from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and Congregational and Ministry Studies at Calvin College

Posts Tagged ‘gathering’

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Cultivating Attentiveness

Friday, November 19th, 2010

‘U

ntoward, adj: unfocussed, directionless, adverse, impolite, rude, out-of-line, uncalled-for, undecorous, unrefined, unmanageable, unseemly, improper, ungodly, annoying, boorish, conflicted, unbefitting, undisciplined, vexatious, wild, wretched, wrong, scattered, stubborn, obstinate, intractable …”

You get the point: An “untoward” person lacks focus. Thus, for example, when her cellphone rings during an important talk with a friend, an untoward person doesn’t hesitate to abort the conversation by a breezy and dismissive: “Sorry. Let’s talk again later.” Untoward people are inattentive, “hard of listening,” as Rodney Clapp puts it. They are as scattered and directionless as 15 beagles on bungee cords.

Individuals can be untoward. So, too, can entire societies and cultures (cf. Acts 2:40: “Save yourselves from this untoward generation”).

There’s a world of difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is a matter of having physical receptacles—two ears in good condition—to receive spoken messages from another. Listening, however, means putting one’s ears—one’s entire heart and soul, too—into the careful work of being wholly attentive when that person speaks; it is the cultivated skill of earnestly paying attention. Note the distinction between hearing and listening coming through in Matt. 13:15ff where Jesus passes judgment upon unrepentant people who failed to believe his message: “They have ears, but they are hard of hearing.” Such people are distracted, inattentive, scattered, obstinate, and untoward. Hard of listening.

Someone once said that the devil’s three most clever tricks upon human beings are noises, hurry, and crowds. If the tempter can bombard people with sounds (grating noises from without, troubling whispers from within); if he can sweep them up into hurried frenzy (so little time to do so many things); if he can squeeze them into a crowded situation (automated telephone calls, Twitter, Facebook, and email messages galore)—then they’ll be hard of spiritual listening. Almighty God will have a hard time getting a word in edgewise to them.

Noisy, busy, crowded persons will find it difficult, too—next to impossible, I think—to bring God the pure, sincere and vigorous worship he deserves and takes delight in. To give God his due—to offer him worthy worship—takes careful concentration and deep attentiveness.

All of the above now now makes clear to me why Grandpa and Grandma Mast, who reared my brother, Jerry, and me from our earliest years, made it strict practice to get to church early. Far too early, as Jerry and I saw it. Their ritual twice each Sunday was precise: Forty-five minutes before church began, Grandpa Mast backed his ’41 Chevy out of the garage, honked the car’s the horn twice to summon the rest of us, and then drove us on the five-minute journey to church. Arriving at church, we made our way to the same pew—”the Mast pew” —and sat there for 40 minutes, waiting for things to get started. Grandpa and Grandma didn’t “do” anything during those 40 minutes—didn’t read the bulletin, didn’t look at others walking in, didn’t speak with anyone. They just sat there, heads facing downward, hands folded. And though my brother and I complained regularly—weekly—to Grandpa and pestered him with “Why do we have to go so early?”, he never explained. His only response: “Never mind, boys; that’s just the way we do it.”

But now, decades later, it’s beginning to dawn on me why our grandparents did what they did. By “just sitting there” they were, in fact, doing something very important: They were getting ready for the high and holy task which lay immediately before them. They knew that to be “up” for giving God good worship requires hearts prepared. Thus, they were aiming to free themselves from the previous week’s accumulation of noises, hurry and crowds. They were centering themselves by quiet reflection and meditation.

Unlike people today who largely ignore the sturdy summons, Grandpa and Grandma’s generation knew the importance of the Biblical words: “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God; to draw near to listen is better than the sacrifice offered by fools;….Never be rash with your mouth…for God is in heaven, and you upon the earth; therefore let your words be few.” (Eccl. 5:1-2) They were readying themselves for the grand announcement that was about to break through: “The Lord is in his holy temple.” They were heeding Scripture’s words: “Let all the earth keep silence before him.” (Habbakuk 2:20)

Untoward people do not worship God well. They cannot. For they are—untoward.

All of Biblical religion can be summarized in the Shema of Deuteronomy, which begins, ‘Hear, O Israel.’…We are used to thinking that it was light that broken the primordial darkness from which all life comes, but it was really God’s voice…’Let there be light.’ Sound precedes light; we hear before we can see.
—Stephen Webb, contemporary theologian

Prayer

Speak, O Lord, as we come to You To receive the food of Your Holy Word. Take Your truth, plant it deep in us; Shape and fashion us in Your likeness, That the light of Christ might be seen today In our acts of love and our deeds of faith. Speak, O Lord, and fulfill in us All Your purposes for Your glory.Keith Getty and Stuart Townend'Speak O Lord'

Glorify the Lord with Me

Friday, September 17th, 2010

The story goes that one afternoon Sir Winston Churchill met his portly colleague, Haldane, in a hallway of the House of Lords, poked his finger into Haldane’s fat belly, and with a wink asked him: “Is it a boy in there, Haldane, or is it a girl?” Lord Haldane, no less quick-witted than Churchill, came with swift retort: “I’m not sure. If it’s a boy, I’ll name him George, after the king. If it’s a girl, she’ll be Elizabeth, after the queen. But if it’s only air, the name will be Winston, after the old windbag himself!”

