Sunday Wasn’t Made for the New York Times

Part of being on holiday means going to church like a regular person, sitting in the pew and then going out to lunch afterward. Today the service doesn’t start till 11 which meant that I slept until something ridiculous like 7am. That’s usually the moment when I’m shouting at the kids to get dressed and go to church, being already dressed and on my way there myself.

A while ago there was a ridiculous advertisement comprised of shiny people lazing around in big sweaters drinking coffee and reading the paper. Some disembodied voice then soothingly spoke and said, “Sundays are made for the New York Times.”

That ad always made me so mad. First of all, it’s not true. Sunday wasn’t “made for the NYT”. It was made for the resurrection of Jesus. Second of all, there’s only a tiny segment of the population that gets to sit around in a clean kitchen in a perfect sweater with perfect hair with a perfect coffee quietly reading the paper any day of the week. Most people around the globe are wearing badly coordinated clothes and their hair looks like they just emerged from Sheol. The morning light may penetrate through their dim windowpanes and when it does it hits their dirty from the night before kitchen counters. Maybe they sit down to read the paper but the minute they do a child starts crying from hunger or the cat begins to throw up on the couch. Having the NYT in hand isn’t going to make the kitchen clean or any number of sweaters appear.

But most importantly, the picture of one or two people sitting around in all their perfection reading a newspaper, and then saying that the day was Made for that purpose, potentially adds a lot of sadness to the ordinary person who wishes in a deep, unfathomable way, that there really was a day made for just that kind of experience. I want a few hours to sit and just be with all the beauty of a clean kitchen and good hair. I don’t want to read the NYT (that would surely ruin it), but I do want to just have a moment to myself, to rest, to not rush on to the next thing.

But then along comes Sunday, and Sunday is the opposite of that. Sunday is getting up out of bed when you’d rather keep lying there, and getting yourself shoved into some kind of clothes that you are willing to be seen in, and maybe spending a few moments hating yourself for how they fit. And then it’s about trying to get your hair to do anything. And then, if you have children, and if any of them are girls, you have to relive the very same trial you just endured. There is jam in the hair and there’s not time for a shower, so there is an angry ponytail. There is the seam along the toe of the tights that will not lie down the way it should. There is the desperate hunt for shoes. There are the tears and exasperation. There isn’t any coffee, at least until you get to church, and then you have to stand there and decide whether you can face a cup of weak sorrow.

None of it, in other words, is you sitting there with your feet up, enjoying your day. All of it is you forcing yourself to cope with people and be in a space that, unless you’re Jesus himself, makes you feel slightly uncomfortable.

So the New York Times coming along and saying, ‘Sunday was made for you’ is something that is really easy to hear. You stand there in front of the coffee pot and calculate the trauma of going to church, or the peace and quiet of sitting down in your own house for a few hours, and there’s really no contest.

And yet, even though I would certainly pick sitting in my own house with my feet up if I could, I have never yet ever had that Sunday morning. I have always been in church, no matter the exasperation and strife. I am always there, doing something, or, as I will do this morning, sitting in a pew and being talked at. Because, well, I’ve been told to go.

Jesus didn’t rise up from the grave on the third day, having dealt sin and death a final and catastrophic blow, in order for Sunday to be about me. When the psalmist said, “this is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” and he wasn’t talking about any old day. He wasn’t trying to write a Sunday school song. He wasn’t trying to be trite. He was talking about God making a day whereby the proper order and beauty of creation would begin to be restored. He was seeing in the far distance a moment when rejoicing and gladness would overcome a tidal wave of grief.

If Sunday were really about you getting to have the peace and quiet you long for, it would really still be Saturday. Saturday was quiet. The grave was perfectly still. The weeping was muffled and lonely. The guilt and disappointment were isolating and unbearable. Anyone of us could have sat at our kitchen tables, alone and quiet with the usual burden of sin and guilt that is the substance of every single day of the week.

But it isn’t Saturday, it’s Sunday. And it’s not made for me, except that it is. It’s made for me to be swept away from the quiet rest of grief, and brought into the difficult rejoicing of the resurrection. It may not feel restful but it is objectively so. Sitting there in my pew, unburdening myself of my sin and fixing my internal eye on the glorious Christ, who, as we all know from the movies has perfect hair, realigns me with the one who did actually make the day.