Worship From That Side

There is certainly a different perspective I have worshiping God while sitting in the chancel than I do while sitting in a pew. It was demonstrated to me a few weeks ago on vacation.

The service rushed past. We used Divine Service I so I didn’t need to look at the book much. Instead, I sang those words and looked at my daughters standing next to me, helping them, encouraging them, cajoling them into participating. We sang the hymns, and one was entirely unfamiliar. Hard to sing, hard to pay attention to the words. It was slow and felt like this would be going on for some time.

The sermon was hard to listen to. Between listening on a clinical level, evaluating his delivery and so forth, and the distractions around me, I didn’t get much out of it. Communion liturgy went by quickly, but I was at the altar rail longer than usual. I had the sense of being a half-engaged participant, kind of like the feeling of being at a graduation ceremony. I felt detached during that hour, and it seemed as if the time before and the visiting after were more engaging and concrete than the hour siting, standing, listening, singing and praying when I remembered to.

Perhaps all this simply means I am made for standing up here, because I can’t stand out there very well. Perhaps it means that having children in church is really a big job like people tell me. Could it mean that the way we “do church” is wrong? That we need more engaging things like Rick Warren talks about? I don’t think so. Singing songs that may have moved me emotionally still would have meant me singing and being distracted by the kids, the guy who sang below every note, the huge bass voice in the back and my mother’s whispered singing that somehow I could still hear under everything else. A dynamic, flash animated, audio-visual sermon I still would have dissected. Dramatic dialogues and skits professional acted would have made the hour feel like a short play rather than a graduation ceremony. I don’t think any of those things designed to engage people really do if something else is wrong.

And that’s it.Something else was wrong. It wasn’t the vacancy pastor at my parent’s church that was bad. He did a fine job. The organist played well, only slower than I liked.The liturgy was done well, different than I do it, but well. Communion was conducted well. It wasn’t that these things were boring. I wasn’t bored. But I was distracted, I was unconnected, I was on auto-pilot or parent mode or whatever you want to call it. I had the problem.

It's like this: would you rather spend the evening reading God's Holy Word or the latest Dean Koontz novel? One of them would be more entertaining. One of them would tempt me to stay up too late reading. One could be called a "page-turner." Hint: it's the one that has a serial killer, a dog, and a government conspiracy. But we would never say that we should stop reading God's Word, or that God's Holy Precious Life-Giving Word is somehow less than a Dean Koontz novel. Or that the Holy Scriptures were not written as well. Or that something is wrong with the Bible because of how I feel about reading it. Something is clearly wrong with me when Dean Koontz is more appealing than Deuteronomy.

You could say that there's a divine reason the Scriptures cannot be read like a "page-turner" can. You could say that the spiritual encounter with the living God, with the Eternal Word who continues to speak in Scripture cannot be borne for too long. Priests and Pastors alike testify that presiding at the liturgy is an exhausting task. St. Christopher is right: when you carry Jesus you carry the world He bears as well. Likewise with Scripture: our finite souls cannot bear the infinite Word too long in our weakened state. Better--our sinful souls cannot bear the holy too long, even when it comes in blessing.

But that is my problem, not God's. It is my sin that is at fault, my weakness, not our Lord's. That the liturgy was a blur of the familiar and did not engage me that day was a fault of circumstance and sin. Not God's.