On Saturday night, my son Jude told me he wanted to "play church."  We are pros at playing school, but this was the first time he ever wanted to play church.  I was elated - it was totally his idea and it meant that he had been to church enough to know how to play at it!  Awesome.

What was not so awesome is what happened next.  I intuited that by "playing church" Jude meant that he wanted to pretend to go to worship, so the first thing I asked was which of us was going to be the preacher.  He pointed to me.  So then I asked him "Jude, what are you going to do?" thinking that he would want to lead a song, or say a prayer or something.  Instead, Jude said "I'm going to sit and watch."  I was flabbergasted.  You're going to just sit and watch?  What do you mean?  There are lots of things you can do!  So I said to him "Jude, don't you want to be a part of it?" to which he innocently responded: "Why?"

This whole encounter made me very sad.  My sweet three year old child, who is in worship every Sunday at multiple churches -- mine, Jason's or our parents' -- thinks that church is about sitting and listening.  Being passive.  Watching while someone else puts on a show.  And he's a double preachers' kid!  What do other kids think?  How could it get any worse?

I decided that in our own family, I'm going to have to make this one right.  It's going to be my job to teach Jude that church isn't about sitting and watching, but about participating.  It's about us joining our voices with the voices of our brothers and sisters, and with the voice of God, so that together we can speak good news to the world.   And a big part of this will happen in the worship that I lead, worship that engages everyone in a transformative experience of God's presence.

The "church play" that resulted on Saturday evening at our house was highly participatory.  Together, Jude and I lit imaginary candles as acolytes.  Jude led us in singing "Deep and Wide."  Jason preached a three word sermon (God loves you).  Jude helped me bless a communion meal of chocolate bunny crackers and orange juice.  Together we proclaimed "The body of Christ, broken for you" as we snapped a chocolate cracker in half.  Hopefully, this will be the start of a new way of understanding church for Jude, and for all of us.

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I went to the gym this morning and watched the morning news for the first time in quite a while.  We usually don't have it on at breakfast time, because it's annoying to have a TV and a 3 year old blaring at the same time.  But, as I walked on the treadmill and listened to Good Morning America, I was struck by how many people have opinions on everything.  The topics of the morning were the 2012 elections and the economy.  2012 is a long way off still, but we have plenty of opinions about the candidates.  The economy is not a future reality but a present one, and one that I know is extremely important.  And yet, people continue to scream and shout about what they think our government should do to strengthen the economy.  If there was a clear answer, don't you think they'd already have it figured out by now?  Why all the rhetoric and the pontificating?  And it's the problem a very complex one, something that is more involved than can be explained in a two minute segment with flashy pictures?

I read an interesting article that helped me to put things in perspective a bit, and I hope it might help you too.  Check out: Debt and the Cost of Discipleship

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This past Fourth of July weekend was an opportunity for me to practice Sabbath.  And I did, sort of.  I guess I'm still trying to get the hang of it.  I'm the kind of person who likes to be busy.  On the weekends, I like to have a plan - "Today we are going to do yard work, and run errands, and then meet our friends for dinner."  And I'm realizing that having a scheduled day off like this isn't all that different than having a normal workday schedule.  The tasks are just different.  A to-do list filled day off isn't the same thing as Sabbath.

In his book, Allender addresses this when he critiques other books that make the Sabbath out to be a day to rest and recharge.  Recharge for what?  Recharge so we can get back to work, and be busy again?  I agree with Allender that there is a deeper issue here.  He puts it this way: "We are driven because our work brings us power and pride that dulls our deeper desire for delight.  We are far more practiced and comfortable with work than play."

I know that is true of me.  I'm much better at work than I am at play.  So it seems that I've got to start thinking about Sabbath in a whole new way.  I need to begin treating it as a holy day.  Holy means set aside, not lost in the sea of everything else.  It is different than any other day of the week.  It should be set apart from those other days that are filled with to-do lists and tasks.  And I suppose the hope is that in practicing a holy day, that holiness might creep into the other days as well.

