Friends,

We grew up going to the Roman Catholic Church, and I hated it. Don’t get me wrong, when I was ten, I hated the Episcopal Church too. I couldn’t stand Church for the same reason that I couldn’t stand school assemblies; I was being forced to sit, be still, be quiet and to occasionally do the school motto, prayer, hymn or whatever. It wasn’t like going to the movies where I had some choice in being there. In Church I was a hostage and I learned the liturgy (order of service), for the sole reason of being able to determine when it would be over. In our case, this was immediately after communion, as we didn’t stay for the post communion prayer and final hymn. By sixteen or seventeen I was considering myself a Christian again, and we were all attending the Episcopal Church, and this time we stayed for the whole service. I had warmer feelings for the whole thing at this point, but I always signed up to be an acolyte just so I wouldn’t have to sing the first and last hymn, as I would be carrying the cross in and out. Not having anyone to chastise me if I choose not to sing the hymns is one of the benefits of being a priest. Church is weird.

I think my whole family hated going to Church, my dad especially. He was raised Episcopalian, and for most of my childhood he did not express much interested in Church at all. He refused to convert to the Roman Catholic Church, so he stayed in the pew while we received communion. During the sermon he would flick our ears, and he tripped us on the way to the communion. He always tried to act like it wasn’t him, but he would have a mischievous grin on his face. We started going to the Episcopal Church partly because my dad started to take God and religion seriously. Initially, his newfound piety resulted in him getting on to us about kneeling at the right times and all that stuff, but he could not stop the seed he already planted within us from sprouting. Having our ears flicked during the sermon, and being tripped on the way to communion was how my siblings and I battled our own boredom, and it had become part of our ritual. Now that my father went up to communion with us, there was no one to trip us, and we need to fill that void.

There was hope in the collection and offertory. We once took turns putting the check in the plate as it passed by, so we dialed this innocent practice up to ten. As the plate would get closer and closer, we would snatch the check from whomever had it, and dunked it into plate, often with some sort of comment like, “how are you going to buy your ticket to heaven now?!” This slowly morphed into everyone getting a dollar to put in the plate as to take the competitive aspect away and to make us appear civilized. There would be a wholesome lesson in this, but we ruined it with gusto. The competition to get our dollar in first was so intense, that we would brazenly dive pews in front of us to catch the plate before it got to the rest of the family. One Sunday, the priest turned our competition on its head by giving a sermon about how the first will be the last and the last will be first, changing the objective of our liturgical game to be the last one to put in their dollar. My brother forever won this game by holding onto his dollar as the plate went by and when it was time for the plates to go to the altar, he reverently followed the ushers up during the doxology (🎵praise God from whom all blessings flow…🎵) then dumping his dollar into the plate as priest took the gifts to be blessed. Who could possibly top that?

You might be thinking that someone who is currently serving as a priest would be ashamed of this past misbehavior, but it’s quite the opposite. I miss it terribly, and the one thing I hate about being a priest is that I can’t flick my sons’ ears during the sermon. Parallel to the ancient liturgies of the Church, we were coming up with our own liturgy to mark our time together as hostages to those sacred rites. Even when I was passionately disengaged and trying to get glances of a grown-ups watch to determine how much longer we had, I was still absorbing bits and pieces of the service. I don’t remember being taught the Lord’s Prayer, Nicene Creed and Eucharistic Prayer, because they were just always there. Now they mean a great deal to me, but first they were just something to say before I was free to go play.

So much humanity is within the Gospels. The disciples left everything behind to follow Jesus, and what did he do? He challenged them, and he often got frustrated when they were found wanting. James and John argued about who would get to sit at Jesus’s right hand in Mark’s Gospel. Were they enduring these trials and sacrifices just to get to that glory? Did they feel that they were held hostage by that demanding teacher, but they kept going to get their reward? If only they knew that they would be yearning to walk with Jesus again as a hostage of his love.

You might think that I am leading you to the conclusion that we should strive to be aware of sacred moments while they are happening, but that would have ruined our experience. As hostages to the liturgy of the Church, it was our boredom and shortsightedness that created room for our love for each other and our reverently irreverent humor to shine through. Keep in mind, that the Gospels were not being written as things were happening. The disciples remembered, emphasized and told the stories of their hubris and shortsightedness. Read and pray on the Gospel, but keep in mind how they were written, which was after the events took place. The disciples were completely unaware that they were living in stories that they would be telling later with intense longing and love in their hearts. We live much the same way.

If you find yourself trying hard to find the sacred around you without any success, do not be troubled. Go be bored with people you love and wait a decade or two and pay attention to how you and others remember those times. If you must, consider the cute or odd things you notice in Church, like the child who licks her lips when the communion bread breaks, and consider the possibility that they are making their own liturgy overlaid onto the one we’ve inherited. They are adding to it in their own boredom… or maybe wonder… or maybe love, or a mix of the three.

Blessings,

Nick