Things I learned in kindergarten

“Good morning, Church!” said no one ever when I was young. Church was a noun, as in ‘the building.’ It was where you went on Sunday. ‘The church is at the corner of 5^th and Walnut.’ It was also an adjective, as in, you had a church wedding. You had a church fellowship (the event where you ate way too much macaroni and cheese casserole plus multiple pies and chocolate desserts.) Years later, it started to be stressed that we were the church and the building was just where the church held meetings. This idea is taking a long time to settle in as a given because old habits die hard. Not unlike being obliged to drop the ‘e’ from judgement or the ‘u’ from words like colour, neighbour, and humour, or Saviour. I’m submissive to my ever-insistent spellchecker but I’m secretly including those favoured letters in my head.

So yes, old habits, old teachings, give way only with a great deal of battering and prodding and repetition, plus a near-equal measure of stubborn resistance aka griping. That said, I have great sympathy for Jesus’ disciples. What they’d always heard at Synagogue was what was, for them, settled truth, the status quo, the divine scenario they were waiting to see rolled out before their eyes. Only, it wasn’t.

When Jesus was strolling around Galilee handpicking those who would become his disciples, none of his group suspected they were living that divinely appointed scenario. None recognized their choosing as a key component of how God was orchestrating His Master Plan. Even as wild and extraordinary things took place before their eyes, their Sunday School training remained not only intact, but raised grave questions in their minds (as in ‘Who is this??’). They lived for over three years with Jesus convinced he was the Messiah and with the message of their childhood causing them significant mental conflict, as in ‘When do we get weapons?’, ‘When does the revolt begin?’ ‘When do we show our anger, our frustrations?’ The gentle Jesus, meek and mild, neglected to give any sign of preparing that kind of uprising. Oh sure, he was riling the religious rulers, all right. They’d even put a price on his head. He seemed not to care, seemed to anticipate it. What we refer to as the Last Supper must have been a supremely weird evening. Jesus flouted tradition, arriving heavily burdened, going far off script, acting like a household servant, washing their feet, talking resignedly about being betrayed. The unspoken question had to be something like ‘What’s going on? Why is he talking about dying? Is this some strange kind of pre-war pep talk?’

Yep. Childhood training doesn’t allow for new thinking without a major battle. Got any leftovers of your own? Looking forward to seeing you lifelong learners tomorrow, 10 AM, 4 PM, FR.  PD