The church encounters the experience of grace in worship where a prayer of intercession invites us to crawl out of our pre-occupation and pray for the hungry halfway around the world; in church school where a teenager meets an adult with whom she feels she can talk later when she has a problem; in working in a soup kitchen or a night shelter when we suddenly realize what Christ meant when he said that when we served the least of these we were serving him; in Session meetings when the Spirit seems so powerful that the Session is surprised at its own willingness to be generous with its building and in a multitude of other experiences both big and small.
Indeed we need to be cautious about expecting revelation only in special moments. “It is precisely in the commonplace surroundings of every day that the church is believed and experienced, it is not in moments of spiritual exaltation, but in the monotony and severity of daily life, and in the regular worship of God that we come to understand the church’s full significance.” (The Communion of the Sazints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, page 198; NY; 1963)
There is a danger in relying on mountaintop experiences for the nurture of our faith. First, we measure the strength of our faith by our emotional response which is a notoriously unstable and very fluid part of our nature. Second, since high emotional experiences cannot be sustained over a long period of time, they cause faith to be based more on memory than the continuing experience of God’s nurture. Third, they cause us to not look with expectation to the very ordinary experiences which can offer us continuing nurture.
It is because we read the Scripture regularly that a verse or a story will suddenly leap out at us and speak to us in a moment of need. It is because we witness the small experiences of forgiveness that go on within the community on a regular basis that we understand the profound impact of forgiveness on our lives when we most need it.
