Sunday morning I used the poem "Obedience" by Sietze Buning in my message. Since that time I have been struck by how absolutely foreign this poem is to our experience. The idea of letting crops be destroyed rather than skipping worship makes little sense to most of us. We would find all kinds of reasons to harvest the crops. But more than that, the idea that gathering for worship is a central activity for us is also somewhat strange. We find all kinds of reasons not to go to worship from going to the cottage, to being on vacation, to some event our kids are a part of. When it is rather convenient and there isn't something that trumps it, we go to worship. Many of us go to worship regularly--but I wonder if that's because there isn't too much that trumps worship on Sunday mornings. If there were.... I wonder if one of the reasons fewer and fewer of us come to evening worship is because there all kinds of things that trump that worship time. We speak of busy lives and so we need time with our family (could worship be family time?). In the summer there is the beach that calls to us. In the winter there are those bad roads and great football games--plus we may well have already gone to worship on Sunday morning and isn't one time a Sunday more than enough?
In all of this I sympathize with the struggle to get to worship and other (sometimes easier, more appealing things) things taking the place of worship. I've had it more than once on Sunday evening that it sounds so much better to stay home, not leave my comfortable chair. Oddly though, when I get there (when I'm not leading worship) I discover that most of the time having been at worship seems like a far better use of time than what I was doing.
All that being said, here's Buning's poem for reflection
Were my parents right or wrong not to mow the ripe oats that Sunday morning with the rainstorm threatening?
I reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man and of the ox fallen into the pit. Without an oats crop, I argued, the cattle would need to survive on town-bought oats and then it wouldn't pay to keep them. Isn't selling cattle at a loss like an ox in a pit?
My parents did not argue. We went to church. We sang the usual psalms louder than usual-- we, and the others whose harvests were at stake:
"Jerusalem, where blessing waits, Our feet are standing in thy gates."
"God be merciful to me; On thy grace I rest my plea."
Dominie's spur-of-the-moment concession: "He rides on the clouds, the wings of the storm; The lightning and wind his missions perform."
Dominie made no concessions on sermon length: "Five Good Reasons for Infant Baptism," Though we heard little of it, for more floods came and more winds blew and beat upon that House than we had figured on, even, more lighting and thunder and hail the size of pullet eggs. Falling branches snapped the electric wires.
We sang the closing psalm without the organ and in the dark:
"Ye seed from Abraham descended, God's covenant love is never ended."
Afterward we rode by our oats field, flattened.
"We still will mow it," Dad said. "Ten bushels to the acre, maybe, what would have been fifty if I had mowed right after milking and if the whole family had shocked. We could have had it weatherproof before the storm."
Later at dinner Dad said, "God was testing us. I'm glad we went." "Those psalms never gave me such a lift as this morning," Mother said, "I wouldn't have missed it." And even I thought but did not say, How guilty we would feel now if we had saved the harvest. The one time Dad asked me why I live in a Black neighborhood, I reminded him of that Sunday morning. Immediately he understood."
Fathers often fail to pass on to sons their harvest customs for harvesting grain or real estate or anything. No matter, so long as fathers pass on to sons another more important pattern defined as absolutely as muddlers like us can manage: obedience.
