Snow is falling heavily today. This morning, some locations reported two inches per hour. This wouldn’t normally be news in a Central New York January, but we haven’t seen any significant snowfall this season before today. Tree limbs are thickly flocked. Traffic lights are hanging at a 45-degree angle in a stiff wind that sometimes gusts to 40 miles per hour. Since the snow is falling too quickly for the plows to keep up, the roads are sloshy and slippery, and visibility is down to a few hundred feet. Snow is forecast to fall steadily for the next 24 hours.
In many other parts of the country, this would be time to close school, shut up shop, and hunker down at home. We’d be doing the same thing if this were a monstrous nor’easter dumping a couple of feet of snow. But it’s not that at all. This storm is just the return of winter to the Snow Belt – finally. School is open, traffic is flowing (albeit slower than usual), consumers and cashiers are moving with a sense of urgency, but not frantically. The plow drivers are feeling their oats for the first time in nine months. We seem to have been rustled out of our post-holiday slumber. Normal life has returned.
In a post last month, I intimated that many residents here reflexively complain about snow, as if the less snow the better. The ideal winter, to hear some people talk, would be no winter at all. Florida, in other words. Some of us have a different view. We appreciate having four real seasons. We believe that heavy snow is preferable to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. We also recognize that a snow-blanketed ground lightens up otherwise dark days. On sunny days, the snow sparkle under a cobalt winter sky is breathtaking.
Complaining about snow in Central New York is a little like griping about the people in church. You can’t have one without the other. A frustrated fellow pastor once said to me, laughing at himself before he finished his sentence, “Church would be a whole lot easier if it weren’t for people.” Easier, yes. And pointless. The challenge of community formation is a source of both deep frustration and great blessing. You can’t know the blessing without the frustration. It is tempting to focus on the maddening human imperfections, the flies in the holy ointment, so to speak, rather than on the privilege of sharing worship, a faith heritage, and the grace of God with others.
Churches are notoriously inefficient for the simple reason that we do not hire and fire our members. To the extent that we are effective in our witness and mission, it is the result of the patient, painstaking work of integrating disparate individuals into the congregation and aligning their gifts with the church’s various tasks and responsibilities.
If church leaders press ahead with this work, even when it feels about as effective as clearing your driveway in the middle of a snowstorm, the eventual result is more than an effective organization. It is also the redemption of sinners; the experience of God’s transforming grace in and among us. We become witnesses of grace in a world that knows too little of it.
Snow is more than something to shovel. It is a huge part of our life in Central New York. We can wear sour faces all winter complaining about our plight, or we can welcome the snow (up to a point, anyway!) for the beauty it brings to the landscape and the appreciation it inspires in us for all the seasons. It’s the same with the life of the church. People are more than sinners. We are the subjects of God’s redemption. We can complain about all the human imperfections that frustrate the church’s ability to reach its institutional potential, or we can celebrate how the grace of God, little by little, is transforming all these lives. To be sure, we are called to make the very best use of all the gifts that God has assembled, but we do so patiently and with longsuffering. Whatever we lack in institutional efficiency, God more than compensates with an abundance of grace.
Let it snow. Let the people come.
Copyright 2012 by J. Mark Lawson
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