Mistakes and Corporate Worship

"The church has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that she has made us like ill-taught piano students; we play our songs but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music, but to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch...I have now heard the strains of grace, and I grieve for my friends who have not".

Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?

Babette's Feast and the Foretaste of Heaven

The following is an excerpt of a review of Babette's Feast (one of my favorites films for its themes of redemption and trasncedence) by Thomas S. Hibbs. Read on and be sure to check out this great Danish film.

Babette’s Feast (is) a story of the sacramental celebration of sensible delight and communal reconciliation as a sign of the heavenly banquet (Luke 14:23 and Matthew 22:1-10). Set in Denmark amid a small, austere community of Protestant Christians, united in their devotion to their founding pastor, whom they honor as “priest and prophet,” the film focuses on the founder’s beautiful daughters, Martine and Filippa. Named after the great reformers Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, the daughters early on attract the attention of worthy suitors. Neither daughter is capable of freeing herself from her father and the community he has established. One of Martine’s suitors, Lorens Löwenhielm, leaves disappointed; learning from this religious family that “earthly love and marriage” are mere illusions, he vows to devote himself to his career and becomes a decorated general. Another, Achille Papin, a famous Parisian opera singer, discovers a great musical talent in Filippa, but he too is rebuffed.

Later, as war envelops Paris and families are torn asunder, Papin sends a friend, Babette, to live with the family he still admires. A devastated Babette, who has endured the murder of her family, begins work as a cook, preparing the simple meals the sisters insist upon eating. A series of fortuitous events make it possible for Babette to prepare a feast for the entire community. The sisters wish to commemorate the anniversary of their father’s founding of their religious community, a community lately afflicted by “testy and querulous” disagreements. What they have in mind is a “modest supper followed by a cup of coffee.” Plans change, however, when Babette wins the French lottery and has 10,000 francs at her disposal. She persuades the sisters to let her prepare a French feast. In a humorous set of scenes, wine and live sea turtles arrive; the sisters suffer nightmares and confess to their religious brethren that they may have “exposed” everyone to “evil powers” and a “witches’ Sabbath.”

It looks at this point as if the stage is set for an evening of quiet misunderstanding, an evening in which the splendors of the senses will be wasted on a community that identifies religious asceticism with a state of disembodied detachment. But another chance event, the last-minute arrival in town of General Löwenhielm alters the chemistry of the meal. His presence means not only that there will be twelve at the meal but also that a person of cultivation will enjoy, and comment on, Babette’s feast.

The general is the first to sense the transforming effects of the feast, as he marvels at the quality of the food and the wine. Here the meal is an occasion for the most human and most philosophical of passions: wonder. The dinner is at first characterized by comic incongruity between the general’s comments and the non sequitur responses from the other members of the dinner party. At one point, a woman, who had earlier described the human tongue as a source of “unleashed evil,” sips her wine as she speaks innocently of how much she is enjoying the “lemonade.”

The film completely transcends our popular way of framing the debate over appetite, which pits a repressive Puritanism against a celebration of the indulgence of untutored desire. If the religious views of this community are in many ways shallow and repressive, the film’s corrective consists not in a repudiation of religion as oppressive. Instead, the film makes clear that bodily goods and sensible pleasures can be vehicles for the manifestation of grace, occasions of communal transformation. The feast achieves what the sisters’ attempts at moral and religious reform could not; it brings about reconciliation as warm memories of the departed founder flow forth in speeches from those assembled.

As the general recounts famous meals at the Parisian restaurant, Café Anglais, where the renowned chef was a woman (Babette, of course!) with a gift for transforming dinner into a love affair that weds spiritual and bodily appetite, he offers an education in the way sensible things can be vehicles of spiritual realities and meals can be foretastes of heaven. If his words are lost on his dining companions, they need not be on us. Viewing this film...provides a glimpse of the remarkable scope of the drama of redemption and of the way in which art, like food, can be a vehicle for the expression of the most profound of spiritual realities.

