Worship, Desire, and Enjoyment (Why Worship Remains Central to Our Lives, Part 3)

Psalm 23

Rev. 7:9-17

 Two weeks ago we gave you a few minutes to answer two questions:

1) Of all the things we do in worship, what feeds your soul most deeply? 

2) Of all the things we do in worship, what is least helpful for you?

The first feedback I received was from Elizabeth Schafer right after the benediction.  She said, “Jared you know what I’d like to see?  Less surveys!” 

By far the most common response to both questions was a polite refusal to answer the questions.  That is, most of you said, in one way or another, that you can’t pick out one part of the worship service that feeds your soul.  What feeds you is the movement through all the different parts of what we do.  Similarly, most of you said that there is no “least helpful” part.  It all hangs together. 

Now those of you who answered this way didn’t deny that there are some parts of the service you like less and other parts you like more.  You were simply saying that liking certain practices of worship more than others isn’t really what matters.  And I think there is wisdom in that approach to what we do.

Others of you did answer the questions with specifics.  And the honesty there was important too.  But as you might expect, we are all very different people, with different personalities and different needs, and so we are drawn to different parts of the service.  Some love the music and the singing, others could do without it.  Some relish the prayers of confession, the words of forgiveness, the prayers of the people more than others.  Some like the sermons – as long as they’re short and avoid controversial topics.  Some anticipate the passing of the peace, find it a meaningful time to connect with others, and wish it were longer.  Others dread it as a time of forced interaction, gossip, and the spreading of germs. 

Your honesty helps me to remember that it’s important to worship in ways that feed all of us.  But another reason we did the survey was simply to help us think about our own posture and attitude toward the practices of worship.  As we continue to pray for a renewal of our worship life as a congregation, the good ideas, the interesting experiments, the penetrating questions will most likely come from you. 

Now let’s return to our reading from Revelation.  The author is a poet who claims to have received a vision from God and who describes his vision in order to encourage little communities of people who have taken up the way of Jesus.

Today’s vision is another scene of worship.  What he sees is throngs of people from every corner of the earth, different colors of people speaking different languages but all of them singing with full voice in praise of God on the throne and the Lamb who was slain.  They are dressed in white and are waving palm branches.  Alongside the human choir is an angelic one, singing along in harmony. 

John watches and listens to all that’s taking place, when all of a sudden one of the elders, a character within the dream-like scene, addresses him.  “Who are all these people singing?  How are there so many of them and why are they here?”  John replies like you or I would: “Hey, I’m the one having the dream.  I don’t know.  You tell me!”

 And the elder says, “All these throngs of people singing, these are those who have come through a great ordeal.  They have suffered.  Their lives have been a difficult struggle.  But they were loved by the Lamb.   Their garments were washed white in his blood.  And now they’ve gathered here, and they won’t stop singing, because their suffering is behind them.  And they’ve finally found the kind of joy that can never be taken from them.”

If you took one of those surveys, I don’t know what you said about the practice of singing.  I’m like many of you – some days I feel like singing and other days I don’t.  Some hymns I love and others I don’t.  If you love to sing in church, this scene will appeal to you.  But others of us may wonder whether we really want to take our place in an unending choir of praise.  I am not trying to downplay the importance of singing – whether in John’s vision or within our own worship.  But I do think that singing is more than singing.  It is one of the few ways we have to express the intensity of our heart’s desires.  When we are overwhelmed with pain or longing or delight, we sing.  In other words, the reason those robed in white sing praise to God day and night is that it is enjoyable.  This is a scene of intense enjoyment and pleasure.

One book I continue to re-read is Dante’s Divine Commedy from the early 14^th century.  Dante the poet and theologian wrote this long poem in three parts.  In the Inferno he travels down through the circles of hell, describing for us how sin distorts and deforms our lives.  In Purgatorio he climbs mount Purgatory, describing for us how by God’s grace we sinners can reform our lives and move towards God in repentance.  And then in Paradiso, Dante ascends through the angelic circles of heaven towards a final vision of God. 

As Dante journeys towards the final vision of God, you wonder whether the end will be anti-climactic or a true climax.  Dante’s prayers for help as he nears the end remind you that no poet, however gifted, will ever be able to describe the unsurpassable Light of God’s glory.  But as he moves nearer to his goal, he finds that the intensity of his longing for God increasing.  The wheels of love and desire were turning in him, as he puts it.  And while he does eventually describe three spheres of colored light all interconnected, he knows that that description won’t be very helpful.  Words don’t work, says Dante, when you come to the “end of desire.”  For Dante, the goal of life is a journey towards what you have always wanted.  It is more about the sweetness of longing than the clarity of knowing or believing something.

