The secular crossroads

This morning we three little saints woke our sleepy selves up (after an unexpected emergency room trip last night with the littlest saint: throat infection part two) got dressed with varying degrees of competency (the mama saint wore back-less shoes in the pouring rain) and headed off to church. The littlest saint managed, oh, maybe two songs before deciding that trumpets at 10am were NOT his style (can't say I blame him with that one) and the mama saint took her little man off to the nursury to sit in the dark and rock.

The service today was a Remembrance Day service and that bothered me a bit. My family has done their share of military service, mind you. My paternal grandfather was a career military man and fought on the beaches of Normandy as well as working in a diplomatic capacity for years afterwards. His father was an army surgeon in WWI and ran a hospital in Europe which I can only imagine must have been a horrendous and thankless job. My maternal grandfather fought in WWII as well, and brought his shell-shocked wife home from England to make a life in Canada. They made great and noble sacrifices and I cannot begin to thank them. I know that in Heaven they are safe from all evil and are at rest at last. I was an air cadet myself and loved every minute of it, even the boot-polishing bit. Okay, maybe not the boot polishing but everything else! I seriously considered attending a military college and I know that if I had chosen that route the full support of my family would have been behind me.

And in respect for those who serve now, have served in the past, and those who made the sacrifice of laying their husbands, brothers, sons, daughters and fathers on the alter of freedom we always, always observe a moment of silence a wear a poppy on our jackets, and we try very hard to make it to whatever cenetaph service is being offered where we are that day.

So, why was I so uncomfortable with the idea of a service like the one today? As my husband chatted about what had happened while I was in the nursury it occured to me that a Sunday worship service being merged with a secular holiday was what had gotten my dander up. I've been uncomfortable with this idea for years now, starting mainly with the whole Mother's Day nonsense that seems to be seeping through the church. I've been handed carnations at the door to thank me for being a mom, I've been applauded in a service, I've listened to sermons that just sort of jog alongside scripture rather than dive into it because the minister wants to respect Grandparent's Day or something. Honestly, have we Christians lost sight of what we're doing on Sunday morning? We're worshipping the LORD, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. Of all that is seen and unseen. This is not a time for your ego to take a bow, this is a time to honour and glorify the risen KING!

I'll step down off the soapbox for just a second because I'm getting a little rant-y here. The fact is that we like to imagine church as our 'time with God' when, in fact, all our time is our time with God but Sunday is God's special time with us. A time when, in honour of his resting, we congregate together to do special things: we take communion to remember that Christ died for us, we sing to the Lord in praise and adoration, we tithe and give back to God that which he has blessed us with. In short, we rest, not from all of our labours as the ancient Jews did on their Sabbath, but from our lives as we live them day to day. This is a day set apart, the Lord's Day, a time devoted to Him. The remainder of the week is our time to live the lives that He has set before us, and then on the seventh day, we rest from those lives to pause and worship the One who granted us our own thread in His great tapestry.

So when I find myself in a church service that has drifted from the focus on God to focus on man, however great the accomplishments of those men, I get very uneasy. Because where does it end? If we replace our worship with Remembrance Day services then it isn't difficult to imagine that Mother's and Father's Days should be held up too. And then Grandparent's Day, and then maybe Pastor Appreciation Day, Secretary's Day...how about Canada Day, should we celebrate that? Maybe the Queen's birthday? You may be scoffing now but I don't think that once you adopt one exception the others are far behind. In fact, I would go to far as to assure you that somewhere there is a Christian church that celebrates the first day of Spring.

And what's the big deal anyway about celebrating important days? These men and women died for you and I and there isn't anything wrong with taking one measly day out of the whole year to say thank you, right? RIGHT! I agree wholeheartedly, I think we should take more than one day, I think we should take every opportunity to thank those people in our lives who have helped us, held us up, been there for us in any way and fought and died for our freedom. But not on God's time. He already has, for many people, been relegated to a squeezed-in 60 minutes once a week, don't use those 60 minutes to praise man instead of Him, I beg you.