When I was a child – which is not too long ago, except in the eyes of my sons – families went to church without any obvious worries. Everyone knew who would be there, because church was what people did on Sunday. Stores were closed, and there was no soccer that day.

We didn’t wear seat belts as we piled in the car for the short trip. We assumed the world was safe, and that God was on our side. Trouble was far away.

As we got to church, my siblings and I bounded out of the car ahead of our parents. It’s not that we were happy to be there; but it was our last chance to kick up our heels before having to be on our best behavior for a couple hours.

With a dime for the offering in each child’s fist, we lit off down the sidewalk a block or so past tidy lawns toward the massive stone building. My only concerns were (a) don’t lose that dime, and (b) don’t step on a crack, or I’ll break my mother’s back.

Outwardly, Mom and Dad were relaxed too, as long as we three boys kept our shirts tucked in and the girls didn’t scuff their patent leather shoes before we got inside. 

To walk into the church building through its heavy wooden and wrought iron doors, we first had to pass by the minister’s car, always conspicuously parked out front. Its presence told us that he arrived before us. Everything was in order.

It said something else too, more subtle, but equally important. The dark blue Buick Riviera was as shiny as any car on the street. I imagine it had a standing date every Saturday at the car wash. Its hood was long, with plenty of room underneath for a powerful V-8 engine. The interior was all leather. The rear window had succulent curves. And the sharply pointed tail was so dramatic, so sensational, that I gawked at it coming and going every Sunday to convince myself it wasn’t a dream. I had never seen such a beautiful hunk of metal and glass.

The car had an aura of status and style, along with a whiff of prosperity suitable to the pastor of the Presbyterian church where the old money of St. Louis gathered to pray.

And it was purposefully parked, I now believe, to prove that all was well in God’s world. Or at least in that church … which was all that mattered there.

Climbing the stairs and entering the building, we were met by a deep calm. Soft lights and stained glass kept the world at bay. No talk of war or race was heard in the sanctuary or hallways (even in the late 1960s). Grown-ups chatted about women’s hats, men’s promotions, and where the family went on vacation. Church was a simple, if elegant, affair.

I don’t mean to say that the church wasn’t the church. Christian education was done well; other things too, I’m sure.

My parents say they truly became Christian (not just churchgoers) while attending some of those adult classes. And to this day, I keep copies on my shelves of the splendid curriculum our denomination published back then for adults.

Still, Sunday in church was pretty subdued. God was dormant or sleeping – at least in that congregation. The Holy Spirit never broke loose and rarely got mentioned. Jesus was the model CEO for dark-suited businessmen. And like the starched white shirts those gentlemen wore, everyone and everything was pretty well buttoned down.

Even the Christmas pageant looked exactly the same every year. And no one complained!

Those days are gone, aren’t they? Church today seems more like biblical times … though I’m not sure that’s a compliment.

Worry and stress come to church with us as they did centuries ago. Stained glass and stone walls can’t keep them away. We walk in with pockets full of nagging concerns and hearts pulsating with misgivings we hardly dare to speak aloud.

Jonah’s preaching in Ninevah, and Paul’s prediction to the Corinthians sound the alarm that is stuck in our throats. “Forty days and it’ll all collapse!” Jonah says. “The appointed time has grown short!” Paul chimes in.

Glancing at the newspaper over breakfast or listening to the morning news while getting dressed, tells the story …

·         Oceans rising, pensions falling, ice caps melting.

·         Banks failing, homes foreclosing.

·         Layoffs and bailouts and loved ones who sometimes get sick and die.

·         The Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl, and lights out at Lambeau.

·         Two wars endangering our brave soldiers.

·         More snowfall this year than at the same point last winter.

·         An airplane in the Hudson River, though thank God and the pilot, everyone was rescued.

·         Belligerence in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

·         The massive cleanup of New Orleans half-finished … and half-forgotten.

·         And apocalyptic peanut butter! (My favorite lunch food, a life-threatening risk!)

That’s just the public stuff. I can’t begin to name the personal losses, setbacks and problems we bring to church each Sunday.

