:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Is the New Testament the Last Word on Worship?

Like many evangelicals, I’m a former Catholic. When the priests told me during my high school years that I shouldn’t read the Bible on my own, I had something to rebel over. All it took was a priest to warn me that reading the Bible on my own was dangerous.

It’s ironic. If he’d just encouraged me to read the Bible with a Catholic commentary or answered my questions, there’s a chance I could have remained Catholic. However, as I rebelled against the suffocating hand of the Roman Catholic Church, which is something of a sport here in New England, I found that many Catholic beliefs and practices didn’t originate from the Bible.

It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Mary’s assumption? Gone. Purgatory? Out! The Pope? Fabrication! A celibate priesthood? Oh, please! The mass? Not in there.

As I embraced the Protestant branch of the faith as an evangelical, I continued to play this Bible-based game. Growing dissatisfied with the typical church service, I searched the scriptures along with many others and found that many of our worship practices have no biblical basis.

I had this chip on my shoulder for a while because the only NT command regarding church is a flimsy statement by the author of Hebrews about not forsaking the gathering of fellow Christians. That’s not quite the same as going to a large building, singing four peppy songs, dropping a check in a dish, listening to a 45-minute sermon, and then singing a weepy closing song.

For a period of time I honestly believed that we needed to recover a biblical model for worshipping God, which amounted to using the New Testament as a blue print.

Did the early Christians meet in homes? Yes, so that settles it! Did they preach, sing, or pray? Well, sometimes, so that’s flexible. Did they share a meal together? Absolutely. It’s not a worship service without that!

If you come from an evangelical or conservative background, this game of being the most “biblical” can be quite fun for participants and rather tiring for everyone else in the general vicinity. It’s like we’re all picking out certain parts of the Bible, trying to follow them to the hilt, and completely missing a huge, gaping problem.

Worship has changed and evolved throughout the Bible and since the founding of the early church. Even the various early churches had different kinds of meetings in their homes. One of my seminary professors said, “If you want to model the early church, which one are you going to choose? The church in Corinth?”

As we look for guidance in the scriptures on how to worship God today, Catholics can get wrapped up in preserving their traditional means of worship while Protestants can drive themselves batty trying to be the most biblical and authentic. In reality, as Protestants such as myself strip away our traditions, we actually merge contemporary ways of worship with the Bible and mistake it for somehow being pure and biblically authentic.

While Catholics defend their worship services that are in some ways culturally out of touch because they preserve the worship forms of one particular time in history, Protestants have cut themselves off from the supposed barriers created by tradition in favor of the barriers we have with today’s culture.

Think about this, it has to mean something that many Christians worship in megachurches today, especially churches that used to be former movie theaters and shopping malls. When we incorporate these cultural spaces into our worship, we are not pursuing a pure form of New Testament worship. We are adapting the New Testament to worship practices associated with the entertainment and consumer worship of our time, just as the Catholic Church preserves the worship values of another cultural period.

I hope this disturbs you a little. It disturbs me. I’m not trying to say that worshipping God is a hopeless enterprise. Far from it. However, we need to realize that our forms of worship today are not as pure and biblical as we lead ourselves to believe.

When we can see the forces at work and what is at stake, we’ll be ready to talk about the possibilities for worshipping God today.

Tomorrow’s Post: A Realistic Vision for Worshipping God Today

Worship: From Slaughtering Lambs to Shirts and Ties

In college I used to dress up for church with a shirt and tie. Every Sunday I pulled out my tie rack and matched a tie with a shirt. I never had to match my pants to anything since eighty percent of my pants were khakis. That’s a long story.

Actually, it isn’t. I didn’t want to match my tie with my shirt AND my pants.

Somewhere in my conservative Christian brain, I knew I needed to dress up for church. However, I became a little wrapped up in my church dress code. I was dressing up to project a certain image of myself.

