For Wilshire Baptist Church
In the midst of an ongoing text conversation during the first rounds of March Madness, my friend Gary noted that my Baylor Bears would be the first to play on that Saturday and his Houston Cougars would be first to play on Sunday. “Good thing it’s today for Baylor. Oh the quandary among the faithful if it was tomorrow, eh?”
I replied: “Nah, that Chariots of Fire ‘can’t run on Sunday’ attitude went away years ago.” I went on to comment that society and culture have changed the nature of Sunday dramatically with the advent of youth sports leagues playing on Sunday mornings and all of that. As for Baylor, I told him that it is minority Baptist now. I did a quick fact check of myself on the internet and confirmed that the big three religious affiliations among Baylor students are 21 percent non-denominational, 17 percent Baptist and 16 percent Catholic.
Still, Gary’s instincts were correct based on history. There once was a time when Sunday mornings were sacrosanct and sports and recreation didn’t start until noon. With shops and businesses closed, there wasn’t much else for me to do on Sunday mornings but go to church unless I was on a Scouting campout, which was almost once a month for our troop. And while Baylor certainly was majority Baptist when I was there, I know that a fair number of us slept in on many Sunday mornings. Kids will be kids when they’re away from their parents, after all.
But it’s a different day now. Sunday has changed. Organized religion has changed. The world has changed. Life has changed.
The questions are: Has God changed, and has our relationship with God changed? I can’t answer for God, but our relationship with God doesn’t have to have changed. Church is still a great place to be on Sunday mornings, but we also don’t have to be in church on Sunday to be with God. Sunday isn’t the only day when God hangs a sign in the window that says, “I’m Open.” God is 24/7 with us, even when our heads and hearts are somewhere else.
I think trying to box God into our Sunday mornings may be the source of some of our problems. Maybe when Sunday was more identifiable as a day of worship and rest, we did a disservice to “the kingdom” by limiting its influence to one holy day a week. Instead of going to meet God at church, perhaps bringing God along for the ride on the other six days of the week is the better way. As long as we take the one real God with us. Given our penchant for sin and distortion, the God we take with us into the rest of the week may be a false God: a judgmental God that we have created out of our own insecurities, biases and self-righteousness.
These 40 days of Lent are a time for focusing our hearts and minds on the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that means to us personally in terms of salvation but also our witness and ministry in the world. It’s meant to be a daily journey that makes real the concept of “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s a daily focus – not just on Sunday – and that should be true for us long after the Easter lilies have faded.