Sent Back Into Monday

Sunday is genuinely good. She wants that said first because otherwise this sounds like a complaint about a church and it is not.

She is fed. She sings and means it. There are two people there who know things about her that nobody at work knows, and last month somebody said something in a corridor that she has thought about eleven times since.

Then it finishes.

It finishes in the way it finishes: a last song, a notice about the thing on Wednesday, somebody saying have a good week, and then a room turning into a room. Chairs. Coats. Somebody's child running. The lights going up.

She goes home. Sunday evening is fine.

Monday at ten past nine she is at a desk with a screen and forty one emails, and there is a thing with a colleague that starts at about quarter past, and by half past nine everything from the day before has gone.

Not faded. Gone, the way a dream goes: she could not now tell you what the second song was.

She has been assuming, for about two years, that this is a problem with her attention span, or her spiritual constitution, or the fact that she does not read enough in the week.

What she has never once wondered is whether anything was actually put on her at the end.

Grace, love, communion, and then they went back to Corinth

Sit down at the desk before you open anything, because the last line of a difficult letter in the written word is the exact thing you have been missing, the Holy Spirit is named in it, and it is worth noticing where those people were about to go.

Corinth was not a gentle church. That letter has grief in it, and defense, and things Paul plainly did not enjoy writing.

And it ends like this.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.2 Corinthians 13:14

Grace, love, communion. Three things named and put on a whole church at once.

And then those people put the letter down and went back to their work, in a port city, on an ordinary morning, with everything in their lives exactly as it was before the letter arrived.

That last line is not a farewell. A farewell tells people the thing is over. This puts three things on them for the going.

Hear this at your own desk. You are not deficient, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture ends its hardest letter by placing grace and love and communion on people who are about to go back to an ordinary week, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is named in that line as the one who goes with them.

Now let me name what is actually happening on a Sunday, and I want to be fair, because nothing wrong is being done.

You are being released. The room ends, the notices are read, somebody says have a good week, and the building lets you out. That is not what the written word does at the end, and it is not what the Holy Spirit does either.

Released and sent are two different things and only one of them has a sentence in it.

That is not a criticism of anybody. Almost nowhere does this any more, and the have a good week is warm and genuine and it is not a blessing and was never meant to be.

Hear this too, and let it stop two years of self diagnosis. Your attention span is not the problem, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts three named things on a church for the week ahead, and the Spirit of God is one of the three and He is not confined to a building or to a Sunday.

And now the thing that is available on Monday, and it costs eleven seconds.

Nobody may say it over you. So say it over yourself, at the desk, before you open the forty one emails.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with me this day.

It is not an emotional exercise and it is not designed to make Sunday last longer. It is a sentence, said at a beginning, over a woman who is about to go into a week, and it does exactly what the end of that letter did for a port city full of people with complicated lives.