Why We Worship

Revelation 5:11-14

Sitting in the kitchen this week, my younger two boys mentioned that church is kind of boring.  They were quick to point out that they like many things we do at church.  They like hanging out with people.  They like eating together.  They like the game room.  They just don’t much care for “lessons” where they have to sit and listen, or for this hour of worship.  Oliver then clarified, “I’m not saying God is boring.  It’s just church.  I mean, we go there and we sit in pews for a long time.”

 

They are not the first twelve and nine years to declare to their parents that church is boring.  Their perspective may even be shared by an adult or two.  Let me begin by confessing that there is something profoundly true in what they say.  I feel it myself.

For me there is a kind of disappointment that settles in every Sunday as we worship together.  We confess that this is all “good news.”  As good news, it should greet us as a welcome surprise, the opening of a new perspective should open, the unfolding before us of a new path that makes us glad.  And yet that only very rarely happens.  What we claim should be life-changing good news more often than not feels routine, deadening, and kind of boring (to put it in my kids’ language).

More and more, I find God in other places, places that aren’t church.  Places that don’t involve any specific liturgy, or special words, or bible readings.  I meet God on walks, in the woods, in the mountains or on a beach, under the stars, traveling.  I meet God in books and stories and music and conversations and in the process of cooking a meal.  I meet God in conversations with friends.  And so I often wonder whether gathering for “worship” is all that important.  This liturgy thing, this official thing we do together, it more often than not leaves me feeling disappointed, like what I really wanted to happen didn’t happen.  Like I sat down at a table ravenously hungry only to be served a ham and cheese hotpocket.

And so I come back to my kids’ question, “Why do we worship?”  What is it supposed to do?  Why did we build a building like this, with a sanctuary like this, and with pews like this, with an organ and a pulpit like this, with hymnals like these, and Bible stories and prayers?  Why do we gather here each week, round and round all year long?  It’s the same circle we wander, again and again – Advent/Christmas, Epiphany, Lent/Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time.  Every week the same thing: call to worship, prayers, singing, confession, bible reading, preaching, offering, benediction.  It’s like we’re running through the same loop over and over.

Someone named John is exiled and imprisoned on an island called Patmos.  He is given an apocalypse – a revelation or unveiling – a vision of the risen Christ.  And he is told to write down what he sees.  And what he sees and writes is meant to encourage seven little congregations who are considering giving up, and any other congregations (like us) who happen to overhear it. 

John writes (4:1f), “After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven.  And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’  At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.”

So here we are.  There is a door.  This imaginative poet is walking through it, and he invites us to follow.  This is the door between heaven and earth.  It might surprise you that there is this door between heaven and earth.  That there is overlap, traffic between them.  But that is the vision. 

With John we see the resplendent throne flashing lightning and encircled by a rainbow (this is poetry people, he’s describing what can’t be described, play along).  There are 24 elders on smaller thrones.  There are four living creatures, special animals, peculiar versions of angels designed exclusively for the praise of God.  They are singing what we sing during worship, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”  And the elders fall from their thrones to worship the one who sits on the throne.  And they too give voice to the Lord’s worthiness to receive glory, honor and power. 

But then things go wrong.  There is a scroll sealed shut seven times over.  The scroll has written on it what every single one of us most wants to know: where is all this going?  What’s the point of life?  Will there be any real direction to the flow of history?  Will our lives count?  Can we hope that beauty wins over ugliness, that love beats selfishness, that the world can be rescued from the threat of evil and death? 

John writes, “I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside.  Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep!  See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.  He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals’.” (5:4-5). 

Next John sees a lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in front of the throne.  And the twenty four elders and the four living creatures begin to sing, to rejoice, to celebrate.  This vision tells you why the early Christians were a small and persecuted minority group.  They not only refused to worship the Roman Emperor and the brutal Roman economy.  They reserved their singing, their allegiance and their praise for Israel’s God.  And much to the surprise of their Jewish neighbors, they included the humiliated, defeated, and crucified Jesus in these acts of worship and praise.  Worthy is the one on the throne.  And worthy is the lamb.

On Friday, I did what I usually do.  I ran the trails at Gunn Park.  I entered through the doorway made of vines just to the right of the park entrance.  When I go through that doorway, I am in another world. 

That vine-tangled doorway always makes me think of Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy, and the doorway that begins his descent down into hell.   Now that poem is a comedy, which means it has a happy ending, so he makes it through purgatory and up through paradise.  But this first leg of Dante’s journey is pretty fierce and harrowing.  The sign above the doorway reads, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”  And it’s true, if you’re over 40, you could twist an ankle or pull a hamstring.

That doorway to the trails also reminds me of the doorway we encounter in today’s reading.  John is invited up through a doorway into heaven and basically walks in on a full-throttled church service.  The faithful dead, the angels, the elders, and those fabulously monstrous creatures all covered in eyes – they are exquisitely oblivious to him being there.  They are in ecstasy, their energy fully focused on the beauty and glory and worthiness of the one on the throne, and of the slaughtered lamb.  And they sing and sing. 

