Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The Word that Sustains the Weary

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(Isaiah 49:14-50:11; Romans 9:6-8)

I said last week that in the first part of this chapter, which is the second of the Servant Songs, I believe we see God accept Israel’s rejection of him and respond by sending the Servant beyond Israel to the nations; rather than trying to force his people to accept their part in his plan, this is the point at which he simply incorporates their refusal to do so into his plan and moves forward despite them. I noted that this isn’t the common reading of that passage, but it is what the passage says, and there’s really no good reason to reject it, while there are a number of good reasons not to.

One good reason is the way Israel responds, beginning in verse 14—which, granted, could be just another ridiculous complaint, since we’ve seen a few of those from them already; but it fits. God tells the Servant, “Don’t worry that Israel has refused to respond to you—that’s too small a job for you anyway; I will make you a light for the Gentiles and my salvation for all people,” and Israel complains, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.” You can see where they’re coming from, right? It is, again, the same concern that Paul wrestles with in Romans: if God broke the branches from the olive tree that he might graft the Gentiles in, does that mean that he’s replaced his people? Has he simply written off the Jews and dropped them from his plan?

As we saw last week, Paul says, “no,” and for good reason; here, God says the same thing. He has allowed his people to reject the work he had prepared for them, he has given that work to the Servant instead, but that doesn’t mean he’s rejected them in turn. His care and concern for them isn’t just for what he can get them to do—he didn’t choose them merely as a tool to accomplish his purposes; his love for them is real and sincere and unfailing, and he will never forget them. “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Not likely, but even if she does, I won’t,” declares the Lord. Take the highest and greatest example of human devotion and faithfulness you can think of, and God still exceeds it—and it isn’t close.

Note what he says. He’s been promising his people that he would bring them back to their own land, the land he had given them, and that they would be blessed on the way; now he promises them great blessing in the land. Note the blessing he offers, and how he describes it—not material wealth, not power or conquest, but family. The Lord will gather his people, his children, home to Jerusalem, and they will see far more people gathered than there were in the nation before the exile—so many more, in fact, that there won’t be enough room for everyone. The nation that seemed to be in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth will be larger than before; the family that was afraid it would die out will instead find children returning—so many, in fact, as to raise the question, “Where did they all come from?”

Where did they come from? This is what God says: they came from the nations. They came from the Gentiles, from all those folks out there who aren’t Jews—from us; we are part of the fulfillment of this promise. The terms of his blessing haven’t changed, because his heart hasn’t changed. He loves the Israelites, yes, but not exclusively; he loves everyone else, too, and his blessing on them involves all the nations, as it always has, going all the way back to the beginning. What they need to understand, what Isaiah is moving them towards, is what Paul’s talking about: God’s promise isn’t just for those who are descended from Abraham, and it isn’t automatically for everyone descended from Abraham regardless of their faithfulness to God (or lack thereof); God’s promise to Abraham is greater and broader than that. What matters most isn’t whether you have Abraham’s DNA, but whether you have his heart for God and his willingness to follow.

As such, in order to accept God’s blessing, the Israelites have to let go of the idea that they alone are God’s people, that his blessings are for them and no one else, that they are somehow superior to and favored above all others, and let the nations join them. It’s important to note, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, it can be hard to forgive your enemies, and even harder to welcome them into your home as friends, let alone as family, and that’s what God is inviting Israel to do—making it clear in the process that he isn’t giving them the option of returning his blessing and asking for another one. But then, God never does give us blessings that are just for us—he blesses us so that we can use them to bless others. We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits. That’s just how God works.

For all his reassurances, Israel still wonders: is it really possible? Can plunder really be taken away from mighty warriors? With the second line, I think we’re better off following the Hebrew rather than changing it: can captives be rescued from the righteous? Which is to say, can lawfully-taken captives, captives whose fate was just and right, really be set free? Can a warrior who has both might and right on his side really be deprived of his captives? This is the situation for Israel: the country that conquered them is a great power, and their conquest of Israel was just, for it was ordained by God as his judgment on his people for their faithlessness.

In response, God makes it clear that he both can and will set them free. He has the power to overthrow the fierce warriors, to strip them of their plunder and free their captives; and he has the force of right to make his case against them. The word the NIV translates “contend” is a legal term; those who hold Israel captive can make their case that they have the right to do so, but God will make his own case against them, and as we’ve seen several times in Isaiah already, he’s unstoppable in a courtroom. His action in setting his people free is entirely righteous, and no claim to the contrary will stand before him.

Of course, this won’t happen gently, for those who conquered Israel are fierce, greedy, rapacious, and bloodthirsty; they’re very like the greedy python in the classic children’s picture book by Richard Buckley and Eric Carle: “Half hidden in the jungle green, the biggest snake there’s ever been wound back and forth and in between. The giant snake was very strong and very, very, very long. He had a monstrous appetite, his stomach stretched from left to right.” In the book, the python proceeds to eat everything in his path, from a mouse to a porcupine to a leopard to an elephant, before his greed becomes too much for him: “And when they all began to kick, the snake began to feel quite sick. He coughed the whole lot up again—each one of them—and there were ten.” 

