Chapel Post

Praise in an awe-deficient world

A Lutheran Christian life for today:Praise in an awe-deficient world
A Story by Peter W. Marty

Worship is a weekly opportunity to practice not being God
If you've checked out local or national news coverage recently, you probably haven't seen much eyewitness reporting on worship. Unlike college football highlights, convenience store robberies and lottery winner announcements, Christian worship doesn't make the news. For one thing, it's tough to report on. It's a bit like trying to get compelling footage of a nice family meal where grace is spoken over turkey tetrazzini and beneath warm candlelight. Worship isn't easy to grasp from the outside. You have to experience it.

To plenty of skeptics and distant observers, Christian worship is useless behavior. Who would participate except dreamy-eyed believers, full of patience for invisible things and strangely willing to endure hard pews for an hour at a stretch? Never mind that many other facets of a meaningful life could come under similar scrutiny for being useless. Why kiss someone you love? What's the point of staring through wired safety glass at a newborn in a hospital nursery? What is the value of giving a gift to someone who has no intention of repaying you, much less expressing thanks?

Still others shrink from worship because mystery baffles them. So does that ornate cross with the gold trim paint, mounted on the wall. So does that assembly of people who seem to embrace wonder as if it were their sixth sense. Many of these unwilling participants turn first to nature: "Oh, I can worship God much more meaningfully outdoors than I can stuck indoors with a group of people singing some half ancient song."

Yet where is that Ponderosa pine that will tell you to "love your neighbor as yourself?" If Yosemite's Half Dome reminds us to love our enemies, it could only be through graffiti carved somewhere in its granite face.

Nature may be the handiwork of God. But nature doesn't pass an offering plate to help feed the hungry, clothe the poor or meet the needs of cholera-stricken refugees. Nature gives no clue as to how sinners might be reconciled to God and invested with a hope in Christ. The best-looking tulip garden in the Netherlands can't declare the forgiveness of your sins.

The great choral conductor Robert Shaw once commented that "the absolute minimum conditions for worship are a sense of mystery and an admission of pain." People incapable of handling either one will shy away. They will not thirst to know the sweep of salvation. Praise will never emerge as their mother tongue. The personal hang-ups, anxieties and broken shards of sin that can't be airbrushed from their life will have to be shoved under the couch. Unless we're willing to lose ourselves in the unfathomable mystery of God and the unsearchable pain that goes with being human, worship may always prove too much to bear. We will never get to enjoy the gospel of Jesus Christ coursing through our veins.

Lutheran Christians turn to worship as the central melody for their lives because they want a place where God is taken seriously and where they can be taken seriously. For them, worship is their weekly opportunity to practice not being God.

Faithful worshipers are those who get tired of living paltry lives in an awe-deficient world. They know that the activities we undertake in life in repeat fashion always possess the greatest potential to shape us in a long-term way.

So faithful people return time and again to communally confess sin, eat gratefully from the communion table, and sing the spirited liturgies and songs of the church. These recurring commitments add up to great significance. They become our human response to a "for us" God who keeps acting so graciously in our favor.

If we stay away from worship too long, we start to make God into our own image. The privatization of our spiritual journey only transforms God to be virtually anything we want. Once back in the habit and flow of worship, however, and surrounded by a mix of people who don't mirror every facet of our life, something delightful happens. We discover God to be quietly remaking us into God's own image. We encounter a rhythm stronger than our heartbeat. We find ourselves full of more joy than we can contain.