2002 August — wadehodges.com

Reluctant to Lament

Filed Under: Scripture

Last Sunday I preached on the lament psalms. It got me to reflecting on why many Christians are hesitant to lament in private or corporate worship. Almost half of the psalms are laments. The psalter played a crucial role in shaping early Christian worship. Yet, do a song search at the CCLI site for some songs of lament and you’ll find they are few and far between. Our song writers are not putting the lament psalms to music, nor are they writing their own laments for churches to use to express their pain to God when they come together in worship. Surely most churches have some pain to express.

So, why the hesitancy? Is it because we have become so desensitized to pain in the world that we can’t lament? Or is it because we have oversold the resurrection to the point that anybody who expresses grief in the present feels guilty because the hope of the resurrection is supposed to give us a victorious attitude no matter what happens to us?

Any thoughts?

August 29, 2002 By Wade Leave a Comment

Polkinghorne Quote

Filed Under: Quotes

I recently read John Polkinghorne’s The Faith of a Physicist and was intrigued by this paragraph:

Mistakes by natural theologians in the past do not preclude the possibility of success in the present. The science of 1750-1850 made plenty of mistakes too (phlogiston, caloric), and had ideas which were eventually fruitful but in a somewhat different form from that envisioned by their orginators. As a scientist I am often struck by theologians persistent fears of getting it wrong. …a willingness to explore ideas which might prove mistaken, or in need of revision, is a necessary price of scientific progress. One would have thought that the intrinsic difficulty in doing theology would encourage a similiar intrepidity. At times that has been so, but not always. I am not, of course, denying the existence of many wild flights of contemporary theological fancy, but saying within its more sober core I detect a degree of disinclination to take intellectual risk, particularly where it involves interaction with another discipline.

August 27, 2002 By Wade Leave a Comment

5 Things Men Know (That Boys Don’t)

Filed Under: Spiritual Formation

Im working on a talk on Masculine Spirituality. The working title is 5 Things Men Know That Boys Dont

Here are the five things.

1. Life is hard. Stop trying to make things easy on yourself.
2. You are going to die someday. Let a holy urgency dictate your priorities
3. You are not that important. Humility is the key to happiness and contentment in life
4. Its not about you. We are just a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
5. You are not in control–to survive, we must rely on something bigger than ourselves

These are built on the work Richard Rohr has done on male initiation rites.

August 23, 2002 By Wade Leave a Comment

What Makes Worship Good?

Filed Under: GH, Spiritual Formation

What is “good” worship?

I’d like to know. How do we evaluate a worship assembly? I’ve heard people say things like, “Last Sunday the worship was just awesome.” What makes a worship experience awesome? Does the quality of the worship team have anything to do with it? What about the number of people in attendance? What about posture? Does the number of hands raised or knees bent have anything to do with worship quality?

I’ve been to worship experiences which left me with a buzz afterward. I’ve also been to movies and concerts that did the same thing. I’ve seen unmarried college couples get caught up in a worship experience and then go home and get caught up in each other’s arms. Ask them on Monday morning and they’ll the say the worship at their church was great and the sex afterward wasn’t bad either.

I’ve been on the experience bandwagon for some time now. I’m all for designing worship services that help people to experience God. I have to wonder though, if maybe we shouldn’t be taking a longer timeline into account when we evaluate worship. Yes, there are short-term questions to ask about worship and whether or not it allowed the congregation to worship God. That’s not enough. Rather than focusing so much on temporary weekly experiences that help people get their God fix, we should also be looking at the long-term trajectory of our assemblies and asking: “Are the people worshipping here gradually becoming more and more like Christ?” If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how awesome the worship is, there is something wrong. God isn’t interested in our having cool weekly worship experiences while here on earth. He wants every aspect of our lives to be acts of worship to him (Rom 12).

Maybe that’s the problem. We see worship as something that ends with the final prayer on Sunday morning and is therefore ready to critique. What if we began to see our lives as a neverending worship experience being critiqued, not by us, but by the one who gave us life in the first place?

August 21, 2002 By Wade