Waking Into Mystery (Why Worship is Central to Our Lives, Part 1)

Psalm 150

Revelation 1:4-8

In the movie Waking Ned Devine, residents of the tiny Irish village of Tullymore discover that someone in their village has won the National Lottery.  Two old friends, Jackie O’Shea and Michael O’Sullivan, begin to analyze everyone’s behavior to figure out which of their neighbors has struck it rich.  After ruling out neighbor after neighbor, they finally visit the home of an elderly retiree named Ned Devine. 

 

They knock on his door, no answer.  So they enter, only to find Ned holding the winning lottery ticket, with a smile on his face, and stone cold dead.  The lottery winner had died of shock.  The two friends decide that it would be a shame for the money to be wasted.  And so they cook up a scheme.  When the representative of the Lottery commission from Dublin visits the town to confirm the lottery winner, Michael O’Sullivan will pretend to be Ned Devine.  And everyone in the village will share the winnings. 

This scheme culminates in a traditional Irish wake and funeral, with the whole village conspiring to convince the Lottery official that things are on the up and up.

I’ve always loved that title, “Waking Ned Devine.”  It’s a play on words.  The traditional “wake” is a part of the funeral ritual in which mourners keep watch over the deceased until the funeral and burial.  But it’s also the term we use for waking up after sleeping.  But that pun is actually quite profound.  Part of our faith is the confession that even in death, there is more life.  Even in the sleep of death, there is a new kind of wakefulness.  There is a prayer I love that goes like this, “O Lord, let our waking each morning be a rehearsal for resurrection.”

Because we are born from the God who is our Alpha or beginning, when we die we return to God who is our Omega, or ending.  And so on the other side of our funeral or wake, we may be more awake or alert to the glory of God than we ever were during our so-called lives.  That is, Christians have always claimed that the lives we lead on the other side of death are lives of worship and praise.

In many ways, the Bible’s last book, called “The Revelation,” is an invitation to begin doing now what we will be doing for all of eternity.  By pulling back the curtains and allowing us to glimpse the splendor of God’s majesty, Revelation works to wake us up to the mystery of God’s glory ahead of time.  After all, it might be good to begin practicing the worship of God now, since it looks as if this will be the most defining activity for creatures like us as our small lives are received back into the much larger source of all life.

Every morning when you wake, you wake into the mystery of a world created and loved by God – a world called to render God praise.  The problem, of course, is that we are often asleep to this mystery.  What would it be like to be awake the glory of God throughout our ordinary lives?  The term that describes this wakefulness is "worship."  

I have been worshiping God for many years.  And I have some questions.  Is it ok that I don’t always feel like doing it?  Will going through the motions rather absent-mindedly get me in trouble with God?  What if, during the singing of a great hymn, or during prayers for the sick, I am thinking ahead to an NBA game, or perhaps to what I’ll have at Arby’s?  Does God care what songs we sing or what instruments we use?  How important is it to worship in liturgical, patterned ways, like we Presbyerians are accustomed to doing it?  Does worship really need to happen in a church building on a Sunday?  What would I be missing out on if I failed to worship God?  Finally, is worship something we can get better at over time?

You may have other questions - and I hope you’ll let me know what they are.  We'll take the next month to explore the ancient Christian practice of worship.  The goal is to imagine some ways we might experience a renewal of worship in our congregation and in our own lives.  We are just beginning a major upgrade to the media capabilities here in our sanctuary.  About this you’ll be hearing more in the coming month.  But this is a good time to remember that the forms in which we worship God will keep changing.  Even so, the centrality of worship to our lives will endure. 

Psalm 150 is the final Psalm in the collection.  This last Psalm gathers up the energy of all Psalms in the collection.  It is a capstone, an exploding-fireworks ending to a long menu of prayers.  And it is a call for all of creation to praise the living God.  Human beings are to praise God, but so are all other kinds of creatures, including angels, otters, buffalo, centipedes, stars and planets.  Praise happens in religious worship, but it is to resound through all of creation all the time.  This praise might focus on God’s mighty acts of saving and delivering us from harm.  But it might also focus on God’s inherent excellence and beauty.

In terms of what counts as worship, almost anything goes.  The Psalmist urges us to gather up whatever sounds we’re capable of making, whatever instruments we find nearby.  And we are to praise God with our bodies as well (dancing is mentioned, though many Presbyterians would erase this line if they could!).  But swaying, bending, kneeling, holding up our hands, walking – all these different movements of our body can be acts of praise. 

“Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.”  This is a summons for all of creation to turn itself towards its author and source in an offering of praise.  This is an expansive gesture, and a hopeful one.  Some day, but beginning already right now, we are part of a choir that extends across all of creation that gives full-throated expression to our joy at having God as our maker and redeemer.

I remember once arriving late to a worship service.  I missed most of it, but I do remember one of the prayers, because I wrote it down.  It went like this, “O Lord, join our voices to the thundering chorus of praise that comes from the rest of your creation.” 

Commentator Craig Satterlee writes, “The Psalmist calls for praise without considering how people might be feeling or what is happening in the world, because praise is not a reflection of us.”  That is, we are invited into the cosmic praise of Psalm 150 even when we are angry, or hurt, or lonely, or depressed, or sick and dying.  Because “praise” is not about us. 

I like the fact that we can bring coffee into our service.  I do it sometimes.  I have mentioned this before, but you can’t carry your coffee into an Eastern Orthodox worship service.  The Orthodox tradition wants to avoid at all costs the dangerous idea that worship might be casual or informal.  After all, when we enter a sanctuary to worship, so the argument goes, we are walking in on angels who are already at worship.  We come to join our voices to an angelic service that is already underway.  And so we tiptoe in, with as much reverence as we can muster. 

Revelation 1:4-8

The result of St. John’s theological work is a poem, “the one great poem which the first Christian age produced.”  If the Revelation is not read as a poem, it is simply incomprehensible. . . . Poetry is not the language of objective explanation but the language of imagination.  It makes an image of reality in such a way as to invite our participation in it.  We do not have more information after we read a poem, we have more experience.  It is not “an examination of what happens but an immersion in what happens.”  If the Revelation is written by a theologian who is also a poet, we must not read it as if it were an almanac in order to find out when things are going to occur, or a chronicle of what has occurred (Eugene Peterson in Reversed Thunder, 5).

When we were in Boston over Spring Break, we got tickets to see the Blue Man Group.  I thought it would be blue men playing the drums for an hour and a half.  I expected to be a passive watcher of something happening up on stage.  I noticed when we arrived that ponchos were given to all those seated in the first ten or fifteen rows.  They would be sprayed and splashed.  Everyone was given a length of paper and told to wear it as a bandana.  And later in the show, the lights were turned out and we realized our bandanas were glow in the dark.  There were rolls of toilet paper hanging above each row of seats.  Part of the show involved everyone unrolling the toilet paper and throwing it around during a strobe light laser show. Most of the show, it turned out, involved some kind of audience participation.  I had gone expecting to passively watch from my seat.  But this was not a spectacle for spectators.  It was a fully immersive, participatory experience. 

So is the worship that sits at the center of the Revelation, the Bible’s final book.  This  is pastoral literature, originally addressed to small groups of Christians living in Asia Minor (Western Turkey) at a difficult time.  It is about the “end,” but it is primarily interested in how the ending (of God’s ultimate victory) bears on the present of our ordinary lives.  And it ushers us into a new way of seeing, where we discover that worship is joyous but difficult work (and that it takes a lifetime of practice).

Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters in the Greek Alphabet.  So referring to God as our “Alpha and Omega” is evocative language – God the beginning and end, the origin and goal of all creation.  God is and was and will be.  God is the loving and holy horizon in which we live our lives.  This imagery situates us within a loop that gives our lives meaning and purpose: we exist in the loop of creation that emerges from God and then returns to God.  The goal for us is awareness, attentiveness to this process along the way.  Wakefulness. 

This makes the failure to worship appear as a major malfunction of the kinds of creatures we are.  And it makes worship and praise the most natural, fitting habit we could imagine.  Jesus is Lord, and not Caesar.  The poor and crucified one is Lord, and not the wealthy and the powerful.  And we are not passive pawns, powerless consumers, or inactive watchers of this drama.  We are a “kingdom of priests.”  We are to take up new and powerful roles, recognizing our own dignity and responsibility as friends and partners with the reigning Christ.  So worship is like practicing a new way of seeing and acting in the world.  It takes practice.  And we get better at this new kind of seeing over time.  Come, Holy Spirit, and wake us into the glorious light of this Loving Mystery.

Survey for Today

Of all the different things we do together during worship, which feeds your soul most deeply?

Of all the different things we do together during worship, which is least helpful to you?