Magyar Egyház, 1980 (59. évfolyam, 1-10. szám)
1980-09-01 / 9. szám
MAGYAR £GYflAZ 8. oldal MAGYAR CHURCH GOING TO CHURCH! YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS! “So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went to synagogue on the Sabbath day as he regularly did” (Luke 4:16, The New English Bible). The conversation could have taken place in a dormitory at any university, college, or school. It was reported by the chaplain. A troubled freshman came to him for counseling. On her first Sunday at school that fall she had risen bright and early and had begun to dress. Her roommate was an upper-class member. When the roommate realized that the girl was dressing to go out, she sleepily inquired where she was going. Innocently enough the freshman replied, “I’m going to church.” The shocked roommate sat bolt upright in bed. With complete sincerity and total disdain she exclaimed: “Going to church! You can’t be serious!” The college chaplain quickly explained that the roommate’s exclamation was not a question; it was an accusation. She was trying to get through to the freshman that a considerable number of college students considered that going to church, any church, was not just the mark of a kind a naive idiot but practically the act of a traitor. She was implying that an enlightened and sophisticated member of the educated younger set in the 1980’s considered attendance at church service to be a form of immature dependence; that churchgoing and participation in worship might actually do harm. It supports an outworn superstition. It puts you in the same category as stuffy, reactionary supporters of the status quo. It identifies you with the kind of Pharisaical types who refuse to rebel against what ought to be abolished in our culture if we are to “get with it” in the age of the Pill, space exploration, situation ethics, and protest. Going to church! You can’t be serious! In spite of the fact that in many communities it is not the “in” thing to go regularly to the public worship of God in church, there are considerable numbers of responsible, fairly normal persons who take the church seriously and who go to church with a high degree of faithfulness. True, the so-called “noise of solemn assemblies” strikes many as being fatuous and irrelevant to the crucial issues of today. True also, there is much faithlessness among us who are members of the visible church. True, there are many abuses of the ethic and total gospel of Christ on the part of clergy and laity. We who are within the church, giving our lives to it, are more aware of our corporate weaknesses, futilities, and sins than even the severest critic on the outside. But there are those who are utterly serious, and they include young people and men and women concerned about better government, more wholesome communities, social justice, more adequate education for all children, replacement of slums by decent housing, and replacing war with peace and justice. Perhaps some of those who are serious about the church and who are serious about participation in the worship of God as often as they possibly can are the new rebels! The conformists may be those who go alone with the crowd which couldn’t care less about what they sneeringly call conventional, or middle-class church characters. If you are serious about the church and your participation in its worship, you are in excellent company. The Founder of Christianity supported regularly the church of his people and of his time. Was it because he was blind to its weaknesses, its limitations, and the insincerities and downright sins of some of its prominent members and leaders? Indeed he was not! Who was it who lacerated prominent persons with abrasive language — “offspring of vipers, ” “whited sepulchres, ” “hypocrites” — but our Lord Jesus Christ? But says Luke in his Gospel: “He went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day.” As Luke’s Greek is translated in The New English Bible: “So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went to synagogue on the Sabbath day as he regularly did. ” Many things in the Temple and the synagogue (as we would say, in church) must have irritated him. Many things must have made him disagree. Some things made him furious. The worship of the synagogue, like the worship of the church today, was far from perfect. Yet Jesus never failed to join himself to God’s worshipping people on God’s day. Moreover, just as we have laymen in some churches who read one of the Scripture lessons in the service, he, too, participated. But there was this difference: his message rocked his hearers. Going to church, and taking it seriously means that we know that the worship of God is the priority of the Christian life. Unfortunately some of our sincere and conscientious advocates of having the church extend its ministry into the world, which always has been an imperative, sometimes give the impression that you can separate witness from worship. The more radical among them feel they must be committed to a nonreligious, noninstitutional kind of religion, a so-called “secular” gospel. Assuredly the twentieth-century church invites and deserves criticism. Too often the Word of the Lord is muted by success-conscious officials and organizationminded ecclesiastics. All too often the blind are leading the blind, and perplexed pastors are following parishioners. But history shows one heartening fact: Never does the church sing so low and become so ineffectual that it is without what the Scriptures call “a saving remnant. ” The body of Christ, however weak or maimed, is never a dead body. The strange thing about the Church is not that it grows old, but that it seems to have discovered the secret of being born again.
