Pastor's Page: July 22, 2008

The Trouble With Adoration

A pastor friend told me that he was teaching his congregation to pray according to the ACTS formula (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), and that he was having trouble with the "A". He couldn't get them to pray prayers of adoration.

I think there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with lukewarmness or immaturity on the part of the worshippers. It is simply because adoration tends to demand accompaniment. Stripped to mere words it comes across awkward and flat. When I pray I only need standard prose to confess, or give thanks, or make a request. But the act of praise wants more - a musical instrument perhaps, or formal expression in poetry or song. It is possible that my stuttering over verbal adoration is due to my coldness or lack of love for God, and if so, then God forgive me and reform me, and may he dismiss from everyone's mind the analysis below. But here is how I see it.

We have an intuition of what makes for an appropriate response to a performance, or revelation of fact, or stimulus. It is the denial of this intuition that allows that stupid line of rhetoric we've all heard in sermons: "At the football game Friday night you cheered for your team and shouted yourself hoarse when they scored a touchdown - are you telling me you can get excited about football but you can't get exited about God?" It is a common preacher's technique for drumming up enthusiasm-by-guilt in a quiet congregation, and it is idiotic. We should not cheer for God the way we cheer a walk-off home run. I believe we can see that by imagining other attempts to gin up inappropriate responses. When I'm hungry, for example, and good food is set before me, I salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs - and you probably do too. Imagine a preacher indicting us watery-mouthed diners with: "You mean to say you can salivate over a plate of food but you don't love God enough to get any spit in your mouth over him?" We'd say, "Fool! God isn't something you salivate over, food is." Or, if you will permit a racy example (we're all adults here), a man's body will respond in certain God-designed ways to the sight of an under-clad, shapely woman. If a preacher said, "You mean to say you can get it on for a woman but you can't do that for God!" I'd just walk out of the church.

The point is that different things call for different responses, and a vehicle of expression that works perfectly well in one setting will not work at all in another. Words work well for some things - like communicating truth, but not at all for other things - like satisfying hunger. And, I contend, words only "kind of" work, clunkily and under handicap, for some other good things. Like expressing love. As you know, love is notoriously difficult to express with words alone. Jim Croce gave up trying to do so and solved his problem musically:

Well I know it's kind of late,
I hope I didn't wake you.
But what I've got to say can't wait,
I know you'd understand.
'Cause every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I'll have to say 'I love you' in a song.

There it is, in a song! (Of course, you have to hear the above words sung to get their effect.) Croce was right. Love demands a song the way apple pie demands (for me anyway) a cup of coffee. Lovers stumble over mere words, and find themselves waxing poetical and musical in attempts to get their expression just right. Thus it was and ever shall be.

I believe that adoration of God is like the expression of love. Confine it to words alone and you'll see that it is "not quite right" or "missing something." That sense may be so strong that you'll struggle to get out any words at all. So try singing your praise instead. I can sing "How Great Thou Art", but if I update the language and try to say, "God you're really great," the words seem to die on my tongue. Perhaps they should, because I'm not using the right medium. In a terribly inappropriate (but wickedly funny) skit in "Monty Python's Meaning Of Life" a clergyman played by Michael Palin leads antiphonal praise in a chapel service, saying, "Oh Lord...Oooh you are so big...So absolutely huge...Gosh we're all really impressed down here I tell you." This is a lampooning of the Psalms of praise of course, but remember: the Psalms were composed as poetry and performed as songs! Cripple the poetry and mute the music and of course you wind up with something that sounds funny and odd.

I'm recommending to my pastor friend (and if I'm wrong, God give him the wisdom to ignore me!) to leave the confession, thanksgiving and supplication as they are - verbal - but to flavor the adoration with something else. Music, probably. Sing a song of adoration, or perhaps listen in silence to sacred instrumental music. Read a devotional poem. In a charismatic congregation, tongues might do nicely here. Maybe there are visual ways too of provoking the heart's adoration (a friend of mine came to believe in God when he saw mountains!), but I don't know how to do that in a worship service. The main thing is to find a way to give to Adoration the non-verbal accompaniment it demands and deserves.

Pastor's Page: July 8, 2008

Think More

I was glad to hear a college-age friend of my son admit that thoughtful investigation was hard.