Yes, our spirits were buoyed this week by Barack Obama, and 1.8 million American flags waving proudly as one on the National Mall, and the diminutive Rev. Joseph Lowery, too short to been seen over the microphones, yet causing us all to stand 8-feet tall with his uplifting benediction (my favorite moment of the day).

Yet even with that spectacle under clear blue skies, we know that the good will, grand rhetoric, and genuine intentions proclaimed on that day won’t be worth beans if progress isn’t soon made on our big problems.

Someone has said, “Desperate times call for drastic measures.”

Someone else pipes up (after watching too much TV, I suspect), “Desperate times call for desperate housewives.” (The Onion, newspaper?)

But I say – and I think scripture validates – desperate times call for drastic hope.

In extreme situations, God invites us to new life. Through the word of prophets and apostles, we are told that things can be different. A fresh start awaits.

The Ninevites understood that better than Jonah. (Let me say that in different words. The congregation understood God’s newness better than the preacher did!) He spoke of their doom. But they held out hope of God’s mercy, if they altered their ways.

The Apostle Paul understood God’s newness too, and wrote to the Corinthians about it. To that quarrelsome church, hemmed in by intolerant and intolerable Roman soldiers, Paul declared that “the present form of this world is passing away.”

Notice. He does not say the whole world is passing away, but only its “present form.” He knew that when the old was taken, something better would follow – just as Christ’s suffering and death were followed by a glorious resurrection.

The result of this is … freedom from worry … and freedom to take action.

Paul says, “let those who have wives be as though they had none.” But he’s not anti-women or anti-marriage. He says, let “those who mourn [be] as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though not rejoicing.” But that doesn’t mean he’s pro-Botox, and emotionless faces. Rather, he is giving permission to stop thinking that there is only one single answer, one way of being; and that that one way was and is forever the same.

For Paul, Jesus was a sign – like the car in front of my childhood church, though with a radically different message. To him, Christ was more than a fuzzy feeling in our hearts. For Paul, Jesus stands for (& at) the inaugural moment of a new creation. Christ is the sign and the guarantee of a great, cosmic transformation wrought by God.

Everything is being reordered. “The present form of this world is passing away.” Yet by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we see what can be, if we dare to imagine … and try it. No more are we bound by fixed patterns. Even the most rigid arrangement can be remade.

In the 1950s and 1960s when I was a child, church was all about “keeping things as they are.” Everyone sang, “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen.”

But back in the days of Jonah – and Jesus … and Paul – God didn’t stand pat. God birthed a new freedoms. Freedom to break the old mold. Freedom to live fully. Freedom that can be ours once again, I believe.

I believe that, because trusting God always carries the possibility of canceling debts, breaking bad habits, treading new ground, dealing with worry head-on, building bridges for human connection, exploring new treatments and procedures for healing, and constructing daring new methodologies of relating to each other.

Contentious Corinthians and no-good Ninevites were called to climb out of their ruts. They were invited to act “as though” they had no hope except in God, and simultaneously, “as though”it all depended on them.

They said yes to that daring proposition. And because they did, a new script was written. In God’s power, tombs began to open. Shackles were unlocked. Wounds were bandaged, forgiveness earnestly spoken. Communities came alive, and churches began to thrive. Peace between feuding nations was imparted.

We may be tempted to look to the past with nostalgia. But the truth is, God’s people have never ever been called to maintain a particular status or status quo, but always to live toward a future that God is creating. There is mission yet to be done. Lives to be touched. Teachings to receive, embody and share. Choices to be made about what we need and what to discard. And a God to be worshiped and loved for being so faithful and so daring with us.

These are desperate times, as we are continually reminded – but not nearly as desperate as 30 or 40 years ago when we thought everything was settled and God was almost unecessary.

I have a hunch – an image – that an old Buick Riviera is rusting on a scrapheap somewhere. And the church that used that car as a symbol needs to be scrapped too.

Even now, a new and living church is turning a key and revving up its non-polluting, low-emission engine.

So buckle in. The ride may be bumpy … but the journey continues.