Changing the Message
Recently, Carol and I were having dinner at an Italian restaurant. Since we had skipped lunch that day, we went for an early meal at about 4:30. The golden voice of Frank Sinatra greeted us as we followed the hostess through the dining area to the back. After the Sinatra song ended, the sound of another soothing Italian male voice echoed through the establishment, one of those vocalists that illicit romance in the hopes of the romantic. It almost caused me to order a bottle of wine, except I’m not really a wine drinker. I settled for a Sprite, carbonated bubbles included.
The late afternoon was going splendidly…and then it hit 5:30!
The music that seemed to pair so well with pasta changed. Suddenly, almost as if somebody had changed the radio stations on my dad’s old 66 Chrysler Newport, the style of music switched. Senior Hour was over, and Pat Benatar’s rocking voice invaded the premises. And it was an 80’s Rock radio station! The wine connoisseurs had hobbled to their cars already and the beer drinkers had taken their places.
We skipped dessert as Tina Turner came crashing into the serenity.
Someone had done research on average dining-out times compared to age groups and decided that older folk like those early bird specials and middle-agers don’t show up until the 5:00 news is winding down…and the greybeards have wheeled themselves out to and out of the parking lot.
I couldn’t help comparing the situation to church catering. In my pastoring years, I encountered several different worshipping clientele. There was the die-hard hymn crowd, adamant about the shallowness of the new praise songs and hallow-ness of the red-covered hymnal. And there was the praise choruses cohort that enjoyed singing the same words over and over again because repetition somehow brought them closer to the Almighty. Blended services were like pairing a Whopper with a fruit cup instead of fries. Sinatra didn’t mix well with Benatar.
Expository preaching worked better in one setting and with one crowd than the messages that others said were “so relevant to life situations.”
“We’ve got to embrace change if we’re going to survive” would be a rationale that was uttered by the younger crowd, while the older folk would say, “What we’ve been doing has been highly valuable. Don’t just change for the sake of change!”
Jesus valued what had been while proclaiming a new day, a new birth, and a new covenant. Traditions were important, but so was transformation. In fact, He used the traditions to create a path toward transformation.
We have a way of minimizing those who have different tastes than we do, think differently, don’t look like us, make us uncomfortable, or cause us to feel disrespected. Like scratching the record album as the needle is carelessly lifted from it, or the sudden belting of Benatar singing “We belong, we belong” just as a soup spoon of minestrone is carefully raised to our open mouth, change causes cringing and crying, scratches and stains.
In my elder years, I pray that God would poke me about my close-minded responses, lead me into conversations, and push me to be a student of the things, and people, in life I don’t understand. As Pat Benatar would sing (with one additional word inserted), “We all belong, we all belong!”
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