Yesterday I shared a post that ended with an encouragement toward gratitude.
Several people left comments of agreement. “Every day should begin with gratitude.” “Yes. Gratitude pulls up hope from the pit!”
I’m thankful for Sunday. It is a day when some people go to buildings that they call church and do something they call church. I’m thankful for those buildings and those people and that practice. I’m often there and doing that thing.
I’m thankful too for the idea that church isn’t a place or a practice but is a people, a community.
Today I listened to Pete Greig’s Lectio 365 devotional for Pentecost Sunday:
And so today we celebrate the birth of this 2000 year-old, 2 billion strong, messed-up, blessed-up, revolutionary movement of justice and love we call The Church. She is not perfect. Many grave sins have been committed. Our hearts must often grieve.
Our hearts must grieve because the church often doesn’t live up to its potential. Or worse.
For all its global diversity, the smoke and the incense or the smoke and the spotlights, or maybe even smoke and mirrors, it gets tied up and bogged down by the same old thing: people. People can really make a mess of it.
Continuing Pete’s devotional:
But still the Church of Jesus Christ remains the greatest agency of human blessing the world has ever known: starting schools and hospitals, feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, inspiring the greatest art the world has ever known, healing broken families, redeeming cultures and reconciling warring tribes, establishing the foundations for scientific innovation and human flourishing, shaping entire civilisations, and above all, proclaiming today on this Pentecost Sunday the same, stunning good news of salvation for the nations in every generation through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I’m thankful for quiet Sundays. For living room playlists: one loves, hearts delighting, deer panting. I’m thankful for voices stumbling over ancient words and holding space for questions to be considered and permission for mystery. I’m thankful for long stretches of solitude and silence, the leafy turn of pages and the scratch of a pen.
The remarkable thing of the whole project is that despite the people who make up the church—petty, broken, human, the puffed roosters who absolutely loved the taped off lines and timekeeping and clean efficiency of pandemic lockdowns, the strutting stalins, the hypebeasts and the Eeyores, the know-nothings and the know-it-alls, the unqualified upstarts and legacy riders—despite all of them, despite us, despite me—despite all of our flaws and rough edges, we really are better together.
So I suppose I’m thankful too for full Sundays. I’m thankful for the mad cacophony and voices and laughter and song. I’m thankful for the kingdom family, gathered. I’m thankful for the soundtrack of people dragging in, awakened to themselves, awakened to God, and awakened to one another.