Wild or Mild - August 22, 2010
WILD OR MILD?
Hebrews 12:28-29
When my sisters and I were young, our parents took us each summer to spend a day at Steeplechase Park on Coney Island.
To enter this amusement park you had to make it through the Barrel of Love, a tunnel that turned beneath your feet, only to be faced with such perplexities as the Earthquake Stairway, the Whichway, the Human Roulette Wheel, and the Human Pool Table, a series of spinning discs that challenged the customer to cross from one side to the other without being seriously diverted.
Once inside, you could take a gentle ride on the Ferris wheel or the merry go round. But I preferred the much more exciting ride on the Steeplechase Horses: six mechanical horses that took riders down 1,100 feet on undulating track, over a stream bed and a series of hurdles, all around the outside of the park. The tracks ran abreast, simulating a horse race in which gravity gave heavy riders the advantage.
Once I did the Parachute Jump, which was originally built to train real-life paratroopers for service, and is now the only remaining artifact of Steeplechase Park.
But my favorite ride was outside the park: the Cyclone, arguably the most famous roller coaster in the world. This wicked wooden twister is well known for its steep drops – the first one is 85 feet -- and some notable airtime. The original trains with fixed position lap bars and no seat dividers allowed riders to be tossed from side to side. Time Magazine quoted Charles Lindbergh as saying that a ride on the Cyclone was more thrilling than his historic first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
Some like their rides wild, others like them mild, and that is why amusement parks offer both, because they are making sure that amusement parks actually amuse those who come.
Amusement parks aren’t the only venues, however, that are pressured to bend to the demands of those they serve. Churches face the same cultural tug of trying to meet parishioners’ desires – especially when it comes to worship. So now we have traditional worship services, contemporary worship services, and for those who would bridge the gap, blended worship services.
We offer guitar or organ. You can sit or stand. We have clap or no-clap, raised arms or folded hands. You can sing songs from words projected on a screen or hymns printed on a page in a hymnal.
It can easily feel as though we need to design our worship experience to fit everyone’s demands. But it’s not that I am trying to compare our worship services to amusement park rides. Rather, I’m suggesting that worship can have its wilder or milder elements, and people have their preferences. Further, while an amusement park has to remember that it must stay amusing in order to stay in business, the church has to keep in mind what it means to worship and how it can help people learn to worship.
Today’s passage is important for our understanding of worship. The text has nothing to do with style of worship; it speaks instead to the substance of worship, regardless of how people prefer to express themselves. It also reminds us of what God deems true worship to be.
In the first movement (verses 18-24), there is a comparison between two mountains, one wild and the other mild.
The wild mountain is Sinai, although it is not referenced by name. Alluding to the story in Exodus where God speaks to Moses at Sinai and gives the Ten Commandments, this mountain represents the tangible presence of God through its awesome symbols: fire, darkness, gloom, a tempest, a voice booming from the heavens. This mountain is raw and untamed. It inspires dread and awe like no roller coaster can.
The second mountain is Zion. Here the images are of celebration and invitation, joy and excitement. This scene of anticipation is the spiritual equivalent of the first time we walked through the turnstiles at Disney World to see Cinderella’s Castle towering on the horizon and caught our first glimpse of Mickey after seeing him only in cartoons. It was like access to a dream world.
Sinai and Zion are the faiths of the Old and New Covenants, and they point to people’s worship realities. How we view God – Sinai or Zion, Old or New Covenant – has much to do with how we worship.
The second movement of the passage (verse 25-29) builds on the imagery of access to God with the idea of responding to God through worship. As God beckoned at Sinai, God also beckons from Zion. It’s God’s voice that initiates, calling us to a response. And worship is always a reply to God. “See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking,” warns the writer. “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”
Worship is a chance for us to have an honest and awe-inspiring encounter with the God who comes to us in Christ. German theologian Rudolf Otto found that at the heart of all forms of religious experience was human contact with a fascinating, awe-filled mystery – an experience that was literally full of awe.
Here is the cry of one young woman for some awe in worship:
“As a young adult, I do not need flashy graphics, a loud worship band, projected images on a screen or a cool, hip and stylish pastor to evoke passion in worship. Passion isn’t synonymous with loud, big and flashy . . .
I want to worship a Creator who formed the universe with a word and molded my very being from the fibers of the earth. I long to sing praises to a God who shouts with excitement through the joys of life and holds me tightly, with mutual tears, in the pits. I want to surrender all I am to the workings of a Holy Spirit who guides my movement in ways I never dreamed possible for myself. I want to humbly bow to the most humble of babies who changed the course of history for eternity. I want to lay offerings before a God who offered his own Son to wipe away the distance I continually place between [us]. I want to meet this Jesus over and over again, so maybe I will begin to understand the magnitude of a Love so grand, so extreme and so passionate.”
Acceptable worship comes in all shapes, sizes, and volumes. It can be minutes or hours long, loud or soft, lively or still, as long as it provides an authentic encounter with the awesome God who came to us in Jesus Christ, to show us a grand and passionate love.
This is the reason that ultimately in our churches, styles of worship are only means to an end. The true ends of worship are not whether we like it wild or mild – this is worship of worship. Worship is about our awe of God, our access to God, and our need to respond to God’s calling and blessing.