The Hebrew biblical word for “glory” (kabod) literally means “weight, heaviness, thickness, significance, distinction.” That is, the opposite of lightness, transiency, triviality—mere windiness. Accordingly, they who obey Scripture’s call to “ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name” (cf. Ps. 34:1ff) set their sights on acknowledging God for his “heaviness.” They create space in their minds and hearts to recognize the thick reality of who he is and what he does.

Many modern people—post-moderns, too—do quite the opposite, however. Modernity has a kind of airy weightlessness, a lack of seriousness and significance. So, when it comes to the matter of “setting their minds on things eternal”—that is, of paying any heed to the world beyond sight and sound—most contemporary people are pretty breezy and airy.

They are light— “unheavy.” God, if he comes to their minds at all, is something of an on-the-sidelines deity—elderly, feeble, and (pitiably) wimpy. He’s a “Sunday school God,” as J.B. Philips puts it in his little classic Your God is Too Small, far “too small to command [contemporary] adult loyalty.” Take your pick of any of Philips’ depictions of the tiny gods to whom modern people on occasion politely tip their hats: “Pale Galilean,” “Second-Hand God,” “Heavenly Bosom,” “Meek and Mild One,” “Grand Old Man,” “Parental Hangover,” “God-in-a-Box.” Whatever he is, he’s certainly not the heavy God revealed in the Bible, the lionic Aslan whose presence towers over all and demands to be taken with gigantic seriousness.

Recently The Onion, a weekly newspaper which offers satirical, sometimes side-splittingly funny (and naughty) comment on almost anything and everything, led off with this front-page headline: “God Hinting at Retirement.” The accompanying article reported that the Eternal One, after millennia and eons of creating and ruling, had become somewhat tired of it all and was looking to vacate his post as divine sovereign and master of all things. “‘This place pretty much runs itself by now,’ the Lord said. ‘And besides, how many people notice I’m still around? To be frank, I’m not even sure I’m much more than a beloved figurehead at this point.’”

My first response to reading the piece was sheer anger. Oh, the naughtiness—the brazen irreverence—of spoofing the bigness of God. But the more I thought about the article, the more I discovered large chunks of my own self within it. Far too often, and in ways too many and shameful to mention, I too slight God by what I allow to indwell my mind and heart, and by how I choose to direct my life. Too often I discover myself among that crowd who fail to acknowledge God’s “weightiness”—who fail to “make him big.”

And that’s yet another reason why I stay in the habit of going to Sunday worship. Congregating with others there—”in the sanctuary” (cf. Ps. 73:17) helps me to remember the greatness and reality of God—for me. For there, on Sunday morning, I hear my fellow worshippers urgently and with deep-down joy calling me to “Glorify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his holy name together.” They’re bidding me to make God weighty, so to speak.

And when I join my fellow worshippers in doing that, I find my own heart becoming freshly tuned, my life’s course getting set straight again.

Prayer

Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.

Psalm 115:1

A Heart-Stoppingly Grand Invitation

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Many folks nowadays suppose they’re doing God quite a favor by paying him some attention every now and then. When they show up for worship on Sunday morning and, for good measure, toss a dollar or two into the offering plate, they rather expect that God, marionette-like, ought to come through with his smiling approval and hearty applause. After all, it is they, so they think, who have taken the first steps to initiate the rendezvous. It is they who have graciously carved out time for him and invited him into their presence for an hour of human-Divine encounter.

But the Bible declares otherwise. In his Word God declares that it is he, the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth, who welcomes his creatures into his presence and invites them to worship him. Given who God is and who humans are by comparison, the invitation he extends is heart-stoppingly grand.

Imagine that your morning’s mail contained an elegant envelope with the return address “The White House.” You opened it—very carefully—and discovered an invitation:

President Barack Obama

is pleased to invite you to be one of his conversation guests

on

September 1, 2010, at 2:30 p.m. in the Oval Office.

A formal dinner will follow in the White House Dining Room.

How would receiving such an auspicious invitation make you feel? If you’re like me, you’d be delirious with excitement. Everything routine would become utterly unimportant. And when—at long last—you made your way to the White House and military sentries escorted you through its labyrinth of corridors and into the presence of the President of the United States of America, your tongue would be three inches thick and your knees would be like water.

Such an imaginary meeting is but a faint—extremely faint—shadow of what actually happens in church on Sunday morning. There the Sovereign Lord deigns to welcome his people and bids them bring their worship.

How can human beings ever enter God’s presence except “By Invitation Only”? And how can they properly tune their hearts to sing his praise, except that they first have heard his eager, beckoning welcome: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving”? Then—only then—can worthy and right worship be offered to him.

Which is why I, for one, appreciate a worship service that begins with more than a polite “Good morning” from the lips of the worship leader. How good to hear her say to me, speaking on God’s behalf: “O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for he is our God.” Such words put me in my place again. They remind me that though I’m small and undeserving, my Maker and Redeemer really wants me there.

O, the immense favor God shows us by showing up for church before we do.

And by welcoming us when we arrive to worship him together.

Prayer

This is the day the Lord hath made; He calls the hours his own.
Let heav'n rejoice, let earth be glad, and praise surround the throne.
Hosanna in the highest strains the Church on earth can raise;
The highest heav'ns, in which He reigns, shall give him nobler praise.

Isaac Watts
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