of Illinois were very faithful
Christians, which means that going to church on Sunday morning was a deep-seated
discipline of the folks. So, after the
morning milking, we gathered around my friend’s kitchen table, had a hearty
breakfast, and then we all loaded up to go to church. When we walked into the church, I found
myself in familiar environs. In those
days, Lutheran churches had a common look and feel, whether rural or suburban
or city.
But as soon as I
walked in, I noticed something very different.
The smell. My suburban nose
picked it up right away. The smell in
that church was the same as the smell in the barn. The people who had come to worship that
Sunday, and every Sunday, were people who spent a lot of time in the barn, a
smell that their noses had become desensitized to. It was a smell that had become part of them
and was just plain natural to them.
That is the
answer to why bother going to church.
There is a distinctive smell in church; the smell of God’s grace and
mercy, a smell of love and forgiveness, a smell of hope and peace, a smell of
victory over fear and death. It is a
smell that one might sniff in the world if one carefully inhales, but in the
world that smell is simply not pervasive enough to sink into our lives, become
part of us, and become plain natural to us.
However, in church the intensity of God’s presence is so profound – in the
gathered congregation, in the hearing of the Word, in the participation in Holy
Communion – that it permeates everything, including those who gather.
What does it
smell like? Not like money….but
certainly like a treasure. A treasure,
as Jesus says where moth cannot consume and rust cannot decay. It is a treasure that overwhelms the stench
of the world’s despair with a lovely fragrance of the uncompromising and
unconditional love of God. It is a smell
that brings people together with thanks and compassion, rather than the smell
of the world that keeps people apart, or when they do gather together they wind
up holding their noses instead of their hands.
It is smell that brings out life, instead of the world’s smell that
leads to death and decay.
Why bother going
to church? In order to smell like the
barn, and carry that smell into the world….a smell that the world needs to
breath in. The more time you spend in
the barn….the more you smell like the barn.
So, come and spend an hour in church this Sunday, and every Sunday. Be part of the smell!
Have a great week.
God’s grace and peace, (ggap)
Pastor Jerry Nuernberger
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