Lent – Day 12 (Day 11 for me)

As I mentioned last week, I was leading worship on Sunday which often eats up a chunk of my spare time on the weekend…

Oh forget it, as much as I would love to blame my missed weekend post on my worship-leading on Sunday, it’s just not the case.  I could have made the time if I had really wanted to.  I just was so tired and unmotivated that I didn’t.

Then I slept in this morning – no divine wake-up call this time.  Sigh.  I forgot to change my alarm again and that hour of lost sleep really hit me yesterday.  But I’m cutting into my book-writing time to get in my post for today.  I tell myself in the back of my mind that I will make up for Saturday at some point, but I have some misgivings about that hope.

So I led worship on Sunday and as I mentioned last week I was hoping to be more intentional about the way that I did it and to try and get people on board with my thinking as to where we were going.  Well, as it turned out, last week if I wanted to have a team of people, I would need to recruit them.  I had my trusty drummer, but no one else.

A bigger team means a fuller sound.  My ukulele does not have the richest sound in the world.  It’s a nice ukulele, but it’s also a ukulele.  There’s no bass.  The low end is middle C if that means anything to you.  It’s limited.  I love it dearly, but if I want to play solo with percussion I should probably look into picking up the guitar.

But my drummer is a great drummer and he joined me on his cajon – box drum from Peru (I just learned the Peru part – do a search on cajon and you too could learn something new).  So it was a small sound.  I was thinking about Johnny Cash and how great he is and I tried to bring some of that authenticity to my singing which was a good challenge.  I will never have Cash’s emotive baritone, but finding the truest notes in my own voice is a good challenge.

So before we rehearsed I outlined what I was hoping to do through the course of the service and it felt good to get it out there.  It felt good to say it out loud.  I also had this interesting experience as I was preparing on Friday night.  Before playing through the songs, I just read them like I would read a poem, and I was struck by the seriousness of what some of these songs were pledging.  A lot of these songs are written in first person, so you’re asking people to sing a song as if they’re singing their own words, and I sometimes have the sense that if I’m not careful, I run the risk of making liars out of people.  I don’t really mean that, but it’s very easy to sing these songs without really thinking through what it is that you’re singing and I don’t think that’s good.

I don’t think it’s good to just toss off a line like, “…my heart’s one desire is to be holy – set apart for you Lord.  I choose to be holy, ready to do your will.”

If you’re not used to that kind of church language it might sound very strange.  It’s the language of commitment – of service and dedication.  It’s serious stuff.  So I tried to highlight the seriousness of some of these words as we went through them.  I read out some of these lines before we sang in the same way that I had read them myself.

But I wonder sometimes if it would be more useful to spend the whole time just focussing on one song and reflecting on the words and reaching a point where people are ready to sing (or not to sing) those words after having prayed and reflected.  So much worship music these days comes deep from personal reflection on faith and spirituality – I wonder if these sorts of songs are always good to present to a group of people to sing together as we do.

The last thing we want to do is make people feel like they ought to be singing these songs when they’re not feeling completely comfortable with the sentiments begin expressed through the words.

At the same time you want to lead people forward to a place where they’re deepening their faith and being challenged to grow, to be healed and to be transformed as Christians are intended to do.  You want to assume that the people in the seats are there and are willing to engage with the spiritual.

I see worship as a cycle that begins from a place of recognizing God and contemplating his greatness, his eternal nature and the depth of his love for the world.  This extends to singing about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit.  You can begin with the wonders of the universe of the natural world and think about the belief we have that this incredible world is in fact the product of a creative force, and that even more, that this creative force cares about us.  This is a pretty fundamental tenet of the Christian faith.

This pondering on the greatness of God can move to a somewhat self-centred place of pondering our place in God’s world, and how God loves us and cares for us all.  This is a place of healing and of rejuvenation.  In a world where it is easy to become discouraged and to be beaten down and worn out, this can be an extremely important place.  We see this place demonstrated throughout the gospels in the Bible as Jesus spends time with people, healing them and caring for them – demonstrating God’s love in a physical way.

But this is not the place where we live.  It is not where we end up.  The narrative of the Bible is always moving people forward out of this place of rest and into a place of extending that love to others.  This movement may not be immediately apparent in many Old Testament stories, but in the prophetic texts, the importance of justice and mercy is clearly set out.  There are expectations of how we are to treat each other.  Furthermore it is eminently clear from the stories of Jesus and the early church that the mission of God is not simply to feel good about ourselves and to get fat.

I think that this cycle of worship is something that needs to be balanced and that it is vital that we not get caught focussing only on a single aspect of it.  Our worship of God can begin to seem hollow and ignorant if we spend all our time singing about God’s greatness while the world around us smokes and burns.  There is also lament and petition.  Worship is a dynamic form of spiritual engagement and expression.

So, while this post may garner attention for least focussed and rambling post of the week, I wanted to get down some of these thoughts, giving myself the leeway to post a rough ramble because I don’t have time to be choosy.  In short, I’m allowing myself to post weak compositions in the name of sticking (loosely) to my commitment of posting every day.  If it’s a stinker, hey, try again tomorrow.

But, to tie things up, if you’ve made it this far, I think it’s so important to be conscious of what it is that we’re doing if we’re engaging in worship.  It’s vital to a church’s life together and it’s the thread that ties us together during our corporate meetings and sets the tone for what it is that we do and for how we leave these meetings and head out into the world.  It’s so much more than a time to sing some good songs and to hear a sermon.  It’s the backbone of who we are and how we go about our mission.

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