One time God convicted me to give my favorite tie away. It was a little awkward to explain over breakfast with my friend on Sunday morning as I handed the tie over, but I’ll bet you anything that he’s still wearing that tie to this day.

Dressing up for church is fine, especially if you feel that you’re honoring God in some way by it. As for me, I’ve “graduated” to sandals, cargo shorts, and a polo shirt. As I read the Bible, I’m convinced that worshipping God has a lot more to do with actually loving God at a heart level and the forms we use are interchangeable depending on our cultures.

God is really flexible. No tie? No problem! No ox to slaughter? How about a dove? No dove? Well, he’s just glad you came to offer your love to him.

When God began to shape the Israelites into his chosen people who would act as a light to the nations, he first addressed the particulars of how they should worship their Lord. I’ve been reading Deuteronomy lately, and it’s striking to see God basically starting over again with Israel after the first generation died off in the wilderness.

While Moses is walking the Israelites through the particulars of how to worship God and God alone, he regularly hammers home the same theme, “Love the Lord your God.” The word love comes up over and over again.

If we fast-forward to the prophets, we may recall that they often criticized the Israelites for honoring God with their lips, while their hearts remained far from God. They delighted in the forms of worship, but failed to actually love God.

On one occasion, God said through the prophet Isaiah that their burnt offerings were useless because they failed to love and obey the Lord (see Isaiah 1). He wanted their whole-hearted devotion.

It’s particularly telling that even though God made his requirements for worship known in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Psalmist picked up on the central goal of our worship when he wrote in Psalm 40:6-8:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—
   but my ears you have opened—
   burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.
Then I said, “Here I am, I have come—
   it is written about me in the scroll.
I desire to do your will, my God;
   your law is within my heart.”

It strikes me that God chose animal sacrifices and a temple because they were culturally significant at the time of the Israelites. They were vehicles or tools they could use to show their devotion to him.

They sacrificed animals because they were agrarian people who relied on animals to survive. They worshipped in a temple because that’s how people connected with deities then. God mercifully met them where they were and used familiar forms to teach them the importance of worshipping them with everything they had.

The basics of worshipping God remain the same—love the Lord your God. However, the particulars tend to be more flexible than we would imagine.

Tomorrow’s Post: Is the New Testament the Last Word on Worship?

Do the Disturbing Passages Negate the Rest of the Bible?

I’ve read quite a lot about the disturbing passages in the Bible, and I know that many learned authors have tried their best to sort out the nature of God and possible explanations for events such as the conquest of Canaan. Some of us may accept their theories, but I’m going to guess that many of us are dissatisfied by them.

I’ll admit it. I don’t have satisfactory explanations for certain events in the Bible that I simply can’t match up with Jesus.

What now?

For me, 99.9% of the Bible fits together relatively well. There are just a few instances that are hard to stomach. I don’t want to set myself up as a judge of God, and therefore I have an important choice to make. We all do.

Do we let a few troubling passages overshadow everything else in the Bible and the experience of God in our midst today?

After spending so many years studying theology and wrestling with tough passages, I hit a point where I just needed to follow Jesus, worship him, and live in a daily loving relationship with him. There are some gaps in what I understand, but I take these gaps as further evidence that I am not God.

I’m sure my wife appreciates that.

What blows my mind is that God has created us with intelligence and the ability to discern moral choices. I believe he wants us to wrestle with these issues. He wants us to read about the conquest of Canaan and ask him, “What the hell?”

However, he doesn’t want us to stay there feeling bitter, self-righteous, or superior. We have to bring our honest questions to God, while also remembering that we aren’t in this to get 100% on the test, to prove the Bible is flawless, or to prove we are most clever with our theology.

We are committed to Jesus because he is passionate for his people. He doesn’t have to explain every single detail to us, even if we can’t quite understand why he’d leave us hanging sometimes when we bring questions to him.

At the end of the day, we can rest assured that we know quite a lot about God based on the Bible, Jesus is right Savior to follow, and we’ll have to rely on faith when we run into mysteries. I’m OK with that.

