Discomfortable...

The folks who attended the 2009 Montreat worship and music conference led worship yesterday and I thank them for that.  It is always wonderful to have new worship experiences, especially when you can tell the experience is really meaningful for people, especially the people leading it.

New worship experiences are also weird.  Different music, different liturgy, different leadership...and "different" plus "human" over "CHURCH" is a formula for discomfort.  And it was "discomfortable."  Even some of the music, which I am pretty good at, was a bit beyond my ability to catch onto quickly.  At first, I accepted my discomfortableness as part of the package of different folks leading worship.  Then, by the middle of the service, acceptance had grown into fatigue.  And then, Spirit  insight...

Who am I to think worship should be comfortable?  Why do I expect to hear the Word of God only in ways that are comfortable, ways that don't challenge me?  What actually happened in my worship discomfortableness is that I paid attention to everywhere we went, read the words to every song, listened to all the liturgy.  It required all my effort to keep up...which is probably why I was tired.

Jesus life and ministry centered on "discomfortableness."  Karl Barth reminds us that we too easily form "notions of God and His Law...which are very acceptable to [us] but most inappropriate because they are harmless and conciliatory and compromising...[Our] sin takes on the appearance of something which is quite comfortable." The same move to acceptableness that limits God and Law to "harmless" also limits worship. It limits our ability to do God's work.  Harmless and comfortable don't do much challenging to the powers and principalities.

The cross on which Christ died was the ultimate embarrassment.  Crucifixions happened, but no one talked about them.  Being crucified was the most humiliating possible death, the most jarring event that could happen to a family, even a community.  Nothing good could come of a cross. The discomfort of Christ's disciples had to be profound...so profound that only one stayed at the foot of the cross.  This just couldn't be right...


If we follow Jesus, we must live in discomfortableness.  Love your enemies.  Feed the hungry.  Eat with sinners and tax collectors.  Take up your cross.  Christ's way won't be comfortable or familiar.  Moltman, another theologian in my school desk, says, "Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way." (The Crucified God) I recently heard people talking of the great comfort the cross in the front of our sanctuary gives them...and perhaps so.  But I am increasingly aware of the significant change that cross calls me to embody...and there are times I wish wholeheartedly that I didn't have to see that symbol front and center of my faith.

God cracked my little shell of "comfortable."  The great irony was I think I said the Lord's Prayer more times yesterday than I have on any given day maybe in my entire life.  And every time I uttered the words "Our Father," I cringed a bit...wondering if God would answer me back (after a sermon where God did, actually, answer back).  
I would like to retreat into the comfortable on many fronts.  But for today, and perhaps tomorrow, I am going to embrace the discomfortableness of the cross and see what God wants to say.