When Worship is Difficult

A few months ago I think I met a man who could not worship.

What happened was this: I was in Edinburgh last June visiting with my daughter and her family, and, as usual, on Sunday morning I went to worship at the magnificent St. Gile’s Cathedral. It was a beautiful, sunny day – something that can be a little bit rare in Scotland. It was near the beginning of my visit, so I was looking forward to time spent with my grandchildren. I was feeling really good that day. And the worship service seemed especially meaningful. The sun was shining in through the windows. I agreed with the hymns the minister had picked. The sermon was powerful. And almost everybody in that sanctuary seemed to be feeling God’s spirit moving in our midst. It was a joyful service, and I really felt like I was worshiping God. It was one of those Sundays when absolutely everything went right.

I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, if you can’t worship here today, you just can’t worship …”

But ironically, right in front of me, there was seated a man who apparently could not worship. Now, the woman he was with – I suppose it was his wife, she was into it with the rest of us. She was praying and singing and listening and praising, but while she did, he fiddled with his fingernails, and fretted, and checked his watch and his phone over and over again. When we were praying, he was staring off distractedly into space. When we were caught up in the power of it, he was seemingly distracted. Here was a man who somehow, even on this beautiful Sunday in June, could not worship.

Now, to get a handle on this, just think about our Gospel reading this morning. The scene we read about takes place just after the resurrection of Jesus. The disciples, all except Thomas, are in a locked room when the risen Christ appears to them.

Later on, when Thomas arrives, they say to him, “We have seen the Lord.”

And Thomas says, “Well not me, not me.” He did not believe, he could not worship.

Well ever since I encountered that man at St. Gile’s Cathedral, it’s been bothering me. It’s been niggling at the corners of my mind, “Why couldn’t he worship in that place on that day?”

Now I suppose I shouldn’t let it bother me. There are plenty of places where I go to church when I’m away or on vacation, when I can’t worship – something is wrong with me, or something is wrong with the mood, or something is wrong with the service – the sermon is “numbing me into unconsciousness.” Or the choir is just awful or they’ve got this aging, “baby-boomer” praise band who look like refugees from a Bible study at Woodstock.

After all, it was just that one guy in a sanctuary filled with praise and worship, and he was the exception. I shouldn’t let it bother me. But it does and I can’t get him out of my mind. And the reason I think he bothers me is because really, when you get down to it, I don’t think he is the exception. I think, as a matter of fact, rather than being the exception, he may well be the rule, and he may well be a parable of what our culture is becoming on the outside, and in many ways, what our congregations are becoming on the inside.

We’re living in a culture that finds it difficult to worship.

Socialist Peter Berger in one of his books tells about a fascinating study that was done concerning a little French village right after World War II. It’s a small village – isolated, rural, ingrown – but everybody in this village is a devout Roman Catholic – loyal to the faith and robust in their worship habits. But after the war because of the declining French economy, a good many of the residents of this village had to move to Paris to find work. And several years after the migration, sociologists studied what had happened to them. And they found that those who stayed behind in the village kept loyal to the faith and strong in their worship. But those who moved to Paris, almost to a person, lost their faith, became agnostic, disconnected from the life of the church and its worship.

Berger says, “It’s fascinating. It’s almost as if there were a magnet in the pavement of the rail station in Paris that “sucked” all the faith out of them when they got off the train.”

Of course there was no magnet, as he goes on to explain, they simply entered the chaos and stress of life as we know it every day. The disorienting, fragmenting, alienating pressures of “big city” living. And they lost the capacity to worship. We’re becoming a culture that cannot worship. And because the stakes are high, I want to know why that man at St. Gile’s can’t worship.

It occurred to me that maybe he could not worship that day because he had other things he wanted to be doing. Maybe he’d been dragged into church on that Sunday against his will. What he really wanted to be doing was whisky tasting, or golfing or climbing up to Arthur’s Seat. And if that’s the case, it’s no wonder he couldn’t worship – he was feeling frustrated that he had to sit there while all the other things he might have been wanting to do were left undone.

And it seems to me there are a lot of people who are in church on a Sunday morning are thinking about the other things they could be doing with their time – things they want to do a lot more than coming to church. And those who aren’t here, no wonder they’re not here. There are so many other things to be doing – hockey, golf, reading the newspaper, working on a home improvement project, or just plain sleeping in.

One church consultant said to me, “These days, if you are a minister of a church in Canada, be assured, you are looking out over a congregation of people, many of whom almost did not come today, because there was something they wanted to do more than be in worship. And of those who did come, most of them secretly fear that everybody else in the sanctuary is more confident about the Christian faith than they are.”

So maybe this guy was just thinking about all the things he would have liked to have been doing more than sitting in a church on a beautiful, June Sunday. But, to tell you the truth, he didn’t seem wistful or thinking of other things that he might be doing. He seemed more bored and distracted. He simply was not engaged in it. So maybe he couldn’t worship that day because like many others in our culture, he was simply numb and blind to the presence of God in that amazing 900 year old St. Giles Cathedral. He couldn’t perceive the divine shining through the everyday.