In this month of reflection on worship, we've been using the first question from the Westminster Catechism: "What is the chief end of humanity?"  Answer: "To glorify God and enjoy God forever."  In terms of this confession, to worship God is to enjoy God.  

One of the difficult things for us about worship is that we’ve lost this connection to generations before us.  The connections between desire, pleasure, enjoyment, and the habits of worshiping God are difficult for us to see and experience.  And this is important, because that theme of “enjoyment” has always been the fuel for vibrant, soulful, energetic, joyful worship.  And when you run out of fuel, worship becomes little more than an obligatory routine.

But I’m convinced that 21^st century people like us can experience a renewal of our worship lives.  Recent research shows that when we experience something beautiful (like a Monet painting, see bulletin), we experience the same kind of attraction and pleasure involved in romantic relationships.  Our lives are built to find pleasure in attraction to beautiful things.

The same part of the brain that is excited when you fall for someone romantically is stimulated when you stare at great works of beauty, researchers have discovered.

Viewing art [or anything you consider beautiful or attractive] triggers a surge of the feel-good chemical, dopamine, into the orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, resulting in feelings of intense pleasure.  Dopamine and the orbito-frontal cortex are both known to be involved in desire and affection and in invoking pleasurable feelings in the brain.  It is a powerful affect often associated with romantic love and illicit drug taking.

In a series of pioneering brain-mapping experiments, Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London, scanned the brains of volunteers as they looked at 28 pictures.  They included . . . Bathing at La Grenouillere by Claude Monet . . . Prof Zeki found that blood flow increased in areas of the brain usually associated with romantic love [and other forms of pleasure].  (telegraph.co.uk, May 8, 2011)

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom gave a TED talk in which he argued that your experience of pleasure depends on what you believe about the object or event you’re experiencing.  That is, your beliefs about an experience shape and influence the kind of experience you’re having. 

The way you taste your food will be shaped by your beliefs.  Feed someone a beautiful piece of steak and tell them it’s steak – and as long as this person has a habit of eating steak, it will taste good.  Feed them the same steak, but tell them they’re eating rat, or dog, or horse, and they will report far less pleasure in eating it. 

In another study, researchers were trying to find out how to motivate young children to eat things that are healthy, like carrots and milk.  Do you know the easiest way to convince children that carrots and milk are delicious?  Tell them they came from McDonalds.  Children perceive that McDonald’s serves delicious food.  And they will report that carrots are tastier and milk is more delicious if they think it came from McDonalds.  You see, what you believe about an experience matters.

Now move from gullible kids to more savvy adults.  Researchers outfitted adults with brain mapping electrodes to record their brain’s pleasure response to tasting different wines.  But this was all a trick.  The wine was the same.  Researchers were simply changing the bottles from which the wine was poured.  When these adults believed that the wine they were tasting had been poured from an expensive looking bottle, their sense of pleasure went up.  The wine tasted better because of what they believed.

Now of course it’s hard to talk about pleasure without talking about sexual desire and sexual attraction.  You already heard that looking at beautiful works of art, or beautiful landscapes, or gardens, or buildings can stimulate dopamine in the brain’s pleasure centers.  So it isn’t going to surprise you what our beliefs about another person are going to influence the amount of pleasure we experience.  Researchers found that in happy marriages, people tended to rate their spouses as more attractive than did other people.  (Today is Mother’s Day, and there’s no way on earth I’m going to say anything else about that study!)

Now why are we talking about art, beauty, desire, romantic love, food, wine, sexual desire, and pleasure?  Because the practice of worshiping God well requires us to find connections between the ways we find pleasure and enjoyment in life with the ways we relate ourselves to God.  A life of prayerful reflection on pleasure can be the road that leads us home.

The Revelation, Dante’s poem, and the Westminster Catechism teach us that we’re built to enjoy God.  We’re designed to find the worship of God deeply pleasurable and intensely satisfying.  When we glorify God – whether by taking a walk in the woods, as Sherman Sisco suggested last week, or by singing hymns and saying prayers together with others within a liturgy – we are traveling down the natural rivers of our own desires.  When we praise God, we are opening ourselves to a deep attraction to God’s goodness, an attraction that is alluring, wooing, and persuasive. 

Since we are creatures built to "enjoy God forever," let us begin learning to "enjoy" God now.  "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen."