I smelled bad on and off for most of the last 2 years. It was a combination of smoke, sometimes weed and accumulated scent of hundreds of men in a poorly ventilated space with heavy, stale prison air. It was not just me that would absorb that smell. My things, my work bag, books, papers and especially my hair would hold that scent long after I swiped my badge and headed home. I got used to it, and eventually it didn’t even bother me because that was just the smell of where my people were. It was the scent of the space God had called me to, and what a small price to pay to get to carry His light. Sometimes I can still catch a whiff of it on papers or in the Spanish Bible I used in there and my heart aches a little. I miss my brothers dearly.
I don’t smell like that anymore. The women’s prison where I am working now is more well-ventilated and I don’t leave smelling any particular way.
I have been thinking a lot about the Church. I’ve been thinking about the armies of believers, myself included, who attend week after week. I’ve been thinking about the number of sermons we hear, the number of Bible studies we work through, the songs we sing. Why do we do that? What is it for? Is that how we worship God? Is that what He asks of us? Or is that how we prepare to worship God? Is the Bible study the end in itself? Or is it a means to an end? Is our church attendance and participation our spiritual act of service, or is it supposed to equip us for our spiritual acts of service outside the walls of the church? I know our spiritual gifts are given for edifying the body, but for what?
I recently read the following excerpt from a book by Pastor Erwin Lutzer based on an interview he did with a believer whose church met near Auschwitz during WW2.
I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what was happening to Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it because what could we do to stop it? A railroad track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks. We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars. Week after week, the whistle would blow. We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of Jews in route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us. We knew the time the train was coming, and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church, we were singing at the top of our voices. If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.
When I read that, I wondered if God accepted that worship at all. If He was OK with accepting praise from people who were listening to their fellow men screaming while singing doctrinally sound hymns. I wondered in what ways I do the very same thing.
Our world is on fire. In ways unimaginable. Our culture is tearing in half. There is suffering because of evil that touches every person we encounter. People all around us are being broken and harmed in ways that most of them will never speak out loud. Darkness is growing. It is scary. And I am afraid that sometimes our response is that we just sing louder. We hunker down behind our computer screens posting opinions and memes from behind our walls where we feel safe. But broken people don’t need a meme. They need a friend. Jesus didn’t give inspirational one liners from a distance. He gave himself. Up close. He didn’t stay safe. Or clean. He invaded darkness all the way to the cross, to the grave, to hell itself and back out again. I think He smelled like smoke. He asks us to follow Him. Follow Him to prisons, to shelters, to alleys, to schools. To places where there is no light. I think we are supposed to do that. Not stop singing. Not stop edifying and building the Church. But from that foundation, go out into the darkness, into the lives of the hurt and lost, holding the light we’ve been given. I think we are supposed to smell like smoke.
willnotbetaken 