Just The Package, Please

Just the Package, Please

Stores have begun to stock packages with no product. Have you noticed? Reach for an antihistamine, and you are likely to find an empty sleeve which must be taken to the pharmacist in exchange for the goods. The packages are simply ads for the real thing, which must be acquired elsewhere. I imagine these packages themselves are incentive enough for consumers to keep demanding their contents, but I’m struck by the fact that many of us, when shopping for something to believe in, buy just the packaging of faith and are satisfied to leave without the goods.

We buy the trappings of religion—stirring music, a certain worship style, or a charismatic teacher—and manage to content ourselves with these. We equate demonstration with devotion, and liturgy with love. I know because I’ve done it. We find the package enough and miss the God inside. The Bible records that even God’s chosen people preferred to keep him at arm’s length, dealing with him through a human go-between. In Jesus’ day, the ritual obedience of the religious powers that be completely satisfied their appetite for holiness, to the point where they wanted nothing to do with the very holy God-in-the-flesh who stood before them!

But God’s got our number. Or at least he’s got mine. If I manage to leave church content without having encountered him, he is not deterred. He sidles up to me while I’m pumping gas or eating lunch, or he confronts me in the words of a stranger or in the kiss of a friend. “He sockets into everything that is,” writes Annie Dillard. “Loud as music, filling the grasses and skies, his day spreads rising at home in the hundred senses. He rises, new and surrounding . . . wholly here and emptied—flung and flowing, sowing, unseen, and flown.”^a

There you go. I might be satisfied with his empty package, but he is not satisfied with my half-filled heart. He means to own it—and will use whatever means he finds at hand to do just that. Given my weakness for pretty wrappings and trappings, I’m exceedingly thankful that he does.

These people come near me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Isaiah 29:13, NIV

^a Annie Dillard, The Annie Dillard Reader (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 436.