:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

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?

There’s a certain kind of blog post out there that I have both written on my own blog and have read on others. It usually has a title like this: “Why I don’t go to church.”

The author typically says church services are overly produced, inauthentic, insular, and generally ineffective. In addition, greater attention to church services has led to Christians investing their time and money on themselves rather than the commission to go and make disciples.

These critiques are often legitimate. The spirit of them is not always (perhaps rarely) constructive, but regardless, the number of affirming comments and links to these posts prove that such views are wide spread. There are many Christians who are fed up with church services and who have stopped attending, even if they still cling to Jesus. Others attend church services, but only because they have no other option. Still others have started house churches.

I’m not interested in debating whether these folks are right or wrong. In fact, I identify with them in many ways. I didn’t attend a church service regularly from 2002-2009, though I still gathered with Christians for prayer and fellowship in addition to trying out a bunch of churches for various stretches of time.

Living in southern Vermont for four years didn’t help us find a church that matched our beliefs.

Starting next Friday, I’m going to post a series of reasons why I now go to church. In the midst of our debates, we run into a lot of critique that isn’t constructive and arguments for the church that run something like this—you’ve got to just settle.

We can do better. I hope to advance some good reasons why we should go to church, while remaining open to the possibility that sometimes attending a traditional church service isn’t what God has called some of us to do. In fact, if we’re going to attend a church service at all, then I think we should have some good reasons for doing so.

I hope to supply some good reasons.

Next Friday: In kicking off my series, my first reason why I go to church right now is because I have found a church where I can find sacred space to meet with God. I’ll discuss the difference between actually meeting with God in the midst of a worship service as opposed to only singing about and learning about God in a worship service. There is a world of difference between the two.

Next Week’s Series: As of Monday I’ll begin a new series I’ve entitled, “What to Do When the Bible Disturbs You.”

Some days I want to just want to wake up and feel joyful.

Is that too much to ask?

It’s not like joy is a nonrenewable resource. Don’t you think God could be a tad more generous in doling it out, making for happier people who enjoy their lives and aren’t moping about?

Sometimes I wonder if God is stingy with the joy he gives.

However, it’s far more likely that the problem is that I’m stingy with the joy he has given to me. And that gives us something a bit more constructive to talk about…

I’m not a big fan of pat solutions or those holy hand grenades that go something like, “Just read the Bible and Jesus will make it better! or “Pray to make it go away!” or “We have the Holy Spirit, so what else do we need?”

No human being can actually live in our complex world for long on those mantras without going insane. It feels insultingly elementary to suggest that joy is readily available for me from a God who gives it freely.

I mean, are all of the problems in the joy pipeline a result of me plugging it up?

I can’t speak for you and your situation, but from what I can tell, that may be the case. I can’t remember who told me this first, but I’m guessing it was my mother-in-law. She said that we find victory in worship.

It’s like we’re hardwired to worship God. When we worship God and experience him, we’re running on the right kind of fuel that brings us joy and puts us in the place God intends us to be.

Can you imagine trying to run a car on old motor oil or vegetable oil? It’s not like either will work just because they are a kind of oil. Cars will sputter and go kaput without the right kind of fuel.

And therefore, if joy is our destination, it’s not like we have a lot of different options in order to attain the true joy that God offers us. It’s not like we can pursue money, pride, or career advancement all week and then drop a complaint in the comment box at church when we don’t have the joy of God in our lives.

We reap what we sow. That’s the hard, but simple truth that Christianity pounds into us.

If we desire the joy of God and we don’t have it, then the chances are that we are either distracted by something else or not clearing a space to be with God for times of worship and devotion. I can’t speak for everyone on this, and Christianity rarely boils down to one-size-fits-all answers. However, if we want to experience the joy of the Lord, I think we at least know where to start.

Looking for more posts about joy? Drop by Bonnie Gray’s Faith Barrista blog now for more thoughts on joy and a blog post that actually manages to fully develop only ONE metaphor.

