Lay Aside All Earthly Cares

by Terry Mattingly

It's a mere 40 paces from the front door of our church to a four-way stoplight that struggles to control the cars speeding off the nearby Baltimore Beltway and another major street that dissects the neighborhood.

On a cool day, when the doors are open, you can almost hear conversations as folks drive past. It feels like the crossroads is just that close, especially when someone rolls by with a bad muffler.

Sometimes this is funny. Following centuries of tradition, Orthodox Christian congregations don't use musical instruments and, suffice it to say, the oft times tricky vocal process of exchanging musical pitches for our chants, hymns and anthems can be a bit difficult when a fire truck is roaring past. All you can do is smile, wait and hang on for dear life.

But sometimes we share moments that aren't funny at all. It can be jarring when a siren begins softly in the distance and then screams through the intersection, with the ambulance driver blasting his horn in warning. This happened one Sunday morning, just as the priest chanted a prayer asking God to grant: "A Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, peaceful, and a good defense before the fearful judgment seat of Christ, let us ask of the Lord." It was sobering.

Of course, we also hear more than a few automobiles pass by that have been equipped with mega-bass speakers and high-end digital audio systems. It's safe to say that a high percentage of such cars are driven by non- churchgoers.

Anyone with a decent set of ears and a brain containing a few decades worth of rock tunes -- that would be me -- occasionally faces the challenge of singing and praying while ignoring the world just outside the stained-glass windows.

One Sunday, we were singing the ancient Nicene Creed, in which believers proclaim: "I believe ... in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of Very God. ..."

Minutes latter, I heard a car stereo playing the spiraling riff of a rock anthem from the mid-1990s, the radio hit in which Gen-X star Joan Osborne asked: "If God had a face, what would it look like? And would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would have to believe in things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets? ... What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?"

And then there is the news, which can be heard -- in distant, muffled snippets -- at the top and the bottom of every hour during our two-hour liturgies. But let's be honest. The news out there near the sidewalk may be disturbing, but, ultimately, it isn't as disturbing as the news between our ears. The strife in Kosovo is distressing. The latest round of culture wars at the U.S. Supreme Court may numb the mind. But it's the news closer to home that usually sends us to our knees.

Look around at the faces in your church -- or in your office. It's impossible to miss the telltale signs of joy and pain, of lives and loves just beginning and of the burdens that come when lives end or crash.

There's a lovely moment in our services every week where we prepare to celebrate the whole Gospel story, including the painful moments, as well as the ultimate triumph. As we sing about the love of an all-holy God, we also sing, over and over, a call for believers to join in and sing with the angels, while we "lay aside all earthly cares."

The most famous Bible verse that addresses all of this is in the Gospel of St. Matthew. It's easy to quote, but harder to heed when the sirens race by: "(Do) not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day."

But note this fact: the troubles of each day are real. We are not supposed to ignore them. The ambulances are real and they're not going to go away. The news -- like it or not -- is real. But that's not the whole story. What's happening inside the stained-glass windows is real, too.

It's a matter of finding a balance. I can't imagine facing the scream of the sirens without a steady dose of the voices of the angels.

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