"Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is to just show up.” --Brene Brown, author
Five people sitting out in the pews. Just five souls in a cavernous space designed to seat three hundred souls.
Five. That’s the smallest number of worshippers I’ve preached to in thirty-five years of professional ministry. It was a mom, a dad and three boys on a Christmas Sunday several years ago. So many people came to church just the night before on the eve of December 24th, that most of those faithful folks just wanted to stay at home in their PJ’s and watch loved ones open presents and sip hot coffee and relax by a toasty fire.
Which I totally get! But, thank you God, for the five who showed up!
To show up. To be present. To return to a place and a people week after week after week. To be faithful to others who count on you to be there for them. To go to some happening when you want to go, sure, but to also go the times you really don’t want to go, yet you show up because you made a commitment to others. To claim your seat. To be there for others by being right here, right now. To be right as rain and as dependable as the day is long because folks trust you to show up. Need you too show up.
Showing up.
You can’t make a church or a team or a choir or a workplace or a country or a family or a neighborhood if folks don’t show up. But when folks do show up faithfully and consistently, well, then anything is possible. As a church pastor, I am in the business of encouraging and teaching the folks I serve to show up—for others, for people who are hurting and to show up for God too. If people fail to show up in the community God has created in my little corner of creation, things will eventually fall apart. Empty pews. Empty church.
No showing up. No community.
No “we” if everyone skipped Sunday sabbath or missed the fair committee; or forgot to go to choir practice or neglected to show up at Sunday night middle school youth group; or if we tried to help build a house for a neighbor in need but then no one showed up to swing a hammer or we hoped to feed the hungry but not enough servers said “I will help!”…well, then, we are all kind of doomed.
All of this life would not be, cannot be, if we fail to show up for others, for causes greater than ourselves, and just for the joy of hanging out with others. I know I’m biased about the human need to show up. I’m a joiner, a “show-er up-per type.” Always have been. There was football teams as a kid and weekly church youth group and then summer camp counseling and now a choir to sing in and a trivia team to compete on and a dinner party to host with a tight circle of old friends. All of these places and spaces worked and still work for one simple reason.
We all show up.
Last week there was a fascinating and depressing article in “The Atlantic” magazine, by Derek Thompson, about the dying nature of hanging out in community, in the United States, how in just one generation America has gone from a nation of folks who love to associate and to show up, to a nation of individuals staying home and staying away. The statistics he cites are brutal for the vital work of building community, the need to have community at the center of our civic life.
“From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.”
When we don’t show up, we spend less and less time with our fellow townsfolk and fellow citizens and persons next door. Less socializing leads to less trust and less trust means more suspicion and contempt for the other. “I don’t know them! I don’t like them!” Ever wonder why right now in the U.S. so many of us are treating each other with such hostility, fear, and anger? Why some of our leaders work harder to split us apart rather than bring us together?
Maybe it’s because we are just not showing up enough.
Showing up for the kids at t-ball and coaching. Showing up at a house of worship to sing together and work for the common good together. Showing up for each other in public meetings, not just to make a point and then storm out of the room, but to listen to what someone else has to say and to stay. The more we show up, the better chance we have of being in communities of mutual care and respect.
Or I guess can just sit at home on my couch and scroll on my phone through Reddit or Facebook or maybe binge another TV show on Netflix and just feel lonely. And alone. I don’t show up for others. I don’t give others a chance to show up for me.
Wow, that is sad.
Instead, God willing and God inspiring, I’d rather show up and sing with my choir mates and show up and take in a movie with an old friend and show up at church and drink bad coffee and share gentle gossip and help with the food drive and show up at school committee and try to figure out together, what is the highest good for the most kids in town.
Showing up: hope to see you there. I’ll save you a seat.
The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.
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