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Understanding the Sabbath as a day of delight is different than understanding it as a day of rest.  We get the idea that Sabbath is a day of rest from the creation story.  Genesis says that after God spent six days creating, "he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done" (2:2).  Allender writes that God doesn't rest because he's weary from his labor -- it's not like God is taking a nap on the seventh day because he's tired.  Some Jewish commentators have suggested that what happened on the seventh day was God creating menuha -- a word that means "joyous repose, tranquility, or delight" (28).  On the seventh day, God delighted in his creation.

Allender likens God's menuha to the bonding a family experiences after the birth of their child.  "The mother and father gaze endlessly at their child, who is distinct from the parents because she is no longer merely in the mind and the womb of the mother, but external and separate" (28).  God is like a mother on the seventh day, gazing in rapture at his creation and thinking "She is so beautiful."

So, that is the kind of rest -- the kind of delight -- that we are supposed to practice on the Sabbath.  It is to be a day of joy and celebration, not a day for a nap.  Allender goes on to describe four components of this delight, that I'll tackle later.

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Rita Martin is one of the saints of our church, and she and the adult library committee recently gifted me the book "Sabbath" by Dan Allender.  As I've started to read it, I've realized how little I know about what it means to practice Sabbath.  Growing up, I always thought of Sabbath as Sunday -- the day when we'd go to church and argue about where to eat lunch, after which dad would fall asleep on the couch.  In my adult life, I'm just now starting to recover the true meaning of Sabbath, which has nothing to do with the aforementioned activities.

As I read Allender's book, I will blog about those ideas that grab my attention and shine light on the intended purpose of the Sabbath.

So, a first insight -- did you know that remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy is the fourth commandment (of the big ten that is)?  We don't practice Sabbath because it is good for us -- we practice it because it is a commandment.  It is as wrong to neglect this practice as it is to steal, lie, kill or have an affair.  So why don't we take it seriously?

Maybe the problem is that those who take the Sabbath seriously make it so legalistic that the day is no longer holy.  If we make the Sabbath all about rules and regulations, things we can and can't do on that day, then we take all the joy out of it.  Because, Allender writes, Sabbath isn't only a commandment, but it is also intended to be a day of delight . . . more on that next time.

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One of the things I love about working at First Arlington is that we are just blocks away from Fuzzy Taco.  If you are not familiar with Fuzzy Taco, then please do not be grossed out by their strange name, for their tacos are  not fuzzy in the moldy sense, but they fuzz with deliciousness.  Today I went to Fuzzy's as I often do to grab some tacos and had a fortuitous encounter.

Walking into Fuzzy's, I saw a guy who had on a shirt that said "iServe."  I liked the shirt, and so I walked up to him and said, "hey guy, I like your shirt."  Turns out his name is Greg and he is from East Texas and is in Arlington with his church, working at Mission Arlington.  Because I'm interested in that sort of thing, I asked him some questions, and learned that his church has this thing that whenever there is a fifth Sunday of the month, they don't go to worship but instead take their worship time to do service projects.  That's how they got hooked up with Mission Arlington.

I thanked him for telling me and for coming to Arlington to serve, and we went on our way.  Once I was inside ordering my tacos, I remembered how just a few days ago in worship, we talked about the Great Commission and how Jesus sends the disciples out with instructions to "go and make disciples of all nations . . ."  Standing there in Fuzzy's, I got to thinking about how Greg and his church are living out the very thing we'd been talking about in worship.

So, tacos in hand, I went back out to the parking lot and asked him if I could take his picture on my iPhone and tell his story to my congregation on Sunday, as an example of someone who is practicing what we'd preached.  He was a nice guy and said sure, so I snapped his picture and then we went on our way again.

Now (I'm almost done with this story), just an hour ago, I was sitting at my computer, working on my sermon, and uploading Greg's picture to my computer to use in worship, and I get an email from none other than Greg himself!  He wants to continue our conversation and see if our churches can join together for some projects.

So, I'm pretty jazzed.  I'm also reminded of how important it is to have the confidence to strike up a conversation with someone you don't know.  Sometimes nothing happens, but when you don't expect it, creation and possibility emerge.

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