TRENDING [Sat, 12-9-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—TRENDING [Sat, 12-9-23]

 

These days, “trending” is an almost holy word. Open up a web site of any kind and they’ll tell you what is trending, as though it’s somehow important just because a lot of folks are falling for it.

Have you noticed the new trend in outside house lights, like for porches and beside garage doors? They look like flames flickering. I thought our neighbor’s house was on fire! Not so. I think these new lights must be an homage to the Moses story in Exodus. The fire keeps burning, but the fixture is not consumed.

Which reminds me of a contemporary trend I’m told about but have not observed myself. Young preachers, especially women, preach barefoot, because in that burning bush story, Moses was told to take off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. It makes me worry about what they might take off when they are preaching about the Garden of Eden story.

I don’t know why it’s mainly young women who preach barefoot. Maybe avoiding high heels? That would certainly be a relief to their Achilles tendons.

These worship trends happen every once in a while. Some seminary professor gets a burr under the saddle about being “authentic,” which means literal. When I was in seminary, the trend was not mentioning the deceased in a funeral service, because it was a worship service, and worship was to be about God only. That might work in a seminary chapel. It definitely does not in a normal congregation. I found that out the hard way.

Another trend was treating a wedding as a worship service. It’s about God, not the couple, or their marriage. So the officiant should preach a long boring sermon about the place of God in marriage. I never tried that, but I have seen it done. Not quite sure how it came out, since I went to sleep.

Now the trend is not to light the Peace candle in the Advent wreath, since the world is so non-peaceful right now, especially in the “holy” land. But isn’t that exactly when we need the peace candle? And the Prince of Peace?

Seminary students assume their profs know what they’re talking about. So they try to be “authentic.” They don’t know that the reason these people are seminary profs is that a congregation would not put up with their “authenticity.”

When our granddaughter was in kindergarten, she reported to her mother one day that a classmate had been sent to the principal’s office because he called another child a “tootiehead.” “Do you know what a tootiehead is?” Katie asked. “No, but apparently the teacher does.”

No, I’m not saying that seminary profs are tootieheads. It’s literally true that “some of my best friends are…” This simply happened to come up next in my story queue. Just like Brigid’s teacher, though, I’m sure God knows who the tootieheads are.

John Robert McFarland