142 Boring

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Boring”, originally shared on August 23, 2021. It was the 142^nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Are you boring? Is Christianity boring? How do we communicate the Christian worldview to a world that seeks escape, if not answers, by making “feeling good about myself” its primary value, with spectacles, entertainment, toys, and the material pleasures of the senses its primary goals? Today we’ll find out.

   I saw a meme the other day which showed a picture of a sign welcoming people to Dull, Scotland. Below the name, the sign said that it had been “paired” and “twinned” (like a sister city, I guess) with Boring, Oregon, USA since 2012. The meme noted that the city of Bland, Australia joined the two in 2013, making “what has become known as the “Trinity of Tedium’”.

   Most cities don’t want to be known as dull, boring, or tedious. It’s hard to imagine any Chamber of Commerce brochure for any town extoling those qualities. But, if you’ve got three lemons, that’s a clever way to make lemonade.

   Another way to do it might be with experience and perspective. I heard a character on a TV show, I think, who had moved from a big city to a small town say, “When I hear someone call this town "boring" the word I think of is "safe".

   Nikki Gumbel, an English Anglican clergyperson, developed the Alpha ministry. We used Alpha in the church I served in San Dimas and we benefited from it. It’s a course that lasts about 12 sessions. Each session includes a potluck meal and addresses basic questions about Christianity. It’s being used in a variety of churches all over the world including in prisons.

   One of the questions in the series is “Christianity: Boring, Untrue, and Irrelevant?” He structures the answer to those three principle objections to Christianity around this statement of Jesus in John 14:6:

⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 

   When I came back to my hometown in Manitowoc, Wisconsin after my first year of college I realized that there wasn’t much for college-age youth to do other than to work in our summer jobs. Manitowoc is the largest town in Manitowoc County with around 32,000 people. It was the same size then. It had three movie theaters and several beer bars and that was about it for college-age youth.

   So, I went to the director of the YMCA and asked if there was a space where I and some friends could open a coffee house.

   He asked around and offered that there was a guy on his board of directors who owned a storefront building that had once been a drug store across the street from the “Y” who would let us use it free of charge for the summer.

   We swept it out and found $1.65 in the floorboards and that was our starting budget. We formed a board of about 15 mostly college kids from near and far. We got cable spools from the power company to use as tables. We painted the interior in a way that college kids in the late ‘60’s liked.

   People donated chairs, cups, and an old Mirro Aluminum (a local company) coffee making urn. We were in business. Evenings and weekends. We operated the coffee house entirely with volunteers. Local bands played on the weekends and, if we paid them, it wasn’t much. When there were no bands, we played albums on a cobbled-together sound system of donated or loaned parts. I think we had “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on continuous replay.

   When the summer ended, we had over $700.00 in the bank and turned it over to local students and the coffee house was moved to an old opera house.

   There were many challenges to keeping it open. None of us made any money. But we served the community with a safe environment and gave bored college kids something to do. Plus, bad things can happen when people are bored.

   We didn’t do any of it to make ourselves happy. Happiness is a by-product anyway, not a goal in itself.

   Joy, however, is something else. Joy is something like an upgraded feeling of satisfaction. It has nothing to do with what is disappointing, or hard, or discouraging in life. There is no joy in just not being bored. Joy comes through service. It touches something of who we truly are. It is something that we feel even when things are difficult, devastating, or when we are just sad.

   Christians don’t produce boredom, they offer an alternative. God gives lives that are the opposite of boring.

   Jesus says, in John 15:11:

¹¹ I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

   He says this in the context of keeping his commandments as an expression of the love of God within us (verse 10) and saying that love leads Jesus to give his life for us, his friends (verse 12).

   Love is not just a feeling. It is seen in sharing and in living the good news of God, seen in Jesus, most clearly on the cross. That’s the basis for the Christian world view.

   We live in an age in which the self has been exalted above all else.

   The world teaches that life is about convincing others to serve “me”. School should serve “me”. Work should serve “me”. Many have left the Church because it didn’t serve “me”. Worship should serve “me”. Worship that doesn’t serve “me” is boring.

   So some, I think, have invented their personal religion, the spirituality of “Me”, spiritual but not religious.

   A colleague sat next to a person whose life had come to this point on an airplane and, reflecting on their conversation, she said, “I am always interested by people who find ancient religion boring but who find themselves endlessly fascinating.” That used to seem funnier to me than it does now.

   Faith draws “me” out of “my” life. It gives me new life. It makes of me a new Creation in a living relationship with the one true living God, gifted for service to others in relation to others in the Church, the Body of Christ. Faith is a gift from God.

   Maybe people think that we are boring because we do not need to find distractions from life.  The Christian life may never be life that is valued by the world, but it is genuine. Life that truly is life is Jesus Christ, and that life is never boring. It is meaningful and purposeful and joy filled.

   You might remember Derek Fisher from the showtime era of the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq. He’s now the coach of the L.A. Sparks.

   Derek Fisher was my favorite Laker. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t a superstar. His name wasn’t synonymous with the franchise. He was just the guy you called in when you wanted to get the job done. In other words, he was the most Lutheran of all the Lakers. 😊

   I once shared that observation in a sermon. A man who had been coming to worship with his wife, but who wasn’t a member of the congregation, later attended our pre-membership classes and became a member. He became a part of a stewardship effort and gave a stewardship talk during worship. He said, “I used to come to worship regularly with my wife, but I wasn’t a member. One Sunday I heard the pastor talk about Derek Fisher and I realized that I have been a Lutheran all my life and didn’t know it!”  😊

   Christians, not just Lutherans, don’t need the approval of the world. We are called by God to fulfill our vocation, our calling from God, for which we have received every gift that we need, both individually and in the Christian community.

   The world may view Christians who don’t share its values as boring, but Christians live a renewed life. Our relationship with God and with one another is all that matters. Service to the world extends from this.

   The Christian life is always new and filled with the gifts of God that fill our lives with things that the world cannot understand outside of God. Our selves are not perfect, and our lives are not perfect, but they are filled with God and the things of God, including a redeemed worldview in Jesus Christ.

   Paul writes to the church at Philippi, in Philippians 4:4-7,

⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. ⁵ Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. ⁶ Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

   The Boring Company is a tunneling and transportation company founded by Elon Musk. “Boring” happens when people dig a round hole through something, often dirt and/or rock, often with some kind of drilling tool. It’s what we do when we dig for a water well.

   Is the Christian life boring? Well, we do call people to seek water, and then to receive it’s benefits as a gift in Baptism.

   We become a new creation through lives of faith, in repentance and Baptism. We are given new life! We begin our Eternal Life with a capital “E” and a capital “L”.

   Paul writes to the Church at Rome in Romans 6:3-5:

³ Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

   Are you ready to live life from the inside out? To commit yourself to a life that is defined by creed and not culture? To live as people in but not of this world? To be deeply concerned about the needs of this world and all the people in it? To live not for self but for others and their new life in God made flesh, fully God and fully human being, in Jesus Christ?

   Then open your heart and receive the Holy Spirit to dig a hole and hit water, streams of water, streams of living water that will well up from within you.

   Live a life of joy, of resistance to the things of this world, and of the uncommon life in the transformational life of faith, and of peace and of joy in the work of God now and forever.