The Right and Wrong Kinds of Routines

Yesterday I wrote about how we rarely intentionally drift away from God. It happens gradually over time. However, sometimes we’ll realize that our hearts are far away from God, even if we’re still involved in the service and worship that good Christians should do.

One of the ways we can remain close to God is through our routines. This feels almost counterintuitive since the Pharisees that Jesus criticized had the routine part down. In fact, the wrong kinds of routines can do a great deal of harm to our relationship with God.

The Wrong Routines

The wrong routines place more value in performing religious acts than in actually meeting with God. Rather than using Bible reading, prayer, or song to draw near to God, we keep God at arm’s length by passing through the motions. We honor God with our lips while resisting him.

We treat these practices as punches to our time card. Once we have our God-time, we can move on with our lives without guilt gnawing at the backs of our minds.

Can we imagine a marriage surviving if the husband talks to his wife for thirty minutes each day and then says, “See ya!”?

Cultivating the Right Routines

I find more intimacy with God when I can establish a healthy routine that typically involves listening to him, confessing, worshipping, and reading scripture. It needs to be somewhat flexible since God wants to relate with us. He doesn’t have a time card to punch for us after we’ve read two chapters of scripture.

Without a routine, I’m likely to let my day determine my intimacy with God, which means that I’ll do little more than bless myself and complain to God about something. Routines with a little flexibility can carve out a chunk of time where we are free to be with God free from distractions and our to-do lists.

Ironically, setting up a disciplined routine time with God may be the most freeing, live-giving thing we can do for our relationships with God.

Tomorrow’s Post: Threats to Our Intimacy with God

I used to lead worship. Hymns were my enemy. I always lost my place in the verses. The chord changes were insane. And they usually ended with some wondrous transport to the gleaming starry hosts of heaven while the earth boiled and flamed below under God’s judgment.

Not exactly the “Kingdom of God coming to earth” theology I prefer…

And then I attended a wedding where everyone in the wedding party sang professionally in a church choir.

Hymns made sense in that context. Hymns are a different kind of animal from my preferred poppy, classic rock songs. They reflected the theology, music, and culture of a different time and/or style. They weren’t irrelevant. They were just different.

I could sing hymns by way of honoring another tradition and learning from it.

As we  look at the shifts in American Christianity of late, I’d like to start with worship. Worship is the low-hanging fruit that will give us a pretty clear picture of what has happened among American Protestants of late and what we should do now since it is often influenced dramatically by culture.

What Has Happened

One of the themes I’m going to hammer on this week is the ignorance of evangelicals regarding their past. When it comes to forms of worship, we have always mingled biblical worship with our culture. It’s inevitable.

We could (like some authors) call many of the influences on our worship “pagan,” but in reality there is no one biblical model for worshipping God. We are always adapting biblical worship with forms that are familiar to us. Therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that each new generation is looking for ways to worship God that feel familiar.

Even if we tried to worship in stripped down house churches along the most strictly biblical lines we can figure out, I’m certain that future generations will one day critique us for allowing the hyper-individuality of postmodernism to fragment our worship into small, independent (not interdependent) meetings that function very little like the “body” of Christ.

Robert Webber has written about our recent worship shifts as liturgy has become popular among many who were raised in lower church traditions. Dan Kimball’s Emerging Church book focused on this as well, where he, in many ways, wrote about retooling typical evangelical worship services to incorporate a broader range of ancient prayer practices.

Whether we call it culture or we call it a generational shift, many Christians are seeking different forms of worship than what they knew 15-20 years ago. Many of these forms incorporate older elements such as weekly communion, scripture readings, and liturgical prayer.

As I’ve watched my own shifts from hymns to contemporary to a more liturgical form of worship, it’s tempting to say that one is more authentic or relevant than another. We can make value judgments about which one is the most authentic way to worship God, never mind the other formats of worship we don’t even consider from around the world.

