When you belong to a community you should, ideally, feel as comfortable in its houses of worship as you do on its streets, its schools, its stores, parks and restaurants.

Which isn’t to say that one has to be polytheistic. It’s just that visiting a community’s religious spaces is a meaningful way to learn about your neighbors and friends as they engage in the spiritual side of their lives.

Indeed, to see people at church, synagogue, mosque or Buddhist temple is to see a very private side of them. But it’s public, too. It can feel intrusive to walk in on a religious group that is not your own. But it can also be highly instructive and even enlightening.

To see people in their house of worship is to observe them at their most quiet, their most thoughtful and inwardly focused.

Last week I went to Sunday services at Park Slope’s Old First Dutch Reformed Church. I went, partially, because the title of Pastor Meeter’s sermon, “Passionate Physicality,” intrigued me.

Later the title was changed to “Passionate Spirituality” but I still decided to check out what he had to say.

He even quoted me in the sermon:

“Passionate Physicality.” The context of that sermon title is my preaching theme for the last few months: “Passionate Spirituality.” I posted that sermon title, and it was seen by a friend of mine, not from this church, who didn’t know the context, and she asked me what I would be preaching about with “passionate physicality.” Well, sex, I guess! There’s a mystery. What are our bodies for? What is their glory? Where do we get passionate?

We have these bodies. It’s in our bodies that we carry our emotions and our histories, our talents and our characters. I’d like to be a great musician, but I just don’t have it in my body. I’d like to be good in sports, or relaxed and easy-going, or warm and fuzzy, but I don’t have it in my body. If I had grown up differently, I might have become a decent dancer, but it’s too late now, not with my history.

Would you like to be different than you are? Would you like to be transformed? Do you consider it desirable? Do you believe it’s possible? Do you believe that people can be changed? So often in pre-marital counseling I have given the warning that people do not change. “If you think he’s going to change after you get married, you’re in for it. You’re not going to change him.”

We know that cultures change. We know that civilizations change. We know that nations can be transformed. Indeed, the Bible considers it the will of God that the ethics of the Torah and the Gospel should gradually transform the nations. But what about individuals? What about you?

I found Meeter’s sermon to be very interesting on a personal level. Indeed, who  isn’t interested in personal transformation and the ways that we seek to change ourselves in this life.

I particularly liked when Meeter said that one’s personal transformation will never be complete and that individuals will always struggle with aspects of our bodies and our history.

That’s where maintenance comes in. But he was encouraging in this way:

The way you handle your history and your body is already part of your transformation, the weekly converting of your tragedy into comedy. Your personal transformation will always be partly a mystery. Yes, it will be a fact, but you will never completely comprehend it or control it, and you must give up some part of it to others, to those who love you and confirm you, to God and to the community.

Ah, back to community.

The service was not in the sanctuary, where it’s easy to slip in and out  unnoticed. Instead it was in the community room on the first floor, a smaller space arranged like a church in the round, which excuded the feeling of a warm community gathered together but welcoming of strangers like me.

I liked the modest, almost humble feeling in the smaller space and the fact that the pastor seemed to be a part of the service, but not the ego (or super ego) at the center of it. It seems that he gives the congregation a chance to express themselves, through music, song, prayer, recitation, etc.

There was a comfortable give and take between the audience and the pastor. At one point Meeter asked for the  meaning of algorithm (a word that he used in his sermon but wasn’t sure if he’d used it correctly) and an older woman sitting near me gave a very precise answer.

The sermon itself was thought provoking. Especially the idea that transformation is complete even as it is being accomplished and continuously maintained.