I remember being in a subway station in Toronto. I was walking through a tunnel, when I began to hear the strains of the most wonderful violin music. You know, they have these performers on transit property. They audition them, and pick the best to perform in prime locations in the hallways and gathering places for subway patrons. Now, of course, for the most part, these performers are totally ignored. It’s a big city - people simply rush past them on the way to work or shopping. But on this day, there was a violinist playing magnificently and the music was superb - the kind of music you pay good money to hear at the Royal Theatre. It was well worth taking a few minutes to simply stop and listen, and I did just that.

But what about the other people rushing past – what do you think? I was the only one standing there, although I did see one curious child being dragged along by his mother who looked like, he wanted to stop and listen. I wondered if that child intuitively recognized that some extraordinary music was being played. This music should have drawn a crowd, but of course, it did not. God has filled the universe with the music of grace and love and wonder, but we keep our heads down, and we just keep on going.

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning so beautifully put it: “Earth is crammed with Heaven and every common bush is afire with God, but only he who sees, takes off his shoes, the rest of us sit around and pluck blackberries.” So maybe the man in front of me was just “plucking blackberries,” oblivious to the wonder all around him.

But to tell the truth, he seemed more to me than oblivious. It was not just that he was oblivious to the sacred, there was something defiant and resistant in him. Even when we stood up to sing the hymns, he stayed seated and glared at the floor. He had his arms folded, as if to say, “Leave me alone!” He was not just oblivious, he was putting up resistance. And that may be because he felt himself too intellectually honest to be caught up in this worship.

Back in my congregation in Brampton, Ontario, I was at a person’s home for a dinner. There were a few people from the church at this dinner. It was a lively dinner conversation. And at one point the conversation turned to the news about a little three-year-old girl in the church who had been diagnosed with a childhood form of leukemia some months back. We had just had some wonderful news about this little girl. Her family had just been told by the physicians, that she was in complete remission.

A woman at the table said, “We’ve been praying for her every day, and talking about her around the church.”

And another woman around the table said, “Yes, this remission, this remission is an answer to prayer.”

I noticed however that there was another man at the table who had been an active participant in the conversation, and at this point he suddenly became very quiet. In fact, he leaned back in his chair during this part of the conversation.

When the dessert had been served and we got up to go into another room, I came up beside him and said, “I noticed you got a little quiet back there a few minutes ago.”

He said, “Yes, I didn’t want to say anything, but I’m not comfortable with all this talk about a remission from leukemia being an answer to prayer - as if God were waiting somehow for prayer before God would heal this child. It seems superstitious to me. I guess I’m just more of a rationalist.”

Well, I knew what he meant. And in fact, after I flip through the TV channels on Sunday afternoon, as it seems to me, one television faith healer after another spins a web of deception and deceit, and promises to send some holy oil to the viewer for a donation of fifty dollars – quite frankly, I’m glad for some rationalists at the table.

But I also wanted to say, both to him and to myself, that what he thought of as kind of a religious “spam filter,” can become a different kind of faith – a faith rejoicing less that the tomb was empty, and more that the Discovery Channel has finally found the bones of Jesus!

But you know, I think when we go all the way down, the reason this man could not worship on that glorious day in Edinburgh, was not because he was thinking about the other things he could be doing, and not because he’s blind to the sacred and not because he’s an intellectual rationalist, but because he’s a human being, a human being like you and like me. And we all have problems with worship.

Now look, I know we’re worshipping now, but in terms of allowing every fiber of our being to arc around the flaming mysteries of God at the centre of life, we have problems with worship. That’s why we’re always fiddling to try and fix it. We could jazz it up – have Susanne play a little “boogie woogie” on the organ We could get a big projection screen for the sanctuary here. I could lose these robes and lead the service in blue jeans and wander up and down the aisle as I preach! I don’t know, maybe those would be good ideas? But, in truth, we’re not trying to fix worship, we’re trying to fix ourselves. And the way we try to fix ourselves, is we try to make it easier to get to God - if we could make it more tourist friendly. If we could somehow knock down the barriers and the obstacles, so that people could truly get to God. All those are good things to do, but they will not enable us to worship. Because the only way we can worship is not if we’re trying to figure out how to get to God, but if God comes to us.

Which is precisely what God in Christ did for Doubting Thomas. As one Biblical scholar says, “Jesus came to Thomas as he came to many others in the Gospel of John, with gift, after gift, after gift. All of them the gift of himself in ways they could apprehend. “Thomas, here I am for you! Do not be doubting, but believe.” And Thomas worships as well as anybody in Scripture, “My Lord and My God!”

Thankfully, we have a God who comes to us, with gift, after gift, after gift – the beauty of nature, the power of love, the laughter of a child, the sunlight streaming through a stained glass window, the support and care of friends, the community of this church. Like Thomas, God has come to us, and all we have to do is open our eyes to see, and our hearts to receive the God who loves each one of us, as if there was only one to love.