In the past 15 years I’ve seen many Christians react against either a dry form of liturgy or a shallow form of contemporary worship. They are seeking a deeper experience with God, and oftentimes that search takes them to other forms of worship in various denominations.

What Should We Do Now?

As we try to hear God today, the forms of worship that take shape in various cultures, time periods, and regions will have different strengths and weaknesses, and we should expect them to change with time.

Perhaps in twenty years Christian worship music will have a more driving beat and a greater emphasis on a simple chorus—think Lady Gaga meets David Crowder. Perhaps worship services will place a greater emphasis on silence and holy space as our work and entertainment follow us wherever we go.

I can’t predict what the future will look like, but I can say that after glimpsing our past, we can expect more shifts. Liturgies will be modified. Some will seek a high church expression, while others will be drawn to a decentralized, simple meeting.

In a sense, we should critique the past. Our forms of worship need to change as we encounter God afresh in the present. However, we should not cut ourselves off from the past. More times than not, a people cut off from their past are at the mercy of the present culture and thereby more vulnerable to its influence.

In our worship we live in an “ancient-future” tension that Webber speaks of, though we recognize that we are all making different kinds of shifts. Some are leaving the ancient forms for the contemporary, while others are leaving the contemporary for the ancient forms. 

It should not surprise us that we’re passionate about our forms of worship. It’s important. And yet, we should not let our worship, that will be predictably diverse, cause more divisions than necessary.

Worship has always boiled down to meeting with the Lord, and a good worship service will create space and provide tools to accomplish that. Hymns are no holier than the latest pop worship song, since the real goal is leading us into God’s presence so that he can meet with his people and lead us.

“God has not given us a Spirit of fear” is one of those snippets of scripture that I passed over throughout high school, college, and even seminary. Yeah, yeah, God is good. While we should have a healthy fear of him, the normal Christian life is characterized by peace and hope and love and blue skies and daisies. I knew it.

Meanwhile I lived as a captive to fear—namely a spirit of fear.

So I had my anxiety attacks, I began each day trying to catch my breath, and drove other people nuts with my anxiety about toasters catching on fire, losing my keys, or dying from high cholesterol.

When receiving prayer one day, that verse from Romans 8:15 worked like a real sword that the Spirit used to hack at the spirit of fear that had taken hold in my life. It’s something I’ve written about often because in that moment a passage of scripture did what it’s supposed to do: freed me to know God in a deeper way.

The Bible was unchained, and God’s Kingdom became a reality that made my seminary classes seem a puddle in sandbox in comparison to the wind and waves that crashed onto a beach.

Yesterday I looked into some reasons why we shouldn’t read the Bible. Today, I want to give some good reasons why we should read the Bible.

Storing Up

The daily work of reading the Bible may not yield fantastic results immediately. I read that verse from Romans many times without anything happening. However, at just the right time God used that verse to break me free. What are we storing up today for God’s work tomorrow?

Reorienting

Scripture reconnects us with God’s plans, methods, and hope for us. The Bible tells us how things were, how they are, and how they will become. We have every reason to expect the world of the Bible to become our world—it was written to be taken seriously rather than partially explained away.

That means there will be some cultural changes, but God is still actively involved in his creation and through his people. The Bible keeps us on the same page with God’s counter-narrative that challenges the twisted values of our culture’s narrative that seep into our lives and into the Church. The Bible keeps us moving into God’s Kingdom.

While the Bible is about God, it is very much a story written for us today.

Worshipping

Yesterday I mentioned that God is not found in the pages of the Bible per se, but the Bible does lead us to God—it testifies concerning the God we long to meet. To that point, using scripture in our personal and corporate worship is a way to take our focus away from ourselves and our problems.

I’m sure I’m missing some other reasons to read the Bible, but these are the big three in my experience. Anything else to add?

Tomorrow’s Post: OK, we know why we should read the Bible, but how should we do it? I’ll share a few thoughts on how to keep the same old 66 books fresh and relevant.