Now listen to the ending here: “He soon felt better, and what’s more was hungrier than just before. He hadn’t learned a single thing: his greed was quite astonishing. He saw his own tail, long and curved, and thought that lunch was being served. He closed his jaws on his own rear, then swallowed hard . . . and disappeared!” His greed was so far out of control that when there was no one else he could turn on, he turned on himself, and destroyed himself. That’s the Babylonians: their sin is self-destructive in the end, as in truth all sin is; the appetite that drove them to empire will ultimately drive them to ruin.

Despite all this, Israel still feels forsaken and forgotten; and so God asks, “When I sent you into exile, was there anything to seal that and make it permanent? When I sent your mother away, was there a certificate to finalize the divorce?” Implicitly, the answer is “no”; and then the Lord turns the tables on them. Who was it who created this separation? Was it God? Did he fail to answer when his people called on him? No: when he answered their cries and came to them, there was no one to answer—not a single response—and so he asks them the question, “Why? Did you not believe I could answer you, or that I have the strength to save you? I can do things far greater than this; I can dry up the sea and turn the rivers to desert—remember all the things I did for you to lead you out of slavery in Egypt—why do you not trust me?” In the end, the separation of which Israel complains is their own doing—they blame God for what is their own fault, and accuse him for the consequences of their own insistence.

And here again, into God’s grief at his people’s refusal to understand, the Servant speaks—this time, with a new sense of the cost of his mission. “The Sovereign LORD has opened my ears,” he says, “and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back.” He has heard, and he has listened “like one being taught,” which is to say, like a disciple, with close and careful attention—and not just occasionally, but “morning by morning,” day by day, beginning each day by listening to God, and then following through by living as God teaches him to live. And look at the consequences: “I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.” This is the obedience God required from his Servant? Well, yes, in part because that tended—and tends—to be the lot of a true prophet. A prophet who stood at the center of power and told the powerful that they were OK would be either unnecessary or lying—and given human nature, rather more of the latter than of the former. True prophets stood, and stand, on the edges, challenging godless behavior, challenging society’s comfortable assumptions, challenging people’s unwillingness to change and to deny themselves; and that’s never a popular message, and so it brings retribution.

More than that, however, the Servant must accept suffering without even trying to avoid it; he’s called to trust God to vindicate him in the end, to hold fast to God’s promise that he will not end in disgrace, but will be found righteous and will see his victory at the last, and set his face like flint to take the mockery and the beatings. He is confident that his trust in God will be justified and his message and mission will be proven true and right, and so he accepts the abuse and the punishment that his enemies hand out without fighting back, knowing that their end will come in due time.

And his reward for this? Because he listened as a disciple, he has the tongue of a disciple, to know the word that sustains the weary. This is a precious gift, and a gift the world cannot match. You can’t get that from the world’s conventional wisdom, or from self-help books; you can’t get it from anything the world has to offer, because the world really doesn’t do grace, and isn’t half so good at love as it thinks it is. The world is impatient with human weakness, intolerant of human frailty—of any frailty it takes seriously as such, anyway—and it’s afraid of death, so anything to do with death, dying, and loss, it just wants to put out of its mind as quickly as possible. Its advice is always about doing this or that—“Just do it,” “Just work harder,” or perhaps “Work smarter, not harder,” as the case might be—and tends to be of the sort that only burdens the weary, rather than sustaining them. Or perhaps I might say, us?

No, the word that sustains the weary is a word from God, and can only come from one who has not bowed the knee to the way of the world and its expectations, and who has accepted the world’s abuse and not fought back. It can only come from one who trusts in God, not in human strength, and so is able to see clearly just how limited human strength really is, and how little it really counts for in the end. Ultimately, it’s a word that can only come from Jesus Christ, though he gives his followers the privilege of speaking it through us to those who need to hear it. It’s a word of grace and mercy, of forgiveness and healing—that says that it’s OK if we can’t suck it up and “just do it” in our own strength, because that’s not what God asks of us anyway. It’s God saying to us, “Just trust me—it’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you, I’ll provide for you, I’ll guide and protect you if you’ll follow me—just trust me.”

The limits of the merely human

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This from Ray Ortlund:

Everything man-made lets us down. Sooner or later, everything man-made reveals its hidden weaknesses. Only Christ will not fail. Only Christ does all things well. I don’t. You don’t. Christ does. Always. Infallibly. . . .Man-made things go boom. They cannot be trusted. Respected, yes. Honored, yes. But not trusted.The only unfailing object of our trust and hope is Christ himself. Theological systems have their uses, but also their limits. Christ, Christ, Christ—the risen, living, present Person of the Lord Jesus Christ who is right here right now and always will be, forever keeping his promises—only he has no limits, only he cannot disappoint.

Amen.  The wellspring of our thought must always be Christ; as theologians, we must always be biblical theologians first and foremost, and as preachers, we must be teaching our people to be biblical theologians, and the center and taproot of our biblical theology must always be hearing the voice of Christ and the word of the gospel in every part of Scripture.And it should be said, this applies to every aspect of life—to political systems, and politicians, for instance, no less than theological systems and theologians.  Even the best political systems, though they have their uses, have also their limits; even the best politicians have their weaknesses and will let us down.  We must seek to find and promote the best we can, systems and politicians alike, but always remembering that only Christ will not fail, only Christ has no limits, only Christ cannot disappoint . . . and the corollary, that there are many things that cannot be done well through political means and processes, but only by the body of Christ, whom he empowers for his purposes by his Holy Spirit.

