Awe and Wonder
February 24, 2008
Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-5
A colleague I met some years back in California shared this story of youth ministry and spirituality. He was leading his high school group on a retreat on the Pacific coast, and had taken the kids out to the beach at sunset. He had them spread out by themselves along the water’s edge and watch as the sun went down over the ocean.
As he watched them watching the sun he noticed that a couple of the girls were crying. Being the good youth leader that he is, he immediately suspected some adolescent drama within the group. A romance broken up, an unkind word from a friend, some other of the myriad stumbles along the tortuous route of growing up.
So he went up to one of the girls to find out what he was going to have to deal with that weekend, what was going to get in the way of his great plans for drawing the kids into a deeper spirituality. He asked her, “what’s the matter?”
And she said, simply, “it’s so beautiful; I just never realized how beautiful it is.”
It was at that moment, he told me, that he had them right where he wanted them: open in awe and wonder to the grandeur of the universe; open, that is, to enter the moment of worship of the author of that grandeur.
As the psalmist wrote, “the sea is God’s for God made it … come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.”
Let us worship.
Whatever else it is, whatever else we may try to make of it or accomplish through it by way of building up and maintaining a community, of learning the old, old story, of reflecting on the problems and challenges and issues of contemporary life, that initial call to worship begins so often with the simple recognition of the beauty and grandeur of the created order and a deep gratitude for the gift of our lives, our opportunity to appreciate and participate in it.
Whether they come standing before a Pacific sunset or under an eclipsing full moon, on a mountaintop or a field of waving grain, in solitude or in the company of others, out beyond the bounds of development of in the midst of the city where human creativity can reflect the creator’s image, those moments of simple recognition of beauty and wonder in the face of grace and love, open us to the presence of God and lead us to worship.
When our hearts are broken open by beauty, grace and love, worship is a fundamentally human response.
At such moments, I hear the old American hymn running through my mind:
“My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
Tears flow, even sometimes for those of us who do not cry easily. I recall with great clarity coming home from the hospital after Bud was born, sitting still for a moment, and being overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment of birth, by the immeasurable love I experienced, by my own heart being broken open as if for the first time. Likewise, I remember being on a roof-top garden above mid-town Manhattan with a group of high-school kids, sitting still in the dark listening to the late-night sounds of the city, sharing our thanksgivings after a day of serving the least of the city, and joining our voices in simple songs of praise. Or sitting – being still – in a park in the Rockies, looking down on the spreading lights of Denver, after a day of serving the least of that city, and offering thanksgiving and praise with a different group of kids as we looked out at the wonder of creation.
Such moments of awe and wonder are not the end of Christian worship or spirituality, they are the beginning. Such moments are not the end – the telos or purpose – of faith, but they can give rise to that direction.
For if faith is ultimately more about a relationship of trust than it is about a body of knowledge, then how better to begin to trust than to be still and know that God is God, to be still and open to the beauty and grandeur of the universe and of our small lives within that immense creation.
We all respond to such moments in our own ways, and, at its best, Christian worship brings together those multiple and diverse authentic responses and gives common voice to a communal response to that experience of God.
One of the reasons that there are so many variations on Christian community and worship is surely that our individual responses to such moments and experiences are also varied and diverse. For some, falling into contemplative silence is an authentic response, for others reflection and writing are authentic responses, for some breaking into dance, for others lifting voices in song.
Moving into response begins to give shape to our experience, and situating the experience within the story of a particular tradition begins to give it meaning and power.
That’s how it was that Paul was able to say, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
His heart-breaking experience of God’s presence opened him to hearing a new story, to singing a new song, and that story gave shape and meaning to his experience. Together, the experience and its meaningfulness, gave rise to a powerful faith such that Paul found hope in the midst of suffering.
Paul’s letters to the earliest Christian communities do not give much specific detail about their worship. He doesn’t tell us if they sung the classic hymns of the age or developed an entire new genre of praise, nor if they battled in disagreement over the difference. He doesn’t say if they were preaching communities; although one of my favorite Pauline anecdotes is the passage where a young man falls asleep during the preaching and tumbles out a window. I take that as a warning against the dangers of long-winded preaching!
So I’m going to stop right here and open our community to some prayerful conversation about what gives rise to wonder in your own experience, and about your own most deeply felt worshipful responses.
Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-5
A colleague I met some years back in California shared this story of youth ministry and spirituality. He was leading his high school group on a retreat on the Pacific coast, and had taken the kids out to the beach at sunset. He had them spread out by themselves along the water’s edge and watch as the sun went down over the ocean.
As he watched them watching the sun he noticed that a couple of the girls were crying. Being the good youth leader that he is, he immediately suspected some adolescent drama within the group. A romance broken up, an unkind word from a friend, some other of the myriad stumbles along the tortuous route of growing up.
So he went up to one of the girls to find out what he was going to have to deal with that weekend, what was going to get in the way of his great plans for drawing the kids into a deeper spirituality. He asked her, “what’s the matter?”
And she said, simply, “it’s so beautiful; I just never realized how beautiful it is.”
It was at that moment, he told me, that he had them right where he wanted them: open in awe and wonder to the grandeur of the universe; open, that is, to enter the moment of worship of the author of that grandeur.
As the psalmist wrote, “the sea is God’s for God made it … come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.”
Let us worship.
Whatever else it is, whatever else we may try to make of it or accomplish through it by way of building up and maintaining a community, of learning the old, old story, of reflecting on the problems and challenges and issues of contemporary life, that initial call to worship begins so often with the simple recognition of the beauty and grandeur of the created order and a deep gratitude for the gift of our lives, our opportunity to appreciate and participate in it.
Whether they come standing before a Pacific sunset or under an eclipsing full moon, on a mountaintop or a field of waving grain, in solitude or in the company of others, out beyond the bounds of development of in the midst of the city where human creativity can reflect the creator’s image, those moments of simple recognition of beauty and wonder in the face of grace and love, open us to the presence of God and lead us to worship.
When our hearts are broken open by beauty, grace and love, worship is a fundamentally human response.
At such moments, I hear the old American hymn running through my mind:
“My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
Tears flow, even sometimes for those of us who do not cry easily. I recall with great clarity coming home from the hospital after Bud was born, sitting still for a moment, and being overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment of birth, by the immeasurable love I experienced, by my own heart being broken open as if for the first time. Likewise, I remember being on a roof-top garden above mid-town Manhattan with a group of high-school kids, sitting still in the dark listening to the late-night sounds of the city, sharing our thanksgivings after a day of serving the least of the city, and joining our voices in simple songs of praise. Or sitting – being still – in a park in the Rockies, looking down on the spreading lights of Denver, after a day of serving the least of that city, and offering thanksgiving and praise with a different group of kids as we looked out at the wonder of creation.
Such moments of awe and wonder are not the end of Christian worship or spirituality, they are the beginning. Such moments are not the end – the telos or purpose – of faith, but they can give rise to that direction.
For if faith is ultimately more about a relationship of trust than it is about a body of knowledge, then how better to begin to trust than to be still and know that God is God, to be still and open to the beauty and grandeur of the universe and of our small lives within that immense creation.
We all respond to such moments in our own ways, and, at its best, Christian worship brings together those multiple and diverse authentic responses and gives common voice to a communal response to that experience of God.
One of the reasons that there are so many variations on Christian community and worship is surely that our individual responses to such moments and experiences are also varied and diverse. For some, falling into contemplative silence is an authentic response, for others reflection and writing are authentic responses, for some breaking into dance, for others lifting voices in song.
Moving into response begins to give shape to our experience, and situating the experience within the story of a particular tradition begins to give it meaning and power.
That’s how it was that Paul was able to say, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
His heart-breaking experience of God’s presence opened him to hearing a new story, to singing a new song, and that story gave shape and meaning to his experience. Together, the experience and its meaningfulness, gave rise to a powerful faith such that Paul found hope in the midst of suffering.
Paul’s letters to the earliest Christian communities do not give much specific detail about their worship. He doesn’t tell us if they sung the classic hymns of the age or developed an entire new genre of praise, nor if they battled in disagreement over the difference. He doesn’t say if they were preaching communities; although one of my favorite Pauline anecdotes is the passage where a young man falls asleep during the preaching and tumbles out a window. I take that as a warning against the dangers of long-winded preaching!
So I’m going to stop right here and open our community to some prayerful conversation about what gives rise to wonder in your own experience, and about your own most deeply felt worshipful responses.
posted by David Ensign at
6:44 PM
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