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I don’t mind keeping things simple. As I lead drum circle, I put myself in a place of prayer and start with a simple rhythm.
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Everyone joins in and we let the sound of the drums wash over us as we drum and pray together. As everyone becomes more confident in their drumming, I allow my rhythms to get more complicated. Some people continue with the simple rhthym. Some people try to join me with more adventurous drumming. And sometimes people get lost because it has gotten a little too complicated and I have to pull back my own drumming to help everyone get back on the same page.
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I do the same thing with music on Sunday mornings. We do songs we know that we all love. We try new songs that are more complicated as we wade into new musical ideas. Every once in a while a new song falls apart and we need to fall back on a song that is more baked into our memory.
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Think about how this applies to our theology. We shape our worship and activities around the idea that we celebrate Jesus’ love with everyone. That is our most basic rhythm. As we pray and worship together, we explore a lot of complicated ideas. What happens when we die? Are we really eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood when we take communion? Why do bad things happen to me even though I try to be a good person? What does Jesus’ love look like with people who are doing bad things? What does the Bible say about [insert hot social or political topic here].
The ideas get really complicated, and even among the people who go to school for theology and continue their education through reflection and reading, it is hard to get everyone to agree. So sometimes we have to pull back and remember our basic rhythm: Jesus loves everyone.
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I don’t mind bringing my blogs back to this every time. Our Sunday sermons can get heavy and we have a lot of prayers on our hearts. As we serve together we are confronted with the realities of a world in need of so many more things than we can do individually, but that we chip away at as a church because we know we are called to share God’s love. So as usual, I’m here to remind you that Jesus loves all of us, and if that is the only thing we ever know, then that is enough.
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John