I hate going to the dentist. It’s never that bad. But as someone with some anxiety issues, reason and past experience need not intervene. While trying to think of something else, I turned to my old friend NPR.

There was this guy on talking about Goldman Sachs, the jerks who crashed the economy on the release date of my book, and how they screwed a lot of people by betting against their own investments. It sounded pretty shady and infuriating.

The reporter explained the basics, and about five minutes into the show I felt like I understood the situation. As I considered it, I realized that I probably wouldn’t profit all that much from listening to the show. I mean, what is a freelance writer and speaker in Eastern Connecticut going to do about a bunch of bankers holed up in Manhattan?

I began to think in terms of what would benefit me most, and what would last. This clearly was not it.

While I enjoy NPR, I even listened to Fresh Air on the way back, at that moment I realized that the most important and lasting thing I could do was to turn off the radio and to worship God. For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about his faith, worship can become a rare commodity.

The default for humanity is self. Even theology can become about ourselves, what we know, and building up our own reputations. Throughout scripture there is a tension between humanity’s focus on self and the place of God as the only one worthy of worship.

Intentionally disconnecting from the noise of life in order to worship God can turn a day from an effort to accomplish what I want to serving God with everything I do and asking him what he’d like me to do. Unless we’re convinced that God is worthy of our worship, we won’t give him his proper place as Lord of our lives.

Sometimes it takes the threat of a dentist to drive that message home.

I am a computer addict who bows down before the square, glowing screen of my lap top. It’s my portal into creativity, friendships, and information. Sometimes it’s hard to step away from it, to remove its life by powering it down, and to clamp it shut.

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Noticing my addiction had grown worse with my attempt to make a go of full time freelance writing, I took action during Lent. While I couldn’t completely cut myself off from the computer, I developed an action plan.

6 PM and Sunday Cut Off

At 6 PM each night I shut down my computer and closed the screen. I even put a book or some papers on top of it so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Laugh at me if you must, but I know some of you can relate. On Sundays I left the computer closed  up, not even touching it.

It was freeing at first, but toward the last week of Lent I had a few projects running that demanded some immediate attention in order to meet deadlines. Since my main goal was to avoid mindlessly flipping through blogs and social media sites, I gave myself a few passes to send crucial e-mails and to visit some work-related sites.

Overall, I realized that while I’m driven to work hard and don’t mind long hours, I tend to work myself into the ground and to burn out while frittering my time away on social media. Setting aside a few hours in the evening as a safe zone helped me stay up on dishes, laundry, and other household stuff while also making me more available to hang out with my wife when she wasn’t working on a paper for grad school. I even had some time to read a book or magazine for leisure.

Imagine that!

In addition, I never missed anything all that important be limiting my time online. That’s still a tough one to believe despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Worship in the Morning

The other part of my Lent that is still a work in progress was my morning worship time. This involved sitting to journal some thoughts and listening to some worship music for about 20 minutes. I often did something else while listening to the music. On the days I forgot to take this time, I noticed a huge different in my attitude and in my overall approach to my day.

It is wonderful to sit, to wait for God to come, and to spend time in his presence. When I rush into my day without that, things can go downhill quickly. Jesus described himself as a vine that we are connected to as branches. We don’t stay connected by  saying a prayer once. Remaining in Jesus is a daily practice.

What’s Next…

I’ll keep working on the morning worship time. I’m not calling it devotions because my time in scripture is separate from this. I need time to be reoriented by scripture, but I also need time to sit, listen, and praise him. I’m going to generally adhere to the 6 PM and Sunday cut off, but I’ll give myself more generous allowances if need be.

In the process of working on this, I’ve discovered that I’m particularly obsessed with checking my e-mail. I think it took hold during my last dead-end job. I’d check my e-mail constantly because the interactions with people outside of my workplace helped preserve my sanity—reminding me that my dysfunctional employer was not the norm. Now that I’m freelancing full time I need to break the e-mail-checking habit.