I don’t need to spend my time knowing every little thing in the Bible because I am fully known by God, and, despite this, God still wants to be with me.

What do we gain by explaining difficult Bible passages?

Yesterday I mentioned that I generally expect the Bible to provide comfort, guidance, and direction rather than challenging or disturbing me. Today I’d like to discuss what we gain by trying to figure out the disturbing passages of the Bible.

When I read the Psalms, I often run into difficult questions. Why are you far away God? Why do the wicked prosper? Why has calamity fallen upon me? Why do the righteous suffer? This reveals a complex picture of God that defies simple rules or our hope that the Bible fits together neatly.

The God of the Old Testament and the God revealed in the love and suffering of Jesus are the same. And this leaves us with an important question. What do we gain by trying to weave them together seamlessly?

Conservative and liberal Christians have tried to make them fit together and offer a series of scenarios to explain the tough, disturbing passages of the Bible. I’d like to ask, Should we do this?

I’m not saying that it can’t be done. I’m just saying that we may not be able to do it, and in fact, there are some good reasons to believe that our attempts are not necessarily grounded in good reasons.

Mistake #1: God Must Always Make Sense

If we want the Bible to fit together perfectly and to never disturb us, I think we reveal some presuppositions about God and the Bible. We presuppose that God will always act within our understanding. In fact, if God can’t act in ways that we understand, then he can’t be God or at least a good God.

Christians and atheists make this mistake. I’m at a place in my faith where I’ll certainly try to figure God out, but I’m leaning more toward faith and mystery when I can’t make sense of things in the Bible.

Mistake #2: The Bible Is Our Foundation

Many Christians also presuppose that the Bible can’t have unexplained mysteries in order to be the foundation for our faith. There are two problems here. First of all, our faith stands and falls on God himself and his revelation to us. The Bible is part of his essential revelation, but it does not make up the whole.

In fact, we read in the Bible that Jesus lamented how the teachers of the law searched the scriptures and missed the fact that the scriptures pointed to him—as in the person of Jesus. Paul also asserted that there is no other foundation than Jesus Christ. And therefore, our faith surely benefits tremendously with the Bible, but if every Bible was locked up, Christianity would still continue.

In addition, in order for the Bible to be God’s inspired message to us, we should expect it to baffle and confuse us sometimes. If we are dealing with a deity who is truly greater than us, I think it’s reasonable to expect some uncertainty in the Bible. In fact, I’d say that the Bible encourages hard questions and sometimes does not offer the simple, assuring solutions we crave.

What Do We Gain by Explaining the Bible’s Tough Passages?

I’m driving at this simple point: we don’t really gain all that much by trying to “solve” the passages in the Bible that disturb us. No matter where we land on the issues at hand, such as the conquest of Canaan, we’ll have a measure of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.

We can still try to understand the baffling and disturbing passages of the Bible, but we should expect to sometimes hit a number of possible turns that leave us confused and lost. A disturbing passage in the Bible may rattle our faith, but our faith can endure because God is alive today and calling us to follow him despite our doubts.

God can live with our doubts. Can we?

The Next Post: Do the Disturbing Passages Negate the Rest of the Bible?

We Don’t Expect the Bible to Disturb Us

I know this may sound hard to believe, but most days I’m not interested in waking up, opening the Bible, and running into questions about God’s relation to things like genocide or the way divine election works. Call me hopelessly idealistic, but I thought the Bible was supposed to just tell us how to love God and to love others, making it easier for me to follow Jesus in my everyday life.

We are told to read the Bible devotionally, for the purpose of “spiritual growth.” Preachers lament our lack of biblical literacy. Commentators posit that our problems would be solved if only we opened the good book more often.

Lost in this push to get our noses in “The Word” is any notion that the Bible may disturb us, feed our doubts, and possibly even push us further away from God sometimes. For all of the comfort and joy I find in the Bible, we can’t overlook the times, even if they are few and far between, that the Bible rattles us.

