That Old Time Religion

The church building was not old enough to be on the historic registry, but old enough that two or three generations had passed through its pews. It had seen better days but was by no means falling apart. The sanctuary was always well-kept and efficiently cleaned by the church secretary at least once a week, and the classrooms—though sparsely furnished—were miraculously well-ordered for being inhabited by children under ten for at least two hours every Sunday. Even the “youth room” for adolescents with its outdated video game consoles and heaps of board games with missing pieces had a certain homey cleanliness.

              Every Sunday, without fail, the pastor would come in after the choir sang exactly two hymns and the church bulletin was read verbatim. He would open his Bible to a passage from the New Testament and read through his outline, always ending with an inspirational quote, a poem, or an illustrative anecdote. There would be a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the choir would rise again and sing a jubilant anthem, and the congregation would collect their children from the classrooms and leave.

              “Did they give you apple juice during Sunday School again?” Mrs. Whitaker asked her son, Tommy. Apple juice always made the seven-year-old excitable and unlikely to sit still during Sunday brunch, to which her in-laws were always invited. Mrs. Rawlins, who was in her late sixties, could be heard loudly critiquing the sermon to her husband, George, who always nodded placatingly on his way to their old Cadillac. Fred Hughes found some excuse to meet up with his friend Larry Bergman, escaping their parents’ watchful eyes as they took Fred’s new car down to the town square in hopes of spotting their girlfriends.

              “I hate Sunday School,” Jenny Newman, aged ten, complained, pulling on the stiff collar of her dress. “I always have to dress up and it’s too hot and they tell me stories that say I’m going to Hell and I just want to go home and watch TV!”

              The pastor, whose name was Gregory Brantly, returned to his study after the congregation had left, took off his suit jacket, and helped himself to a single glass of wine, reasoning that he was just having a personal Communion time with the Lord. Putting his Bible and his notebook on the corner of his desk, he sighed and reminded himself that at least he didn’t have to speak again until next week. Absently, he wondered if Mrs. Rawlins’s complaints would finally reach the ears of the members of the board. He wasn’t sure if that idea bothered him or excited him, for he didn’t much enjoy his job. He couldn’t quite remember why he had gotten into ministry in the first place. Some vague desire to “help people” and “please the Lord.”

              Truthfully, his mother had always cherished the desire that her son would grow up and join the ministry one day. He had been in church all his life, and for some reason it had never really occurred to him to do anything other than preach. It was only natural that, upon hearing every Sunday and Wednesday that the only true calling that mattered was one of ministry, he would take up that calling heartily.

              And it had been a hearty calling at one time. He had only once ever considered doing anything else with his life, and the sense of guilt that came upon him with that idea had quickly drowned it out. After graduating from seminary, Greg had married a lovely lady named Nancy and they had set out together to change the world. Their denomination had assigned them a parish in Smalltown, USA and here they were, fifteen years later.

              Nancy was standing in the doorway of his office, looking disapprovingly at the empty glass that had once held his personal Communion with the Lord. “The kids are hungry, and the pot roast is probably burning in the oven as we speak,” she said. Greg stood wearily, grabbing the suit jacket off of the back of his chair but not bothering to put it on.

“Any guests for lunch?” he asked, closing his office door and locking it behind him.

“Amy Smith was looking so forlorn and lonely after service that I just had to ask her over,” Nancy said. They walked through the church building together, shutting off lights and making sure all of the classrooms were securely locked.

“Amy Smith?” Greg searched his mind. “Is she the young lady who sometimes slips in while the choir is singing and sits all alone in the back?”

Nancy nodded as they left the church. Greg locked the doors to the sanctuary and they walked across the parking lot together to their old mini-van. Greg’s son, Luke, was sitting in the grass beside it looking bored. His daughter, Mary, was leaning against the sliding door looking mutinous.

“You said we could leave twenty minutes ago!” she said. “I’ve been waiting for ages!” Greg unlocked the doors to the mini-van and turned the car on, ignoring her protest. As the family climbed into the car, he wondered for a moment how well his children really knew the Lord. They could recite reams of scripture and they had all of the Bible stories memorized after having seen them in some form or another on the television—often played out by talking vegetables. Yet, they never seemed to do anything but parrot what they had been told.

