Trying to Describe the Church...
Potlucks, Paradox, and a Bus Full of People You Would Never Pick
This one is in honor of a great inspiration of mine, Frederick Buechner, who died earlier this week and told plenty of his own small stories through which larger themes of life, spirituality, faith, and all the rest came through.
We drove from our hotel to a different village in Southern Honduras each morning. Three vans driven by locals pulled into the hotel roundabout each morning, and eye surgeons, nurses, dentists, and a host of other church volunteers like myself jumped in. Who gets the front seat is always a curious thing to discern among church people, particularly when the week is filled with less comfort than most of us know stateside.
The base truth is this: we all want the front seat. It is a reprieve from all the other comfort concessions we are making – lack of hot showers, few rooms with a working A/C, weak wifi. Pitiful, really, the things that bother us. But, stacked together they create a measure of discomfort that makes the front seats particularly alluring each mission-trip-morning.
Having the front seat means sitting with the A/C blowing fully into one’s face.
It means a seatbelt. And it means the legs have space to move. The front seat is Delta comfort.
The thing is, Christians have the “first shall be last, last shall be first” notion engrained fairly deep from an early age. We are not sure what the Bible verse means in context let alone how to apply it, but one thing is for sure: it does funny things to us.
Ever watched a church potluck?
All the food arrives to the table. People mingle until a prayer of blessing is given. Once given, people continue to mingle.
Some are fidgety.
Some laugh a little too loudly at bad jokes.
Some call out, “Betty, start us off!” hoping poor Betty will be first-therefore-last. Betty always demures.
Nobody wants the judgment of being last somehow, somewhere, one day.
This is why church potlucks always end up with the people eating cold food. It is not until a thorough lukewarm-ness has taken hold of all of the food that someone finally risks being first-therefore-last. Inevitably, this person takes incredibly small portions thereby hoping their generous awareness of all the others diminishes the first-therefore-last judgment they now face.
The point is this: Jesus’ words have forever made Christians trepidatious about things like lines.
And also seats.
Particularly front seats.
Most particularly front seats on mission trips.
There’s an unspoken understanding that mission trips in their entirety stand under a blessing prayer, and so the first-shall-be-last fears are real.
So, too, is our fleshly desire for some comfort.
Which means people stand next to the front seat and with feigned laxity ask, “Who is going for the front seat this morning!?”
Both their foot already placed onto the front seat floor of the vehicle and their question are meant to invite the following eager response from others: “Why don’t you take it?!” Because who could possibly say with eagerness, “Why don’t you scoot over, and I’ll take it today!”
Or, people of a certain age will rightly, quietly take the seat and mumble something about “feeling my age,” so as to assuage the guilt of taking the first-therefore-last seat. No one judges them one bit for their decision. Still, they worry about being last somewhere, somehow for taking this particular seat.
Or, finally, there are moments like mine: at a healthy 34 years of age, I notice that every other seat in the van is already taken. People from age 28 to 70 sat squeezed, shoulder-to -shoulder, each of them shimmering in the sweaty glow of choosing life in the last-therefore-first world.
They have no room among them, and so my choice is free of all guilt or future judgment. I can simply take the front seat.
I pull my seatbelt across,
I stretch the aches in my leg,
and I let the A/C do its healing work…
…while the others enjoy the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, someday they will be first.
At the end of the day working in the village, we head back to our vans to travel down the mountainside back to our hotel. There is an unwritten rule that if you had a certain seat that morning, you get that one in the afternoon. No one speaks of the rule, no one even thinks it. We all just follow it. On this day, it means I get the front seat again.
And yet, watching Len’s sixty-some year old legs tire through the heat made me speak up: “Len, why don’t you take the front seat?” He does, gratefully.
Kind and generous as this may sound, I assure you I would not have made the trade had I known about the back of the van ahead of time.
I had not yet been in this particular van. Unlike the other vans, this one only had two rows – each of them along the side of the van and facing toward an empty middle.
We squeezed five people on each bench, leg-to-leg, and shoulder to shoulder. After a full day of 90-some degree heat, we were sweating all over one another. We smelled terrible. And we were pressed into people we had, for the most part, only met five days ago.
(It was a beautiful view, though, before boarding the buses to head back down to the hotel)
The whole ride down mountain we bumped significantly every few seconds.
We crashed into one another.
We knocked knees.
Our heads flew right into the roof on multiple occasions.
Someone joked about the mission agency needing to purchase Kevlar helmets. By mid-mountain, drops from my forehead had fallen onto my shorts and made an ever-widening pool. That pool would become a stain that never washed from those shorts.
The other thing about this impossibly hot, ridiculously sweat-filled, and awkwardly close friction with strangers? I laughed like I have not laughed in years.
Whether it was the heat or a survival instinct that kicked in and told us all we better find a way to laugh so as not to die - I don’t know.
But stories were told.
Jokes were made.
Something about Furman’s former mascot, the “Furman University Christian Knights” (I’m confident you can figure out how the acronym became a PR nightmare for those Baptist school leaders). Something, also, about the Presbyterian College “Blue Hose.”
One can imagine the various ways these well-intentioned Christian school mascots became irreverent fodder amid the delirium of excessive heat. The specifics are no longer remembered today, but the deep belly laughter still makes my mouth turn upward in knowing thanks for those 45 minutes.
This, I think, is what church is really supposed to be like.
It is not something we would ever have chosen if we had known what we were getting into. We would have stuck with the the seat of our own choice, comfort, and spacing.
Because church life is hard work. Sweaty work. Vulnerable work.
And you bounce along the road of faith never knowing when the next challenge will throw your body in a new direction. It can feel like the kind of endeavor reserved for last place kind of people.
But you also bounce with a people – a people of certain ages and politics and propensities that you would never have chosen, and yet there you all are. Bound intimately to the one another’s well-being. And if you trust the Driver regardless of the terrain, then you can find space to be so honest and open that your bellies fill with a shared joy unparalleled anywhere else in life - which really is as first place as it gets.
If church is really church, you will not trade those 45 minutes or 45 years for anything. And when the stains born of tiring forgiveness and feeding the hungry and praying thanks-amid-pain prove unwashable – that will be fine. It just means the clothes of righteousness have been lovingly worn-in.
And though you still may have no idea how to explain the last-shall-be-first paradox, you will smile knowing that because of the unlikely ride, you’ve been living its truth all along.
Ahhhh- May we all rejoice in the sweating and struggle and joy of living in those unwashable clothes of righteousness. Thank you for these vivid and memorable words.
Bobby, I Loved this. Thanks for sharing.
Hope you have a good day.
Suzy 🌺