Mission is Messy (Or, Why I Drank an Energy Drink at 7 in the Evening)

I knew I'd pay for it later, but I drank it anyway.

Have you had one of those energy drinks? The ones that have lots of caffeine and other ingredients meant to keep you awake? I don’t recommend them. Especially if it is 7pm and you hope to get a good night's sleep in a few hours.

This is the point in the movie where they do a freeze frame and the voice-over says, "Yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I got here."

It Starts With Joy

I recently was able to spend a whole evening with the sweet Afghan refugee family that First Pres. is co-sponsoring through the refugee resettlement office here in Harrisonburg. I had driven some of the family to see where their new home is going to be. Just before I had come to visit at the hotel where they are staying temporarily, the resettlement office had informed them that they had found them a house! The family was very excited. They’ve been here almost 3 months and have had a lot of trouble finding permanent housing, so they wanted to go see this new house right away.

I hadn’t planned on driving them anywhere that night. But when I saw their excitement I offered and off we went! They liked the house and I think they will be very happy there.

On the way back to the hotel, I asked if they needed anything from one of the Halal markets in Harrisonburg. (“Halal” is the Islamic equivalent of “Kosher” in the Jewish faith.) They said "yes," and we stopped for a few minutes. When they came back to the car, the husband in the family handed me a can and said with a broad smile on his face, “This is for you, my friend!”

It was an energy drink. It was generous, a celebratory gift, given out of joy. It was also 7pm. He also opened it for me.

So, I did the only thing I could do. I took it, thanked him with a big smile… and I drank it.

Needless to say, I had trouble going to sleep that night and I didn’t sleep well at all that the night. (I’m not in college anymore so I don’t handle caffeine as well as I used to!)

The "Difficulties" of Ministry

This also wasn’t the first “difficulty” I’d had in relating to this family. Some of the folks on our co-sponsorship team at First Pres. have also had struggles while trying to connect with this family.

Our cultures and religion are different, there's a language barrier, and this family has suffered horrible loss and tragedy as they've had to flee their home in Afghanistan. And life here has had its challenges. Their phones have been out of service multiple times when we wanted or needed to connect them to services.

Then, during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the women in the family didn’t want to meet up with anyone because they needed rest and wanted to pray.

In short, the journey for them and for us has been messy.

But Messy Ministry is Jesus' Example

But when I think about mission, I think about mess. Mission is messy. In fact, the very heart of the Good News of the Gospel is that God decided to send Jesus down into the middle of the mess that we call life. Jesus came to save us from ourselves and from the sin inside every human that hurts ourselves, hurts others, and pushes God away. 

Jesus was born into the mess, lived in the mess, loved those consumed by the mess, and died a bloody, painful, messy death for us. Then, God raised him from the dead and broke the power of sin and death, forever transforming the mess of this world altogether!

Jesus calls those of us who follow him and claim him as Lord to engage the mess. Despite our best efforts, we can’t sanitize mission. Mission can’t be cleaned up and made to look beautiful so that we can feel more comfortable doing the work God calls us to. If we want to be like Jesus, we have to jump into the mess of life with others. We have to expect that it’s going to be hard and frustrating and messy.

(For a vivid illustration of the messiness of Incarnation, see "God Once Again Gets His Hands Dirty" at Modern Reformation. Also, is this theme ideal for Christmas? See this article in Christianity Today.)

Let's Not Hide the Mess

So often, worship is expected to be clean and "professional." If you’re like me in your pastoral role, then you sometimes put pressure on yourself to make sure your preaching is excellent, high-quality, and non-messy. It’s easy to avoid inviting regular folks to share or lead or pray. We can avoid the mess if we just do it ourselves.

Maybe worse, it’s easy to sanitize everything on Sunday, preaching, worship, the works. But if our congregation lives in the mess all week and sees manicured perfection on Sunday, what's the lesson we're teaching? Surely we don't want it to be that the life of following Jesus is not messy—we know otherwise.

Moreover, we all know from experience that in ministry, so often, it is when we dive into the mess, someone is going to experience Jesus. 

As much as that energy drink kept me up that night, it was a gift—messy, inconvenient, and real. What would it look like for our services to embody the Good News' embrace of mess? 

It's a genuine question that I hope you ask. How can we convey on Sunday morning, through our preaching and worship, that mess is normal for disciples of Jesus, that mess is often where God is working, and that serving God can mean you don't get a good night's sleep (and that's ok)?

(For further reading on authentic preaching that doesn’t shy away from life's messiness, see our book review of Austin Carty’s Some of the Words are Theirs and How to Preach with Authenticity.)

Originally published on First Presbyterian Church of Harrisonburg, Virginia's blog on May 15, 2022 [church site]. Revised and expanded for The Pastor's Workshop.