Friday 20 July 2007

Today we jump into a new chapter of Walter Brueggemann's "Mandate to Difference." The focus will be on imagination...but that involves life and worship and more.

The practice of faithful worship is more odd than we often take it to be, familiar as it is to us. In recent time much of that oddness has been relinquished in the church, in a seductive attempt to be current, popular, alternative, or entertaining. It is, I submit, a major task of the church to receive, acknowledge, and respond to the oddness of our odd holy partner.

This oddness does not seem to mean that we are to keep things in worship "old and familiar" and therefore never being contexual and relevant. Rather, the whole story telling that goes on in worship is a part of an odd adventure. We are called into a odd life as it stands alongside and within the life of the world that has it own gods and longs for life from those gods. Worship can take place in the midst of popular sounding music - but we must not lose what the music brings to us and how that music is a part of the essential shaping of an odd people. I find that it can be those practices within worship that are quite odd and old and out of the patterns of our day, that make me remember and focus and appreciate the contrary nature of the full vision of the Reign of God. More and more, there seems to be a great need in the church for our worship to be more like our world. At times, that need to blend in overrules our call to venture within the odd realm of God's contrary Reign that has never "fit in." In some ways, when I think back to the worship of God in the wilderness and then in the temple, there was something different happening there. Some of those very well-defined ways of worship were meant to bring a vision to the people who were being invited and then nutured to live out their days as something quite different from the prevailing cultures. In worship, the beginning of something contrary to the world is brought into focus and we need to keep elements of that oddness in view.

Connection: I don't think we need to "put up" with worship. By that, I mean we need to be involved in worship that is vitally alive. How does that happen? By worshipping...as though it is really the source of something new...something that will offer us a contrary way to move into the world. It is always worth the adventure.

Lord, as you lead us into and through the days of our lives, we long for you to deliver us into the realm of your glorious life that is the power that transforms all things. In the middle of ordinary people at worship, take our hearts and minds and make something new of us. Amen.