About 25 years ago, when I was serving a church in Tonawanda, my friend David came breezing into the church office to meet me for lunch.  As he came in, he said, “I just heard R.E.M. playing ‘Losing My Religion’ on the radio as I drove to church.  Do you suppose that’s meaningful?”  David has a keen sense of irony, so of course he was not going to let the coincidence of hearing that song escape comment.

 Hearing that song on the way to church is just coincidental.  More people leave the church singing that song, and for good reason. 

Church can put people off.  Churches can be filled with squabbles and hard feelings; they can be fussy and self-involved.  The chasm between the gospel of love and the judgmental attitudes of some church people (especially clergy) is an unbridgeable barrier to being part of the church for many.

I am never surprised to read that surveys indicate the fastest growing religious affiliation is “none.”

Religion can be toxic.  It can spend all its energies dividing the flock between those who are approved and those who are rejected, without a moment’s self-awareness that Jesus opposed the religious authorities of his day for doing that very thing.

Religion can feel strange to outsiders, with our specialized language and our rites and songs that comfort us insiders, but often feel other-worldly to those outside the tradition.  This doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our prayers and practices, but we have to be sure that they still communicate the good news. 

Christianity is an incarnational faith.  It’s audacious claim is that God became genuinely human and lived a fully human life and died a fully human death.  Because we hold this Incarnational faith, we have a sacramental worship.  We believe ordinary stuff like water, bread, wine, and oil connects our daily living with the Divine.

The goal of worship, especially sacramental worship, is to collapse the distinction between sacred and profane.  When we do it just right, we lose our religion.   We lose our religion not because we have lost our faith, but because our encounter with God is not something that only happens in a special place while saying the right words and following the proper rubrics.  Instead, we will go through our daily lives acutely aware that in God we live and move and have our being.

Prayer:  Eternal One, be enfleshed in me, be manifest in this holy space, in this holy time, in this sacrament that is my life.  Amen.