Anyone who has been at Boston Square in the middle of the summer knows that we don’t have air conditioning. Most Sundays it’s not too bad of an issue—the outside air cools off enough at night that the sanctuary is a reasonable temperature in the morning. Only on those Sundays when it’s been hot for a number of days in a row or when it just doesn’t cool off at night is the sanctuary nearly unbearable.
A couple of weeks ago the weather was beastly hot. All week long. And the nights hardly cooled off at all. With an off-the-charts level of humidity. The folks that have been designated to make decisions about such things at Boston Square began an email thread early in the week with alarm messages about how hot it was likely to be on Sunday. About how the previous week was already sweltering, and all signs pointed to the coming Sunday being noticeably worse. We went back and forth about the wisdom of canceling the service or not or simply moving everything to zoom.
In the end, we decided to go ahead as usual, but encourage people to take advantage of the zoom option if they had been finding the heat in the sanctuary to be oppressive. I myself had had a hard time pealing myself from the pew the week before when it was time to go forward to help lead communion, and I admit the thought of leading worship from the air conditioning of home was certainly tempting. Not surprisingly, attendance in the sanctuary was noticeably lighter that week, and participants on zoom were more numerous.
There are a handful of mitigating tactics we can take to try to get the temperature in the sanctuary to come down. Opening the windows is a start. Running exhaust fans in the balcony is even better. They pull out the hot air that rises to the top of the sanctuary and create a draft that pulls cooler air in through the lower windows. I knew we had one exhaust fan already in the balcony that we had moved up when we first started worshiping together in person to encourage airflow to help reduce the risk of exposure to COVID, but there was still one that was in the narthex in the back of the sanctuary. I knew that if we had any hope of cooling down the sanctuary, we needed both fans running all night long in the balcony.
So Saturday night, after I put the finishing touches on the sermon, I headed over to church and lugged the second exhaust fan up to the balcony. I placed it in the window right next to the fan that was already up there. As I was bracing it between the window and the sill, however, I noticed the storm window was open only a few inches. I laughed at myself at how close I had come to running the fan with only about two inches of open screen. I also shook my head, wondering why this storm window hadn’t been open all summer—the balcony windows facing Kalamazoo Ave are under an overhang, after all, and rain isn’t a concern. As I tried to brace it open, however, I discovered that it wouldn’t hold in place higher than it was, so I ended up removing the whole storm window and then put the fan in place.
Satisfied that the exhaust fan was now doing its job, I started my way down the stairs when I had a sudden thought. I had no memory of removing the storm window when I had placed the original exhaust fan in its place back at the beginning of summer. A little troubled, I made my way to the original fan and, to my alarm, discovered that the storm window was completely down, blocking the fan in its entirety. We’d been running this fan all summer, every Sunday morning, to no avail. It’d been blowing directly into a closed window all summer long.
I pulled this exhaust fan out of the window, took out the storm window, and replaced the fan so it could begin actually pulling hot air out of the sanctuary.
Sometimes what we think has been helping us all along turns out to have been ineffective the whole time—or worse, even working against us. Sometimes what we think is a vibrant faith life turns out to just be going through the motions. Sometimes we convince ourselves that everything is a-okay and we’re growing in our walk with God when in reality we’re slowly wilting away.
James talks about faith without works being dead. That is, we think we have faith. We think our spiritual lives are just fine. But we’re deceiving ourselves if our faith doesn’t shape the way we live. If we don’t put that faith into practice through a life of service or prayer or extravagant love. If our faith is only about something we believe—well, it’s a bit like a fan that blowing directly into a window. It’s not very useful. And we might be fooling ourselves.
Rich Mullins, a contemporary Christian singer who was popular when I was in high school, had a short song, Screen Door, that’s stuck with me since I first heard it:
It's about as useless as a
screen door on a submarine
Faith without works baby
It just ain't happenin'
One is your left hand one is your right
It'll take two strong arms to hold on tight
Some folks cut off their nose just to spite their face
I think you need some works to show for your alleged faith
Well there's a difference you know
'Tween having faith and playing make believe
One will make you grow the other one just make you sleep
Talk about it
But I really think you oughtta take a leap off of the ship
Before you claim to walk on water
Faith without works is like a song you can't sing
It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine
Faith comes from God and every word that He breathes
He lets you take it to your heart so you can give it hands and feet
It's gotta be active if it's gonna be alive
You gotta put it into practice
Otherwise
It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine
Faith without works baby it just ain't happenin'
One is your right hand one is your left
It's your light your guide your life and your breath
Faith without works is like a song you can't sing
It's about as useless as a screen door on a submarine
Faith without works—about as useless as a screen door on a
submarine. Or perhaps a fan that’s blowing directly into a window.
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