A Bigger Life
Recently, I overheard someone make an offhand remark which stuck with me. I didn’t hear what prompted the comment, I only heard the reply:
“Don’t join a church to make your life happier. Join a church to make your life bigger.”
This struck me as clever, bumper sticker wisdom. It is short, sweet, and yet qualifies as “capital-T Truth.” There is nothing wrong with happiness. Happiness gets us out of bed in the morning and bathes the world in bright colors. We need happiness like the earth needs rain and sunshine. And church should be a happy place, where people laugh and smile freely. When you find happiness at a church it says a lot about the spiritual and emotional health of the community.
And yet, like all emotions, happiness is a cloud passing through the sky. It’s transitory—here one minute and gone the next. If going to church is motivated solely on capturing fleeting clouds of happiness, then your attendance won’t last and your connections will not go very deep. So don’t join a church to make your life happier. You’d be better off joining a gym or a social group. Join a church to make your life bigger.
Religion, when it is doing its job, should chip away at the hard shell of egotism that we all possess to some degree or another. It should introduce us to the humility necessary to glimpse the vastness of Creation. It should pressure us into sticking it out through conflict long enough to learn how to greet human failings with forgiveness, including our own. These kinds of experiences are not usually described as “happy,” but they can be very meaningful and transformative. When the church is working on us this way, the end result is that our lives become less centered on us and more centered on God. And a God-centered life is so much bigger than a self-centered life.
This Sunday our Scripture passage is from Luke 15—the Prodigal Son. This short, well-known story is full of important images and themes. This time we will consider how it invites the reader to let go of the smallness of self for something much, much more.
Until Sunday,
Pastor Jen
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