SERIOUS CELEBRATION

This past Sunday night I spoke about Isaiah’s prophetic call from Isaiah 6. One lesson I drew from Isaiah’s vision was that worship is a serious celebration. Isaiah saw two things very clearly through the smoke that filled God’s trembling temple. Isaiah saw God’s holiness and his own unholiness. This particular worship service was frightening and potentially hazardous for even the least casual, most reverent participant. And it’s a wake-up call for regular worshippers like us who likely approach the worship of the Most High God with a bit too much familiarity.

Annie Dillard creatively captures the proper stance of human worshippers of God. “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” she asks.

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.