Joy Is Contagious

Yes, I know it's a commercial for a cell phone but don't be all curmudgeony. Think on this...

1) Joy is contagious. Many of the people in the video were commuters who joined in the dance as a result of the enthusiasm expressed by those hired for the commercial. My favorite commuter is the man, who, after hearing the first few bars of "My Boy, Lollipop" eventually succumbs to the dance by lifting his arms as his expression turns from bewilderment into a beatific smile.

2) Joy is meant to be shared because God created us to live in community with one another. The older I get the more and more I see this truth manifested in my life. The times that I am most aware of God's goodness is when I am with friends and family, sharing a meal, a glass of wine, trading stories or making music. I mean, let's face it...this wouldn't have been quite as effective if it was simply one person dancing in their flat by his/herself.

3) Joy is expressed through clapping, shouting and dancing. If we have the true and life changing Good News of Christ Jesus, why can't our times corporate worship look more like this? Heck, even closer to home, why don't I live my life more like this? Consider Psalm 130:11-12...

You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing to you and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever.

4) Ultimately, as much fun as dancing can be, the kind of joy we see in the video only be sustained for so long and after awhile starts feeling empty. The truth is that sustained, substantive, life changing joy is found in God alone. Augustine has said that our souls are restless until they rest in God and there are many Psalms that attest to this. I'd like end this post with a few of my favorites.

Psalm 16:11
You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Psalm 19:8
The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes.

Psalm 21:6
Surely you have granted him eternal blessings and made him glad with the joy of your presence.

Psalm 28:7
The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song.

Psalm 94:19
When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul.

Psalm 30:4-5

Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment,
and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.

This last one has become more and more my prayer as of late...

Psalm 51:10-12

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

Harold Best on the Nature of Beauty

Cosper, Best and Stam - Session Four from Sojourn/The 930 Art Center on Vimeo.

Mike Cosper from Sojourn Worship recently sat down with r. Harold Best (author of Unceasing Worship and Music Through The Eyes Of Faith) and professor Carl “Chip” Stam (Professor of Church Music and Worship at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) for a series of conversation about faith, art, music and worship.

I wanted to post this 10 minute clip because I think Best's discussion on the beauty and art as it relates to the western idea of perfection is particularly insightful and helpful as we approach what we interact with the process of making music and art at the church.

Kitsch or Art?

The performance is merely a superficial imitation of the song by Kansas yet at the same time there is an undeniable quality and skill to the performance itself. Even though the method or mode of interpretation is decidedly...unique .

I'll be straightforward: I lean most decidedly towards kitsch. However, the performance does leads me to the question what is role of the interpreter's skill in art. Is the label "art" inclusive to when the work is done with skill and beauty but decidedly derivative if not outright imitation? If not, how do artists inform and influence each other? Why is it still an "acceptable" expression of art to interpret classical music but not the popular form of rock of music?

Whatever the answers are, there is something ridiculously sublime about this performance.

Piper on Authentic Worship

"Let me mention here that this does not mean that worship is authentic only when you are red-hot for God. It can mean that when you are not red-hot, your heart feels a longing for the passion that you once knew or want to know more of. That longing, offered to God, is also worship. Or it can mean remorse that even the longing is gone, and you are scarcely able to feel anything but sadness that you don't feel what you should. That remorse, offered to God, is also worship. It says to God that he is the only hope for what you need. So don't have an all-or-nothing attitude about worship. The heart can be real even if it is not as enflamed with zeal as it ought to be - which it never is in this life."

John Piper – Singing and Making Melody to the Lord

John Updike (1932-2009)

Author John Updike died a couple of days ago at age 76. Here is his "Seven Stanzas at Easter" which I recently read on the Between Two Worlds blog.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

For more on Updike read Russel D. Moore's article entitled John Updike is Dead, which reflects on Updike's life and the deep spiritual craving that flowed from his pen into his poems and stories.

I'd like to read more of this man's work.