An Offering of Worship

1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. (Romans 12:1, NIV)

I love that verse because it reminds us to think about worship in much broader terms that we often do. I cringe every time I hear people say “worship” when they only mean music, or a feeling interpreted as a sign of the nearness of God (usually evoked by a certain type of music). Romans 12:1 teaches us that worship is not a state of human emotion but an act of sacrifice … and not about receiving but about giving. Worship is about offering up whatever we do, 24/7, to God as a sacrifice.

If you read these things (and I know that some don’t), you know I’ve been reading Harold Best’s Music through the Eyes of Faith lately. Here’s how Best unpacks this truth for us who make music in church.

… for the true Christian, all of life, not just fractions of it, is a continuum of action upon action, faithfully and knowingly made into offering after offering. Therefore, all things done, whatever they comprise – all work, all handiwork, all of everything – can only be one act of worship after another. (p. 149) …

The issue is not whether the music has merit or power, but whether the worshipers are making an offering. If they can’t worship until the right music comes by (and what if it doesn’t?), then they are essentially preferring the gift to the giver, or making God’s presence contingent on the quality or effect of the gift. (p. 150) …

Being moved by music is secondary to worshiping God. The Spirit is always free to direct our worship, whether the music moves us or not. It is only when being moved by music is coupled to a preceding passion for God that we are truly moved. (p. 152) …

Aesthetic excitement, at whatever level and from whatever source, is as much a part of being human as loving is. Ecstasy is, in itself, an offerable act. So instead of assuming that worship is the same as ecstasy, we must assume that if we do become ecstatic, this emotion itself is to be offered up as an act of worship, instead of being substituted for or equated with it. The danger lies in assuming that ecstasy is a prerequisite of worship or equal to it. Aesthetic ecstasy is, quite simply, aesthetic ecstasy. The importance of aesthetic ecstasy for the worshiper is that it should take place within an already ecstatic heart, made that way by the overwhelming love of God, whether music is present or not. (p. 152)

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

As Grain on Scattered Hillsides

Last week I attended the premiere for the Celebrating Grace hymnal. I love looking through new hymnals (and older ones that are just new to me) to find new (or just new to me) texts. Well written devotional poetry set to music touches me and enriches my faith. Consider this “new” hymn by Ruth Duck.

As Grain on Scattered Hillsides

© 1992 GIA Publications, Inc. Used by permission. CCLI No. 1357134

As grain on scattered hillsides, when gathered, makes one bread,
God, gather all your people as one in Christ our head.
We come from many places, and we are not the same,
Yet your strong love has called us to meet in Jesus’ name.

A grain of wheat is fruitless until in earth it lies;
Then, dying to its old life, it bears and multiplies.
So may we die to hatred, to all our hurtful ways,
Reborn to common living, to love, to work, to praise.

Like yeast that brings new ferment so lifeless dough may rise,
Your Spirit is the leaven of life that satisfies.
As salt enhances flavor, enriches, and preserves,
May earth rejoice to savor a church that heals and serves.

O Christ, our risen Savior; O Spirit, holy dove,
Come now and move among us; make us a sign of love.
Come, knead and blend each texture with strong and gentle hands,
That we may be one body, one loaf in many lands.

I’m not a particularly good poet, but my wife gave birth to one, and I can recognize good poetry in a heartbeat. This is good stuff, full of healthy thoughts for us as the people of God. Let these truths burn deep into your soul.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Prorating Grace

I spent Sunday evening in an amazing corporate worship gathering at Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta celebrating the premiere of the new Celebrating Grace: Hymnal for Baptist Worship. Imagine the singing in a worship gathering in which the pews were filled with a high percentage of women and men with masters degrees and doctorates in (church) music, and the combined forces of multiple church choirs, accompanied (in various combinations) by a massive pipe organ, grand piano, brass choir, solo woodwinds and strings, guitar and percussion, or simply the sound of the gathered voices. If you weren’t there it’s hard to imagine, and equally hard to describe. Monday there were reading sessions and workshops … and fellowship with ministry colleagues I rarely get to see. Someone has already asked if it was traditional or contemporary (as if those are the only ways to think about worship music). Answer: both and neither. But that’s not what this Musings is about.

At gatherings like this, there are people from related organizations, some commercial, some academic, some affiliational, who come and set up exhibits. In order to encourage attendees to visit the exhibitors, we were issued a “passport” on Monday morning that we were to get stamped by each vendor. The passports were our ticket for the prize drawings during lunch. I’m always up for a freebie, so I made my way to all of the vendors and got my passport stamped at each in order to be eligible.