I had been explaining a cheap-trick method of argumentation that involved nothing more than postulating an underlying motive for an opponent's thesis. For example, suppose someone maintains that gun control laws are counterproductive because "Fewer guns mean more crime, and when municipalities permit conceal-and-carry weapons, the crime rate drops." An easy response to that is, "Well, you just say that because you're in the NRA and you've got a huge gun collection!" That may be true. But even if the NRA member only believes his statistics because they bolster his position, the question remains: "Are they accurate?" Because no matter what the gun-nut believes or why he believes it, statements of fact must be received or contested on their own terms. If he is wrong, then you can only demonstrate he is wrong by showing that his statistics are in error or that they are erroneously applied. His motives may be relevant for understanding how he came to believe as he did, but they are irrelevant for determining whether what he believes is true. To discern that, you have to investigate and think.

My son's friend said, "That's so hard" and I rejoiced. Exactly. Of course it's hard. Disciplined thinking is always hard - but like most things that require effort there is a payoff for engaging in it and a cost for neglecting it. Indolence is a vice that exacts a toll: physical laziness leaves you flabby and winded; occupational laziness leaves you poor and needy; intellectual laziness leaves you shallow and bigoted; spiritual laziness leaves you far from God. Work hard. That includes forcing your mind to work as hard as it can.

(While writing this paragraph I was interrupted by the doorbell ringing - it was two boys asking me if I wanted to buy something to drink at their lemonade stand. So of course I had to reward their industriousness by going over and buying two cans of pop and a cup of lemonade. Good for them. Now let's see - where was I? Oh yes, intellectual laziness):
Sunday I was asked about an archeological find featured in the New York Times. It was a Hebrew stone tablet with an apocalyptic message. Looking into the matter afterward I found that the scholar promoting his interpretation of the tablet has a long-standing ax to grind: the overturning of what he thinks is "our traditional understanding of Christianity." It would be easy enough to dismiss him on the basis of his motive. But in investigating further and plowing through arcane details of Hebrew orthography, I was happy to find that, though I believe his proposal lacks merit, it turns out that if he is correct his thesis actually supports standard evangelical belief about what would constitute valid messianic expectation on the part of the Jews! That was an eye-opener. (The original article and my response are available upon request).

My point is that I was able to come to this unexpected conclusion only through careful reading and thinking. Valid conclusions and supportable convictions are worth all the "mindly" effort you have to muster to attain them. Think more.

Pastor's Page: July 1, 2008

Our Curse, Another's Blessing

I have a new answer now to the question, "What's your favorite book?" The best book I have ever read is Volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.

It was never intended to be a book. Lewis did not keep letters mailed to him, and he did not expect anyone to keep letters he sent to them. But they did - friends, scholars, children, strangers, lunatics, pastors. They wrote him boatloads of mail from all over the world and he painstakingly responded to every one. They treasured his letters like gold and were able to produce them 30-40 years after his death when editor Walter Hooper went looking for them.

Many who received a personal letter from Lewis were ecstatic (and this encouraged them to write more!), but for him letter-writing was a constant woe. He called it "the bane of my life" when speaking in confidence to a friend. It ate up all his leisure time and bit into his work. He had to get up early every morning to respond to the previous day's mail. When he returned from a brief vacation he'd find an overwhelming stack of 60 letters waiting for him. Since he could not type, and had a genetically deformed thumb that would not bend at the knuckle, he had to do the best he could writing by hand (and he constantly apologized for his bad handwriting, especially as he got older.) For at least a decade he dreaded Christmas, because he would get hundreds of letters at that time, and he felt he needed to answer them all. He begged close friends to write him at some other time of the year.

But Lewis' curse is my blessing. I find his letters to be the best devotional material I have ever read. I noticed long ago that writing that is intended as devotional usually leaves me unmoved. But when I read Lewis dealing graciously with a confused child or correcting an errant scholar or appreciating a gift or simply expressing grief, it inspires me to worship. And as for his casual insights, oh my goodness they leap out from every page. You have no idea how many times over the past few months I've said to my sons, "Remember the other day when we were talking about plagiarism/ the gracious treatment of bores/ the foibles of Rev So-and-So/ the poetry of T. S. Elliot? Well listen to this paragraph I just read in Lewis!" It is as though he somehow listened to our conversation and nailed the point in 50 words or less.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 St. Paul asked to be delivered from a thorn in the flesh, and God said no. Lewis' thorn in the flesh was a constant pile of correspondence he wished he could avoid, but his response to that thorn comes down to me as a source of great enrichment and delight. Now I have a follow-up prayer with regard to my own thorns: "Lord, please take this curse from me. It is the bane of my life. But if you will not, then would you be so kind as to turn it into a blessing for others? Thank you."