Neither do you, a voice in his head said. Guiltily, he remembered that the sermon he’d preached that morning had been one he’d heard during his days in Seminary—updated, of course, with modern illustrations. He concluded then and there that his children didn’t really know the Lord at all because they acted as he did, they knew what he did, they parroted what he and countless others like him had taught them, and he did not know the Lord at all. The thought was uncomfortable, so ignored it, burying it deep in his subconscious beneath his to-do list for next week and his thoughts about the upcoming meal.

He pulled into the driveway and the children shot out of the mini-van and upstairs to change into more comfortable clothing. His wife got out of the car with less alacrity, but no less desire to find something more comfortable to wear. He wondered when Amy Smith might arrive as he followed his wife into the bedroom, removed his tie, and hung up his suit jacket.

He could hear Luke thundering down the stairs just before the doorbell rang. Nancy had already moved to the kitchen to plate the food that had been prepared, and Mary was in the living room engrossed in some cartoon. Greg opened the door to find Amy on his doorstep. “Good afternoon!” he greeted her warmly. Tired though he was, he really did like to help people and this girl looked about as needy as anyone.

Wearing a secondhand dress that was obviously too big for her and with limp orange hair hanging straight down her back, Amy smiled tentatively at the pastor and stepped into the hallway. “Nancy is just finishing lunch in the kitchen. Won’t you step into the dining room?” he led her to the dining room, which was about three steps to the left, and saw that someone—Luke probably, and probably after much prodding from his mother—had set the table with plates, silverware, and glasses. “Can I get you anything to drink?” Greg asked, indicating that Amy should sit down and relax.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Amy said, perching tentatively on the edge of a chair. Luke entered the dining room, then, carrying a bowl of salad. He left and reappeared with a pitcher of lemonade. Mary, having been drawn away from her cartoon show in the living room, came in with a bowl of mashed potatoes. Slowly, the table was filled with good things to eat.

“Shall we say grace?” Nancy asked after everyone was seated. The family joined hands and repeated the standard prayer said before meals:

              Thank You for the world so sweet,

              Thank You for the food we eat,

              Thank You for the birds that sing,

              Thank You, God, for everything!

After saying amen, Nancy began to pass food around the table. Amy was offered everything first—as was befitting a guest—and soon her plate was heaped with roast beef, mashed potatoes, salad, two rolls, and gravy. She took a sip of her lemonade while waiting for everyone else to be served. “Go ahead,” Greg said, indicating her plate. She smiled and tried the potatoes. They were the perfect texture and consistency.

“So what did you think of today’s message?” Nancy asked. The children were eating quickly and quietly, absorbed in their roast beef.

Amy, too, was quiet for a moment, seeming to think hard before answering. Greg was surprised when she did. Her sweet, simple face did not match the biting anger in her voice as she answered, “It seemed pointless,” she said simply. Nancy uttered a small gasp and looked like she regretted her question immensely. She couldn’t seem to find a way to change the subject that did not seem like an unnatural segue.

Greg wasn’t sure what made him do this, but before he could stop it, he heard himself asking, “How so?” He didn’t need to look at his wife to know that she was glaring daggers at him.

“Well, sir, you talk a lot about God, but it’s like you don’t even know Him. Plus, there was a lot of guilt in that sermon. The idea that everyone is going to Hell for doing things they would probably like to stop doing, but don’t seem to have the power to stop doing is cruel. You can’t tell someone to stop doing something without empowering them to stop. Besides, what does it matter what you do if you don’t know God.

“Honestly, I hate church! I have hated it all my life. I grew up in a town like this one, you see, and my mother and father were faithful to drag me along to Sunday School every week until I was eighteen. I was a good girl, too. I listened and went and memorized all the Scriptures. So did they. It didn’t stop them from drinking themselves into a stupor every Friday night and it didn’t stop my mother from feeling so guilty just for living that she jumped off of a bridge when I was twenty-two.

“No,” she concluded, “church is pointless.”

Even the children were listening now. Nobody quite knew what to say. Greg couldn’t think of anything except to finish this meal as quickly as possible. He took a big bite of pot roast.

“Then why do you go to church?” Mary asked quietly. “I mean, your parents aren’t making you go anymore. You’re grown up! So why go if you hate it so much?” Greg didn’t like the tone he heard in his daughter’s voice. He wondered if she, too, hated church. Would she continue attending after she was grown up and out from under his roof?

