We can't box God in forever

Gift wraps don't last forever

Wrapping gifts is one of my favorite parts of Christmas and family members' birthdays. I like to receive beautifully wrapped gifts, too. I almost hate for them to be opened, because it messes up the wrappings I've enjoyed looking at!

I often save gift-wrappings. They're so pretty, and they represent so much love and work. In my attic I have boxes and boxes of smushed bows, wrinkled gift-wrap paper, and droopy artificial flowers and leaves. Whenever I start to wrap a gift I dig through them, hoping to find something reusable.

Sometimes I can reuse an especially gorgeous piece of wrapping paper for several years by cutting off its tom places and sticky spots. But after each trimming I must use it for a smaller package, and hiding its tears and wrinkles keeps getting harder.

I reuse package decorations, too. My daughter and I exchanged one pink foil angel every Christmas for years. I'd put it on one of my gifts to my mother one year, and she'd save it and use it on a gift for me or my daughter the next year. So the pink angel has always reminded me of my mother, and of the fun she and my daughter and I have had wrapping gifts together over the years.

The pink angel seemed like an essential part of our family Christmas. But it is in pieces in an attic box now, too dilapidated to use. I wanted it to last forever, but it couldn't.

What about church wrappings?

We have a similar problem in the church, but it's harder to recognize there.

The church's wrappings include favorite hymns that we've sung for years. They include the words in which we've most often said prayers and creeds and favorite Bible verses. Our wrappings include methods of organizing the church, and ideas about who should do which jobs.

We love many of these features of the church. They evoke fond memories of important experiences and beloved people. Saving the beautiful packages in which our beliefs and memories have been wrapped helps us feel safe and comfortable.

But change comes. New circumstances arise, which our old church wrappings won't cover. People get new insights from God and propose new wrappings to fit them. New hymns appear, and words are changed in old favorites. A new pastor comes and starts using a new method of taking communion, or a new order of worship.

Our personal lives change, too. We enter new stages of life, or disasters strike. Our old beliefs no longer cover what we're experiencing, but the thought of changing them is terrifying. We're afraid that if we replace our old wrappings we won't like the new ones as well. Even looking into the old ones is scary, because we fear that we might find them empty. So instead of looking for new wrappings that will fit the new situations and the new God-given insights, we cling fiercely to our old ones and try to keep them from being too open.

When we accept all the church's traditional beliefs and practices without ever re-evaluating them, we're likely to think that anyone who advocates change is un-Christian. And if the church changes we may think it has become faithless or pointless. We may even decide that belief in God is pointless.

When this happens it means that we're worshipping mere wrappings and containers, not God. We're worshipping pictures of God instead of God. The Bible calls this idolatry. It's worshipping a human product that was meant to point us toward God, instead of worshipping God.

God is infinite, so God won't fit into any finite, humanly constructed package. Whenever we try to keep God in our packages, God will keep breaking out. We can't expect any religious custom, any pattern of church organization, or any description of God to last forever, no matter how beautiful it may be or how well it may serve us temporarily. Our traditions are merely packages in which God's presence is shown to us for a limited time.

Like my pink foil angel and wrinkled paper, our church wrappings can't last forever.

Tradition-breakers started our traditions

Ironically, many of our present church traditions were begun by Christians who dared to discard older traditions that no longer expressed God's will for the church, but we're rarely willing to do that now.

The United Methodist Church came into existence only because John Wesley, a clergyman in eighteenth-century England, made drastic changes from the religious practices that were customary in the Church of England that he was part of. He discarded old wrappings and developed new ones.

In order to revitalize worship and reach contemporary people, Wesley preached in factories and in town squares instead of in church buildings. He and his brother wrote new hymns, often using the tunes of popular songs, including some pub songs. But we Methodists now tend to consider Wesley's hymns and methods sacred. We're not willing to change any of them even if they're no longer effective. We try to preserve Wesley's creations instead of looking for equally creative answers to today's needs.

When needed change finally takes place and we get used to the new way, we usually wonder why anyone ever opposed it. We feel this way now about banning slavery and racial segregation, for example, and letting women vote. Can't we learn from experience, and make the changes that God through prophetic voices asks us to make?

We never see all of God

God often has to wrench us loose from strongly held beliefs and cherished traditions in order to show us more of God. Because God is infinite we can never fully see or describe God, so the need to learn more about God, describe God in new ways, and express our faith in new ways never ends.

We miss God's "new thing" when we try to save all the old things forever. We're busy saving cocoons when God has butterflies ready to emerge. We're saving seeds instead of burying them so they can become flowers.

We can't afford to keep stifling the new life God has in store for us, by trying to make it stay inside our traditional wrappings.