Disturbing passages in scripture throw a wrench into things.

We could mention the flood, the conquest of Canaan, or the particulars of divine election. All of them bring up potentially troubling issues for us and have divided Christians over the years. God’s relationship with violence has been especially controversial of late in some circles.

As a follower of Jesus, I believe that these are tough questions, but we ultimately have nothing to fear from them. I have no intention of messing with anyone’s faith here. The questions are out there, so we need to figure out how we should deal with them. I’m sure there will be some who walk away dissatisfied by my conclusions. However, when I wrap this series up on Wednesday, I hope we’ll arrive at a place where we find a healthy mix of logic, faith, and mystery.

This week I’m not aiming to explain away any particular problem in the Bible. Rather, I’d like to take a broader look at how we approach disturbing passages in the Bible, what’s at stake, and how Christians committed to following Jesus can live in the tension they create. 

Tomorrow’s Post: What do we gain by explaining disturbing passages?

When I first read that Jesus said we shouldn’t worry about our basic needs, but that we should make our requests known to God (Luke 11), I was a little confused. Aren’t we supposed to stop worrying and stop bugging God about our needs?

When Jesus says we shouldn’t worry, I imagine Zen-like Christians who sit cross-legged with their palms up, exuding faith and peace as little angels swirl around their heads. Nothing can shake them. They don’t have to ask God for anything.

They’re chill.

In Luke 11 we have a helpful corrective to my conception of what it means to not worry in the midst of seeking God’s Kingdom first. Seeking God’s Kingdom first instead of worrying about our basic needs does not mean we should never ask God for anything. In fact, Jesus wants us to ask him for what we need.

Here’s the thing: if we are seeking what we want, who knows what kinds of selfish things we’ll ask God to do. Our prayers will be filled with words such as “I,” “me,” and “my.”

When we are seeking God’s Kingdom first, we’ll be able to pray with the proper confidence, perspective, and requests. We may be looking for a job or watching the balance of a checking account dwindle, but when we pray we can seek God first and make his Kingdom our top priority before letting him know what’s going down.

We can ask God for things, but we just shouldn’t make those things our God.

It’s not rocket science.

However, when we take these ideas into our everyday lives, we often find that it’s hard to keep God our number one priority when so many things are going wrong. That’s the tension we struggle with here on earth.

Jesus knows we’ll have worries and needs. He can give us what we need. He’s willing to hear our requests and to even grant them. Our challenge will be to keep our priorities straight, making God and his Kingdom our primary concern. Whether we sit with our legs crossed and palms up is up to us.

Worry can act as a signal that something may not be quite right in our lives. If I begin to worry about money, work, bills, or anything material, that’s a good indicator about my priorities. I have an opportunity to ask, “What am I seeking first?”

Yesterday we began looking at worry and how we deal with it. I often deal with my daily concerns through lists.

I’m a big fan of to do lists. I often make them long and unrealistic, providing plenty of opportunities to avoid the stuff I don’t want to do. My to do lists generally indicate what I need to accomplish for my work, though sometimes I don’t include things that I know I should be doing on a regular basis.

For example, I try to write some fiction daily, but I haven’t included fiction writing on my to do list until this year. Oh, and then there’s that whole thing with God and Jesus. They haven’t exactly been on my official list either, even if I try to set aside time for them daily.

And here’s what has been happening: I get worried about the state of a project or something urgent comes up, and so I redouble my efforts. Time has to be drained from somewhere else. I usually protect my exercise time, my sleep, and a little bit of leisure time, and therefore the time with God suffers.

It’s not a conscious choice, and it’s not on the official list either. I just start skimming off time from God.

Of course I end up worrying about everything anyway, even if I spent more time on whatever project it is.