Amy gave Mary’s question serious consideration. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it’s partly because of how I was raised. I don’t know any different. There’s a part of me that has been ingrained with the idea that if I don’t go to church, I will go to Hell or I will disappoint God or I will have a bad life. But there’s also a part of me that wants to know the Lord, and I don’t know how to find Him.

“I know better than to search for Him in the bottom of a bottle because my parents did that and they didn’t find Him there,” she said, and Greg thought of his weekly glass of wine. “I know better than to search for Him in the love of another man. I’ve seen my sister do that too often, and now she has three kids she has to support on her own and is no closer to knowing Him. I know better than to search for Him in a fulfilling job, because my brother is the youngest president of his company and he hates his life and God, too. I can’t find Him anywhere, but I keep trying.” She sighed. “But maybe it’s time to give up. I think that searching for Him in church is about as useful as searching for Him in alcohol or dating or careers.”

Greg didn’t know what to say to this, either. She spoke with such certainty, and he felt something inside of him that agreed with what she said. Still, she was basically saying that his whole life was pointless, and there was an equal part of him that wanted to throw her out of his house right now. Before he could do anything, however, Luke spoke.

“I think so, too,” he said. Greg’s spirits sank. He had always wanted, more than anything, for his children to know the Lord. Now his twelve-year-old was agreeing with a woman who said that church was pointless. “I haven’t found Him in TV or books or at school, either,” Luke continued. “Some of my friends try and tell me that He doesn’t exist at all, but something inside of me says that’s not true. That same something tells me that this isn’t true either.”

“What’s not true?” Nancy asked quietly.

“What we’re doing. Pretending to be happy and dressing up all nice every Sunday, but always being afraid that someone is going to think badly of what we say or how we act or what we look like. Memorizing Scriptures and stories and songs that talk about how good our God is without seeing any goodness in our everyday lives. Talking about God, but never talking to Him.”

“We talk to Him!” Mary said, “We say grace before every meal and we have prayer services on Wednesdays and we say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday.”

“But that’s not talking to God,” Luke said. “That’s reciting a poem to the sky. Even our bedtime prayers, where we say what we think and feel, is just talking to the ceiling. If we were really talking to God, it would be a conversation, like the one we’re having right now.”

Amy nodded at Luke. “Yes,” she said, “I’ve always felt that He wants to talk to us, not just have us talk at Him. I want a relationship with the Lord, not a religion! Otherwise I’d try searching for Him in Buddhism or Judaism or any of the other religions that are out there. They have some neat ideas, and all of them tell us to be nice to each other and love our neighbors. Still, none of the Jews I’ve met or the Hindu friend my brother works with seem to know God any better than the Christians I know.”

Greg could hardly keep his mouth shut, but he could hardly speak either. Five different rebuttals came to his head at once, but all of them were ones he had learned in seminary. The truth was, he wouldn’t have a thing to say if he hadn’t heard it somewhere else, first. Still, he tried. The idea that one was more likely to find God in Buddhism or Judaism scandalized him to the core. “The difference between all other religions and Christianity is Jesus Christ,” he began. “Yes, all religions tell us to be nice to our neighbors, not to steal, not to kill, et cetera, but only Christianity has a God who loved us enough to die for us.”

“If Christianity is all about His love,” Amy said, “then why do we only hear about His wrath in church? Why do we only receive guilt and condemnation, hear about how we are going to Hell, when even the Scriptures from which you preach say there is now no condemnation in Christ? Yes, Christianity has Jesus Christ, but I think Christianity knows Him about as well as they know God—which is to say, equally to the Buddhists.”

“Now see here—” Nancy began, but Luke spoke more quickly.

“Yes, actually I’ve been studying other religions. We’ve learned a little in school, but not really gone in-depth. I’ve been checking out books in the library. They all have their intriguing commandments, but none of them really talk about knowing God.

“Some of them say we can find Him in nature—in the plants and the animals, things He’s created. Some say we should find Him in each other, but I don’t think we can start with that.”

“What do you mean ‘start with that?’” Greg asked in spite of himself.

“Well,” Luke said slowly, gathering the words to put form to his thoughts, “I think that eventually we will be able to know God in all of these things—in all of creation, in ideas, in stories and Scripture, and even each other—but not yet, not at first. That’s why nobody has found Him there. They all start by looking there, when they should start by looking inside of themselves.”

