Welcome back. I pray my post today finds you well and happy. I just
returned from vacation, so I 'm eager to get started anew.
I've been thinking about good old Rip
Van Winkle. He met some magical men in the Catskill Mountains in New
York, watched them bowl with lightening force, drank their liquor, and fell
asleep for twenty years. He was an Englishman, but he awoke an American.
I joined Dolores
Street Baptist Church in San Francisco in 1982.
I attended seminary at Golden Gate Baptist Church at the time. I began home churching after I left San
Francisco. Eventually, I ended up in
Atlanta.
Occasionally,
I attended Oakhurst Baptist and Virginia Highlands Baptist, but I never
joined. I visited Mass and an Episcopalian
church from time to time.
However, I had established a new routine of watching political
talk shows like Meet the
Press and Face the Nation on
Sunday morning. It suddenly became
important for me to be informed about the issues of the time since for most of
my life I had not paid particular attention to what was going on in the world.
So for a
little over thirty years I home churched.
Last Sunday, I joined a Baptist Church.
The pastor, my friend, said something really neat when he took my hand
and accepted my membership.
He said, “Welcome
home.”
My pastor
stands above me by over a foot. I feel
like a Hobbit standing next to him. He
has silvery hair and a kind face with a ruddy complexion. Because of his height, he seemed closer to
heaven than to me for that moment he welcomed me. His voice, deep and resonate, fell upon me,
sounding more godlike than Charlton Heston’s burning bush. But when he said, “Welcome home,” a rush of
emotion swept over me. I had not
expected that.
The
Baptist church, for all of its weird history and bizarre present, its charlatans
and chimeras and segregationists and fools and young earth creationists is my
home.
For I was raised in a Baptist church, and it has always been a
Baptist
church that I carried with me.
My home churching occurred in the context of "what brung" me, and
though I left the church physically, I took it with me in my brain, that
splendid purveyor of all things poetic and metaphorical, and it caused me to
feel a Baptist church in my chest wherever I went.
When
people asked me, “Do you go to church?”
I would reply, “I am a church.”
And thus was I one, at least metaphorically, and a Baptist one to
boot.
So for all
practical purposes, I have been Rip Van Winkle, asleep, for thirty years. I like to tell people I stepped out of a cryogenic
tube. What marvelous changes God hath
wrought in all that time!
One last
thing: I heard in church this morning
that on this day, Buzz Aldrin took communion before the LEM landed on the moon
44 years ago. I thought that was
neat. How cool would it be to wake up
after thirty years and learn that Baptists walked on the moon… at least…uh…Baptists
who believe Apollo 11 really happened.
Thanks
for visiting. I hope to see you here
next time. I want to share
some changes that I see after thirty years. Blessings…
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