This taps into some key questions we need to ask ourselves regarding worry:

1. Do we believe God knows what we need?

2. Do we believe he will give us what we need at the right time?

3. Do we believe his Kingdom and righteousness are worth seeking ahead of our “needs”?

I don’t think making God’s Kingdom first and breaking free from worry is an instant change. Much like yeast working its way through bread, God’s Kingdom advances in our lives, revealing the places where we need to surrender, trust in him, and seek his Kingdom first by faith, even if we have to wait before returning to our to-do lists.

We gradually learn to place God and his Kingdom at the top of our to do lists, realizing that before we need anything else, he is our living water and sustaining bread. We are starving without feeding on him first and foremost.

The trick is making ourselves believe that we need God more than financial security.

Tomorrow’s post: How to seek God in the midst of uncertainty.

There are times when I read the Bible and Jesus strikes me as an out of touch hippie who would need a lot of help making it in our world today. He’d be a like a foreign exchange student from a jungle or mountain village who needs to learn how a modern economy works with credit cards, jobs, and bills.

Don’t get me started on taking Jesus to a supermarket…

I exaggerate, but you know what I mean. We read Matthew 6 where Jesus says, “Do not worry about money, clothing, food, or anything material,” and then we wonder whether he could really be serious. Has Jesus seen our checking account? Has he noticed how tough it is to find a job out there?

We can’t just toss a net in the nearest lake and subsist on fish around a campfire. That may have worked in Galilee, but the majority of us are stuck with mortgages, rent, student loans, bills, and daily expenses. Most days worry seems warranted.

Jesus is nudging his way into the most personal necessities of our lives. He’s looking at our bills, our meals, and our jobs. And he’s telling us to go against our better judgment by not worrying about them.

Jesus is more than a nice Savior who wants to save us from our sins. He wants to have a say over a daily lives and most basic needs. Discipleship must change our priorities, needs, and desires.

In the previous verse he warned us that we could not serve both God and money, and therefore we need to choose God first. In doing so, our only option is to forsake all worries about our material needs. That’s jarring for me, especially in a slow economy where I need to scrap and fight for every piece of my income.

Others face uncertain work situations, daunting job searches, or a crushing pile of debt. How can we freely worship God when our circumstances demand some kind of worry or concern?

Worry about the basics: that will be our topic this week.

Tomorrow’s post: Worry’s Impact on Our Priorities and Beliefs.

A former pastor of mine used to say, “When you find the perfect church, don’t join it. You’ll only ruin it.” That advice rattled around in the back of my mind when I began trying to reconnect with the church after my burn out.

Could I find a church that lived up to my ideals?

Over the past eight years, I’ve had to rethink the church. And then I had to rethink my rethinking of the church. At some point in the next eight years, I may have to do another rethinking.

Much like a book or a magazine article, one draft rarely does the trick. It usually takes three or four revisions before putting together something useful, and I’m pretty sure that recovering from church burn out works the same way.

There will be false starts, mistakes, and wrong turns.

And if you can bear with me for another metaphor, when we have a bad break up with church, it’s tempting to run after another church that is the exact opposite. And sometimes entirely new churches have been planted in reaction against a supposedly “bad” church.

I used to dream about finding this perfect church that’s led by the second-coming of Paul. And in these churches everything will be amazing, encouraging, biblical, and free from conflict. You know, since all of the churches Paul led were amazing and free from conflict. Well, except for the Galatians. And of course the Corinthians. Come to think of it, the Romans had a pretty rough time as well…

There is no perfect church.

While stepping away from church and ministry in order to heal for a period of time has been difficult, the even more difficult part is figuring out positive, redemptive steps forward that will reconnect with physically present Christian community. Here are some things I’ve been learning in my current revision:

Ask God What’s Most Important

Since there isn’t a perfect church, you need to find the place where God wants you to be. It may be a living room full of Christians, a small church, or a huge old cathedral. Ask God to reveal what’s most important, and seek out a place with a similar emphasis.

We tend to meet and serve God in different ways. Christian community isn’t all about ourselves and our experiences, but it does help to seek out people who have a similar revelation of God.

