Isn’t It Over Yet?

It may be that I just spent twenty minutes scrolling through Pope Francis’ twitter feed looking for a quote about how the homily at a Catholic mass should be no more than eight minutes. If you accuse me of this, I won’t lie and say it isn’t true. Also, for some reason, I am following a late night person by the name of Conan something and twitter thinks I will want to see everything he has tweeted in the last twenty hours.

So anyway, in my quest for greater knowledge, I discovered that Pope Francis often admonishes the homilist to keep it short and sweet. Don’t just ramble on, he says. Say something useful and get out of there. Keep it under an hour.

If you carry on with twitter you’ll find a lot of people who agree with him. But then there is this funny tweet, “@Pontifex hey the Mass tonight was an hour and three minutes, and some gross old couple renewed their 60th wedding vows tonight—totally ruined my dinner plans. Can you send a Swiss guard to take the priest away to Vatican jail.” Then the poor soul had to go on for several tweets explaining that strange and terrible word, “sarcasm.” As I always like to say, I heart social media.

That’s the question though— why bother to go to church? And what happens if you have to endure with someone else for an hour, maybe even the homilist, and do you even have time?

I should say at the outset that less than an hour is too short for the worship of a holy, perfect, merciful, just, kind, and forbearing God. And I don’t really approve of the idea of a “homily.” The scripture should be both read and exposited. That is, laid plain so that everyone can understand what it means and why you had to bother to read it out loud. Without the scripture constantly being listened to and understood, no one grows up as a Christian, no one matures. But I’m not Catholic, as you probably know, what with this blog being over on the Evangelical channel.

But no matter who you are and what kind of church you go to, eventually you do come up against the terrible choice of whether or not to endure. Something will happen. Someone will irritate you. Life will get in the way. You will get sick and tired. God will not meet your expectations and organize himself according to your plans. You will get hurt. You and others will sin. You will wake up one morning and think, “I just can’t take it any more.”

The word “endure” derives from Latin for hard, or to harden, or to make lasting. Something that is durable can take a certain amount of stress and use before it breaks apart. It is not cheap plastic from Walmart, it is strong and useful and doesn’t crumple at the critical moment. In all its various facets endurance points to patience, to suffering without giving in and giving up. And, I would wager, it’s probably not the first of word you think of when you blithely set off on the quest to find, say, a church, or a life, or a job, or anything.

You trip along down life’s merry road, expectant, excited, sure that you will find something—whatever it is—that is the right fit for you. You want a church that is going to uplift you, give you that extra boost to get through the week. You want a life of ease and comfort, of bright shiny cheerful baubles. You want a job that makes you feel good about who you are and the gifts and skills you know you have.

What you don’t want to have to face is the long suffering of endurance, of standing in your place week by week bearing with other people, yourself, and even God and all the troubles he accumulates for you.

And the church definitely doesn’t want you to think of endurance when it shakes your hand at the door and offers you a guest packet. Else why keep it super short on one hand, or pump it full of excited peppy music on the other, lest you have time to stop and consider if you really want to be there—or not.

In a world where you are the center and everyone is vying for your attention, the category of endurance is not part of the newcomers display. We know you won’t, that you can’t, that you don’t want to. So we won’t ask you to, which is great because then we won’t have to endure with you. Thou and I, we won’t have to bother. We will get in and out quickly without ever speaking. Or we will have a light show so that we won’t have to surpass the great distance that divides us.

But what a great and terrible loss. Because every person, no matter the circumstance, does have to endure. You do have to get out of bed day after day, and go to work, and keep up with whoever it is you have in your family—children, maybe, or parents, or a spouse, or a neighbor who you know needs you even though you really don’t have time. The strengthened core that’s revealed by the suffering of time is one of the foremost, unexpected, and beautiful mercies God works out in his people. If the church, of all places, doesn’t encourage you to try, what use or encouragement will she be to you on any other matter?

Or maybe, as our clever tweeter pointed out, maybe it’s ok to stay on another three minutes and endure. Maybe the lives and cares of other people are worth a little bit of time, even on a Sunday. Maybe God himself has something to say that can’t be snapped into in 8 minutes. Maybe the troubles and discouragements of ordinary life merit sitting for a while in prayer, perhaps in grief, or wonder, or even joy when it happens to break in.

God endures with us. He bears us along even as a burden. He doesn’t pass on to the next thing, forgetting that we were straggling at the back, still trying to find a pew, dropping bits of the bulletin and wishing we were still in bed. He endures. He is there.

He endured, in fact, when we had given up and fallen by the way, sick and broken and left for nothing. He stopped and picked us—but really you—up and anointed you with oil, and fed you by the Word and by the Bread. How strangely and closely he identifies himself with both, as if by feeding on him, over and over, you might have enough to go on one more day. You might discover his strength to face the person in the pew behind you at the peace. You might with patience continue in a suffering that leads to eternal life. Not alone, not in your own strength, but by the hard word of the cross, the durable, lasting, perfect salvation of God.