“Inside—” Nancy began again, but Amy was already speaking, her eyes alight with triumph.

“Yes!” she said. “Yes! I want to know God for myself, and looking outside of myself has never worked, no matter where I’ve looked. But I’ve never thought to look in me. I never thought I was anything special… certainly not worthy of holding the God of the Universe.”

Luke smiled, too.

“But we are sinners! Sinners saved only by grace! The idea that we might hold the God of the universe inside of us, be able to find Him in ourselves is prideful! It’s the height of arrogance; it’s blasphemy!” Greg snarled. A detached part of him was not sure why he was so angry at this young woman sitting before him in an oversized, secondhand dress. He was only parroting what he’d heard all of his life. He wasn’t even sure he believed what he was saying.

“But Dad,” Luke said, “even the Bible says we have this treasure in Earthen vessels.”

Greg had no response to this. Surely it couldn’t mean that a lowly, sinful human could find God inside of himself. Suddenly, a quote from Scripture came to him. “It also says that nobody is righteous.”

“But I thought Jesus came and made us righteous,” Mary said, puzzlement in her face.

“Well,” Greg began, then paused. “But it doesn’t say we can find God in ourselves.” Years of church doctrine spilled out in different words, “We were made righteous by the skin of our teeth and we must spend the rest of our existence making up for the fact that once we were unrighteous. We owe God everything and we must work for Him to prove that we love Him and deserve His righteousness.”

“That belief is deadly,” Amy said. “I’ve seen it kill a thousand spirits. I’ve seen people actually take their lives because they believed that they hadn’t done enough to make them deserve to have the life God gave them. But all of it, all of the pain and the turmoil and the sorrow that I’ve seen, is because they heard these things about God, but never knew Him. They were made afraid to seek Him because they thought He would reject them, or they overcame that fear and sought Him anyway, only to find that He isn’t in any of those places we discussed. And if we can’t find Him there, what’s the harm in searching for Him within?”

“Pride goeth before destruction!” the pastor quoted. “Leviathan is the most destructive, evil spirit out there. If you think that the God of all could be inside of you, you’re walking a dangerous road to Hell, young lady.”

“But Dad,” Luke said, “John 17 says that we are to be one with God just like Jesus is one with God. He said, ‘I in them and You in Me.’ I mean, that literally says He is in us!”

“What verse is that, again?” Greg asked. He had read the entire Bible many times, and he could not recall that verse.

“John 17:22-23,” Luke said. Greg began to wonder how long his son had been thinking about this. He had obviously done a lot of research—both in Scripture and, apparently, at the library. He would have to talk to Nancy about curtailing their son’s library visits. Meanwhile, he excused himself from the table to find his Bible.

He was glad to get away from the table for a moment. He had a chance to breathe, to calm himself down before he did something he would completely regret, like throw one of his parishioners out on her ear in front of his family or scream at his only son.

He read the entire text of John 17 three times, sitting on his bed with his Bible in his lap. He was surprised that he had never seen it that way before. The idea of finding God in yourself was preposterous, of course, and yet it was right there in front of him. How had he missed it for all of these years? Perhaps the voices of others in his head had blinded him to the words on the page.

He wasn’t sure what to do at this point. Perhaps if he waited in his room, their guest would finish her meal and leave without him having to speak with her again. Yet, he knew his son would continue to ask these questions now that this stranger had freed him to do so.

How had this happened?

He supposed he couldn’t hide in his room for the rest of his life, and so, feeling very much like a brave martyr going to the execution, but with more humility than he had allowed himself to show for many years, he reentered the dining room. “Well, Dad?” Luke asked as soon as he came in.

To his relief, the main meal was finished and everyone was now eating pie and ice-cream. Perhaps this inquisition was almost over! Still, his pie would be quite humble, and part of him was glad. “Well, Luke, I did read John 17, and you’re right. It does say that in verse 23, but I don’t quite know what it means yet.”

Luke grinned. His father had said yet. He was open, willing to search. And that mean that he, Luke, was also free to search. “This is great! Maybe now we can actually find Him, can start to get to know Him better!”

“Yes,” Amy smiled, “who’d have thought after all these years of searching for God, that He would be in the last place I looked, that He was here within me all along?”