For example, part of my healing process has been a deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit through my wife and in-laws. That means I can’t attend or serve in a church that isn’t comfortable with  listening to the Holy Spirit, hearing the Spirit, being lead by the Spirit, or acting in the power of the Spirit. That immediately rules out certain churches since I don’t want anything to interfere with the work God is doing in me.

Don’t Jump Right In

If you’ve been burned out by church or ministry, step in with caution and focus on getting to know the people in your community. It’s often easier to serve with others once you get to know them, so invest your time in worshipping together and getting to know one another first.

Chances are that you’ll react against certain things as you try to connect in a new community. It will take time to readjust and figure out what you think of everything. Certain things may grate on you. Don’t expect everything to feel right immediately.

Keep Hoping

If you’re going through a rough season of burn out or frustration with the church, keep hoping. There are Christians all over the place who have either gone through similar experiences or who can empathize with you.

It’s hard to find a community of Christians after wearing yourself out in one of them. However, keep in mind that God isn’t done with you, me, or the people in your former church. He’s doing good things in all of us, even if sometimes we can only see a half empty glass.

Jesus will build his church. The Holy Spirit isn’t burned out. I pray that wherever you’re at, you may find a community of Christians who can support you in your walk with the Lord.

We all need community, especially because none of us are perfect.

I tried to avoid the word “never” when I spoke about my future in the church. I knew I couldn’t return to the same kind of church and ministry that I’d come from, but I also knew that church did many things well. There were a lot of good people seeking God, and I couldn’t overlook that.

Everything wasn’t terrible.

The same is true for just about every other church out there. We may pick apart the service, the wastes of money and time, and the poor management of volunteers, but many churches are filled with good people who desire to worship God and serve others in community.

I’m thankful for that, even if the system itself is deeply flawed sometimes.

Though we’d always had some kind of small group or prayer group to meet with during the years following my burn out, I took my first tentative steps back into a more organized church through the large old doors of the Episcopal church in our small Vermont town.

Though the sermons didn’t teach me much more than Larry the Cucumber’s one-line lessons on Veggie Tales, I found a meaningful space to worship God with others. I was forced to stop, to wait, to pray, and to prepare myself to receive communion.

We weren’t quite regular, but I began to rethink church and my place in it. Though I had some legitimate reasons to be wary of church, I began to look at its dynamics, virtues, and faults with fresh eyes. Here’s what I saw:

Not Every Church is Dysfunctional

Some churches are healthier than others, and there usually are good things going on in even the most unhealthy churches. However, when you gather a bunch of people together and form an organization, problems will emerge because everyone has an opinion about the color of the carpet, the length of the sermon, or the places we should serve. 

Not Every Church-Attendee is Unsympathetic

As I shared my own story and struggles, I met many other Christians who have seen the same problems with the church. Some of them had to get out, while others worked within trying to make it better.

At the beginning of my crash, I didn’t realize there were so many sympathetic folks right in the church. Mind you, there were plenty in the church machine up to their necks who couldn’t reconcile themselves to my distance from the church. However, I met many church-attending Christians who were willing to walk with me during my time of healing and restoration.

God is in the Resurrection Business

While I couldn’t see myself returning to regular church attendance, God has gently guided me back to meaningful Christian community over the years. It has been a process, and I trust it will be different from everyone. So much depends on the kinds of churches in your area.

However, God can change us and the people around us. Don’t give up. He can heal our weariness, pain, and frustration. If you don’t have a physical group of Christians to encourage you, I encourage you to continue asking God to lead you to the right people at the right time.

Don’t Give Up

It was hard to confront my doubts about the church, walk down the red carpet of the Episcopal church, and settle into a cold wooden pew. I was uncomfortable, critical, and a little confused. However, as I tried to sort out the parts of church that I could hold onto, I found that God still had a plan for me in a Christian community.

When God is able to work in the lives of people, miracles can happen. He can heal you, me, and even our communities.