Messner brings the heat in a chapel to remember

Bagpipe editor in chief, Zach McElrath, caught dozing off after chapel last spring.

As Chaplain Aaron Messner got up to speak last Monday, I looked to the left of me and saw people sinking in their chairs, getting ready to go to sleep. I saw someone in front of me reading their homework for class. As I was sitting down I sent a quick text, and as I closed my phone I heard “today will be about what chapel expects from you.” As Messner unfolded what he meant, he brought up multiple things that distract us in chapel.

From sleeping to leaving early, he pointed out that these things disengage us from being active participants in chapel lectures. He told the story of pastors labeling us the “toughest place to preach in our denomination,” “hard to the gospel,” and saying that “those kids just don’t care.” At that moment, regardless if you agreed with Messner or not, you could hear the sound of conviction silence.

Messner hammered us with injunctions that were hard to hear, injunctions that attacked our phones, our schedules and our hearts. Messner’s lecture seemed to be taken as legalism, an attack on our freedoms and our rights. However, when he talked about people sleeping in chapel, he wasn’t attacking people who are running on very few hours of sleep, he was addressing “intentional disengagement,” a kind of sleeping that is an issue of our hearts. The real question is, are we actively seeking to disengage from chapel because it doesn’t caress our ears every second?

Let’s face it, brothers and sisters, we expect to have our entertainment here and now and when we are not entertained, we could care less. I have struggled with being interested in chapel, however, we all have a responsibility to the community (the kingdom) that we have asked God to be a part of to listen and to respect God’s word. Regardless of what we think our rights are; the fact remains that Jesus died for us. He gave us hope, he gave us ears, and he gave us life. Yet we cannot find it in ourselves to give him 35 minutes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Messner was not proposing a legalistic agenda aimed at garnering for Covenant a better “listening audience reputation” or increasing the limelight for chapel speakers. He was trying to open our eyes to the fact that we have an inconsistent hermeneutic. We talk about how “Jesus died for us” and how we “owe him everything.” Yet in our everyday actions we cannot give up 35 minutes to engage in worship and the Word. This was the root of the problem Messner was addressing.

Let me be clear, not all ideas and thoughts given in chapel are perfect, but Messner isn’t aiming for perfect. This campus is in trouble, because we shouldn’t be in arms over giving 35 minutes to Jesus every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after he gave us his whole life. Let’s drop our defenses far enough to realize just how often we put our own agendas over the preaching of the Word of God.