About halfway through lunch, they asked if everyone had turned in their passports for the drawings and went around gathering them from those who hadn’t turned them in yet. Then they started handing out blank passports to those who had not gotten one and visited the vendors so that they, too, could be included in the prize drawings. What?! You mean I went to all that trouble in those hot, crowded rooms where the exhibitors were set up in order to get my passport properly stamped, and all those who were too lazy to do the same have the same chance as I do to win a door prize?! I was angry for a moment, then truth hit me and I told my table-mates, “I feel like one of the workers hired first thing in the morning.”

Do you remember that parable? The workers hired later in the day … even those who worked only an hour … got the same pay as those who had worked all day … and guess who was upset about it! We understand why they were upset. The others didn’t work as long or as hard (or as well) to earn their pay. The story is about grace, and God doesn’t prorate grace, but gives it freely to all who are undeserving … and ALL of us are undeserving. I didn’t win a door prize (mine probably went to someone who didn’t earn it), but I came home with a pretty decent illustration.
That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Feeling How We Act (Not Vice Versa)

In Malcolm Gladwell’s NY Times best-seller Blink!, he relates the story of psychologists Paul Eckman and Wallace Friesen, who spent 7 years in an exhaustive study of the psychophysiology of facial expression. (Sure, it’s not something you or I would do, but remember that these are scientists and not normal people.) We know that our faces reflect our emotions. It happens in more detail than we are aware, and some people have better natural aptitude in reading the faces of others; but these skills can be studied and learned.

Eckman and Friesen isolated each facial muscle and studied how each muscle reacted both by itself and in combination with other facial muscles in response to changes in the emotional state. They spent hours and hours observing each other and trying to consciously control their own facial muscle movements. The result of the study is a 500 page scientific paper outlining something called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a valuable tool for psychological evaluation. In the course of the study, they encountered a phenomenon that has huge implications.

During the time when they were studying the facial expressions associated with anger and distress, they found themselves feeling absolutely horrible following their … um … expression sessions. So they began to monitor their body reactions during the studies as well and discovered that simply making the facial expressions associated with certain emotions caused the autonomic nervous system to respond as if the emotion itself were really present, not just the facial expression. In short, making angry faces actually made them angry. Making sad faces actually made them sad. Making happy faces actually made them happy. Actions produced feelings.

It got me to thinking: several weeks ago I shared a quote from theologian Eugene Peterson that concludes that worship is more about acting ourselves into a new way of feeling than it is about feeling ourselves into a new way of acting. Far too many of us enter a worship service with an agenda that places a burden on those who are leading to make us feel worshipful. If that agenda is not met (whether reasonable or not), then we find it hard to worship and easy to blame those who failed to meet said agenda: They interfered with MY worship. However, if we come into the worship service with a heart that is already determined to behave worshipfully regardless the circumstances, we will almost certainly find the experience to be worshipful. We often find what we expect to find. The mindset with which we approach the corporate worship gathering has a profound impact on our experience in that gathering.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

The Olympics: Citius, Altius, Fortius

I love the Olympics … the Summer Games and the Winter Games … and I love the fact that we now have Olympics to watch every two years with the alternating schedule. I don’t know why, but I tend to find the Winter Games particularly fascinating … perhaps because I grew up in southeast Alabama … a place where the winter sports are hard to find and hard to participate in. I’m almost 48 years old and I’ve never skied on anything I couldn’t swim in.

There are dozens of fascinating stories about the athletes competing in the games every year. In what I have seen thus far, NBC has done a stellar job in producing the human interest stories that, truth be known, are more than just filler. There are stories of hard work come to fruition and stories of hard work that didn’t. There are stories of athletes overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds in order to achieve and stories of athletes that had it all going for them and fell short. There are even commercials that tell stories of Olympic athletes.

We are avid viewers of the Winter Games, and have been as long as we have been married. We are fascinated by the newer events that have been added such as the snowboarding events, ski-cross, and freestyle. The Nordic events have been particularly fun to watch this year because the US has finally produced a team that is able to hold its own against the Scandinavians. Speed skating (both short-track and long) is almost always exciting. Then there are a couple of Winter Olympic sports for which we have a tough time summoning interest. My family in Connecticut will have to forgive me for not caring much about watching ice hockey; and though I find the strategy intriguing, watching curling can be almost as interesting as watching paint dry.

There will be some who might threaten to take my man card for this, though (try it … I dare you!): I like to watch figure skating. The Lovely Wife got me interested in it 20 years ago. Since Michelle Kwan is no longer competing our interest in the sport has waned a bit, but there is one thing that makes it worth watching to me: the voice commentary of Scotty Hamilton. It doesn’t matter who the skater is or from where, he is excited when they do well and empathetic when they don’t. His enthusiasm is contagious and it comes out in everything he says. He's fair, though, and calls a spade a spade ... but without malice or prejudice. I want to be around people like that ... so I want us to be people like that.

Ephesians 4:29 says: Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.