Checking my e-mail has turned into a control and obsession problem in which I can’t stand the thought that an important e-mail could be waiting for me. Whether or not that e-mail is there, and it frequently isn’t, I need to let go of that control. I’m thinking of setting up 3-4 e-mail checking times throughout my day.

What did you give up for Lent?

What were benefits?

What’s next?

I’m going to keep working on taking

When trying to figure out what I should give up for Lent, I’ve decided to make a list of what I can’t live without and to pick one item from that list. However, this season I ran into an interesting twist.

I began to think of what I’m longing for—what I lack and desire but have not been able to find.

My list of things I can’t live without would include my computer, the internet, social media, coffee, nice pens, nice journals, etc. However, I realized that this Lent I needed to create some boundaries in order to cultivate space where certain things could happen that have not been happening lately.

I think my professional life has some decent boundaries in and of itself, but the problem is that my professional life has crept into my personal time. Since I’m working on writing and speaking full time, it’s very hard to know when to stop—and I rarely stop once evening comes.

My wife always looks at me in shock on the few occasions when I sit on the couch reading a book. That is not good.

I need to stop more. I need to create some boundaries from the internet and my work. I need sacred space.

While I admire those who are giving up social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter for Lent, my larger problem is when I fritter my time away on social media, blogs, and web stuff in the evening when I should relax, pray, read, or let a rabbit climb all over me. I don’t feel like these things invade my professional life too much, but they are a problem at home.

So this Lent I’m creating two boundaries.

The first is a space of roughly 20 minutes each day for worship. This means worship music, prayer, or whatever. Some of this needs to be time specifically set apart for worship without any other distractions, but I’m also planning to focus on playing worship music while working throughout the day.

The other is a 6 PM internet cut off time. After 6 PM I am not allowed online, save for the few occasions when I’ll have to check my e-mail for something important. Even then, I’ll only use my wife’s computer where I don’t have any social media or blog settings saved—and it’s frittering my time away on social media and blogs that I’m far more worried about.

It’s already been wonderful. I fought off the urge last night to go online, even if Lent hadn’t begun, and enjoyed reading and journaling for a few hours. One rabbit hopped onto my lap and furiously licked my jeans and the pillow next to me.

I have a feeling that Lent is going to be wonderful for my soul… and my rabbits.

My church celebrates communion each Sunday and follows it with a time of prayer and songs of worship. It’s always deeply moving and powerful, standing in stark contrast to the first half of the service that is fine, but doesn’t affect my spirit so deeply.

I don’t intend to be critical of one part of the service over another. Simply put: I’m moved by one part and not so much by the other. It just happens.

Perhaps some things are best left unexplained, but when I think about the communion table and the celebration of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, I’m reminded of what some in my family have described in their approach to church: gathering around the person of Jesus. I find it striking that communion moves us around Jesus in both word and deed, acting out his saving work, confessing our sins, and then drawing near to worship in gratitude.

This is highly significant, as Jesus essentially ensured that when we gathered as Christian communities we would focus directly on him and his saving message. Maybe we don’t need to roll out the bread and juice each week, but the one essential should be Jesus himself.

“Does this focus on Jesus?” becomes our litmus test in determining the value of all we do. We may want to focus on truth and the Bible, but unless that truth is the truth of Christ and the Bible as it leads to Christ, we have only succeeded in putting together a nice service, rather than a gathering around Jesus.

That helps me a lot. It keeps things simple. It makes me realize that we have included communion services in our worship because it’s hard to screw up, to make it about ourselves. It’s quite hard to break bread and then think about the latest theology debate or political campaign.

When we participate in this sacrament that has endured for 2,000 years, we are tapping into a reminder that Jesus himself instituted. He didn’t leave us with a Bible and tell us to preach from it, though there’s nothing wrong with that. He told us that our gatherings should focus on him, and he provided a visual aid just in case we ever forgot.