The trails are basically a big loop around the outside of the park. I run it enough that it’s bends and outcroppings, its dips and berms have become familiar, like a good friend.  There are stretches I find a little boring.  Then there are three or four sections that seem almost magic every time.  In Fall and Spring, there is something new almost every day.  Most people who use the Park stay up on the roads.  The roads are good.  They’re safe and straight.  But there is a lot you miss by staying on the path most people take.  There is a lot you don’t see unless you take the loop of trails down closer to the river.

On the southwest corner of the park, the trails bend down into a steep ravine and then back up the other side.  When the trail descends sharply, and you’re in a groove, and you like the song that’s playing, and you’re not paying attention, a person like me easily finds himself running too fast.  The worst fall I’ve taken was on that steep decline.  I did not see the angry tree root sticking up in the middle of the trail.  It sent me flying forward and sideways.  I landed on my hands.  I don’t even know how I didn’t break something the way my body flailed and lurched down the rocky trail.  When I got myself back together, I walked back up the trail to find the culprit.  And there it was - a small tree stump, the same color as the ground.  I run down that hill every time I run the trail loop.  I know it’s there.  It’s like a familiar hymn or prayer or reading that could be easily overlooked if you’re not careful.

I see deer quite often.  But one day this past Fall I almost stepped on one.  I was running on a trail along the south side of the park.  This is an easy part of the trail.  There’s not much reason for vigilance.  It’s a light downhill slope with no rocks or sharp turns.  You can just run.  That’s why I almost ran over the deer.  I stopped and jumped backwards five feet before I even realized what was in front of me.  The dead body of a large deer was lying right across the trail.  I ran around it.  Days later, it was gone.  I don’t know who moved it.  But there was a thick patch of fur left on the trail.  It’s still there.  Early this Spring I went on a run about 7am.  The ground was frozen.  I came to the very same spot and stopped in my tracks again.  The patch of hair had frozen, and the sun was shining directly on it.  And it looked like a blaze of fire.  It took my breath away.  It have never seen that blaze again, but that part of the trail feels holy and special, like there should be a shrine there.  And so I slow down each time I pass it.

There is always something to see, if you can pay attention.  The forest floor is already dotted with beautiful pockets of little purple flowers.  (A little internet search leads me to believe they are Glory-of-the snow, or scilla, or both).  There are the squirrels, always busy, darting through leaves and up around the other side of a tree. 

The rare treat is the great bird that lives on the river.  I see it maybe once a month. It is a majestic, prehistoric heron.  Large enough to startle, with a wingspan six feet across.  It flies down the middle of the river, using it like a road.  It is skittish.  The longest glimpse lasts maybe three seconds.  Two or three flaps of its great and graceful wings, then it disappears.  Each time I see it I have to ask myself, “Did I just see that, or did I imagine it?”

Of course I am not the only one seeing these things.  The path itself is hard packed earth.  These are well worn paths.  They show the wear of many other travelers.  I am not the only one who prefers to leave the wide asphalt roads for the uneven trails where you see more.  And I’m sure that like me, others run through all the cobwebs right at face level.  It’s as if all the spiders along the five-mile trail have decided to string their webs at exactly the height of my face.  It scared me the first few times.  But I’ve come to think of them as little ticker tape finish lines, so that when I break through each one the spiders are cheering for me as if I’ve won the race.  As if going round and round the same loop, week after week, year after year, and keeping at it, falling and getting back up, as if all that is a kind of victory that no one but the little spiders can see.

If our worship seems boring, if our singing and praying and listening and greeting one another and blessing and forgiving each other seems boring, it can only mean that we do not yet believe the good news about what happened in Jesus Christ.  That we do not believe that the gospel stories of demons twisting and disfiguring peoples’ lives aren’t real.  That we do not believe that the monsters and beasts and dragons so artfully imagined here in Revelation aren’t real.  That God’s decisive victory over them in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus isn’t real cause for rejoicing. 

We worship because God is worthy.  God is worth it.   That’s what “worship” means.  And so we take our places among the elders and the living creatures and we lose ourselves in wonder and praise before the throne and before the lamb.  “Worthy is the lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”

First a ladybug, then a roly poly and a silkworm join in.  Next a starfish, a seahorse, and a blind shrimp from the deep.  Then a mole, a badger, and a wombat.  Up in the trees, an orangutan, a lemur, and a koala.  In the savannah first a giraffe, then a hippopotamus, then a wildebeest.  Up in the air a finch, joined by a parakeet and a bluejay.  All of them - every single one of them, singing.  People from every tribe and religion.  Everything everywhere, singing.  The buildings and roads rejoice.  The seas roar.  The planets find voice.  Now imagine this choir-of-everything multiplied by the voice of all the saints who've ever lived, multiplied again by thousands upon thousands of angels.  All singing "Worthy is the Lamb."   So now let us join our voices to this thundering chorus of praise.