To lure independents, nominate a conservative?

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In yesterday’s open thread on HillBuzz, the poster made an interesting argument that I’ve been mulling ever since:

We don’t believe Republicans can win the White House with a moderate—they need a conservative, and should not try to court moderate Democrats like us. Paradoxical, we know, but hear us out. We believe Independents don’t know what to do with a moderate Republican like McCain . . . there isn’t a clear line of distinction between Republican and Democrat in that case, so Independents don’t see a good choice to make, and seem to default vote Democrat in that case. But, those Independents had no trouble voting for Bush . . . and Republican turnout for Bush in 2004 was higher than it was for McCain in 2008. Without Palin, a true conservative, that turnout would have been dismal.

As fellow Palinites, those folks are of course offering this in support of the proposition that Sen. McCain did considerably better with Gov. Palin on the ticket than he would have if he’d picked someone else—something which I argued last summer would be the case and am convinced was indeed the case, despite the MSM’s best efforts to bring her down.  As someone whose political convictions are fairly described as conservative, I of course believe already that the GOP ought to nominate a conservative for the White House next time rather than a moderate.  As such, the perception-of-intelligence problem (our tendency to judge as “intelligent” anyone who comes up with a good argument for what we already believe, or want to believe) is clearly in play here.  The fact that I have, and know I have, a predilection for counterintuitive arguments such as this only reinforces that.  So as I read this, I have to try to filter all those things out.Having done my best to do so, however, this still makes sense to me—and the evidence, such as we have, does seem to bear it out.  When, after all, was the last time a Republican won running as a moderate?  Wouldn’t it be Eisenhower in 1956?  Broadly speaking, Nixon ran as a conservative in 1968 (talking about the “silent majority”), George H. W. Bush ran as a conservative in 1988 (“Read my lips:  No new taxes”)—before losing in 1992 after his time in office proved him nothing of the sort—and George W. Bush ran as a conservative in 2000.  Reagan, of course, inarguably was a conservative, if a rather more pragmatic one than many sometimes remember.   Meanwhile, even if you don’t blame Gerald Ford for his loss in 1976, the Republican Establishment types didn’t do much in 1996 or 2008.The first read, anyway, does seem to suggest that independents are more likely to vote for a conservative Republican than for a moderate Republican, at least at the national level; this thesis seems to me to support further investigation even if I do find it appealing.  Not being a statistician (except for a certain amateur interest when it comes to sports), I have no idea how to investigate this to see if it stands up to more rigorous examination—but I hope someone puts in the work, and if so, I’ll be interested to see their conclusions.

What our gaffes reveal about our character

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The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart
his mouth speaks.—Luke 6:45 (ESV)Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.”  It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter:  because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see.  They’re the places where the mask slips.  That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.The highest-profile gaffe of recent weeks, of course, is the president’s “Special Olympics” quip on The Tonight Show, which (much to the administration’s chagrin) turned out to be the rimshot heard ’round the world, despite the best efforts of his sycophants to wave it away as meaningless.  We know better than that, these days; we know gaffes are meaningful, and so by and large, we haven’t bought that line.  At the same time, though, what I haven’t seen is much thoughtful reflection on what Barack Obama’s gaffe does mean—most of the commentary has only been interested in its political significance (and on increasing or decreasing that significance, as it suits the one offering the comment).An exception to that is John Stackhouse’s recent post, probably because it’s not just about the president—it’s also a reflection on his own gaffes:

We have to cut each other a little slack: people under stress sometimes do inexplicable things, including making tasteless jokes or using inappropriate language.But I’m not inclined to let myself entirely off the hook, however forgiving I might feel toward President Obama or any other public figure. I recall the words of Jesus: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).That joke came from somewhere. That word came from somewhere. . . .Yes, we live in a sarcastic and vulgar culture . . . It is part of the air we breathe and the toxins enter us whether we like them or not.Again, recognizing that kind of constant cultural influence should help me be more understanding and forgiving of others who screw up in public.Nonetheless, it is simply true that sometimes I really do mean what I say. Sigmund Freud was prone to overstatement, but there is more than a grain of truth in his dictum, “There is no such thing as a joke.” And as I search my heart for the attitudes expressed in this joke or that word choice, I confess I am sometimes dismayed at what I find. . . .Sometimes, alas, the way you really do think about things and the way you really do talk about things—that is, the way you think and talk when you think no one can hear or no one will be offended—really does come out in public.Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy.And may we attend to what we have inadvertently exposed in our gaffes. It’s good to get forgiveness. It’s better to get healed.

I believe we’re right to ask what the president’s wisecrack tells us about the abundance of his heart; but as we do so, we’d best not get too cocky; we’d best proceed with all due humility, and ask ourselves what we’d let slip about our own hearts if we were in his shoes.  And perhaps we’d also do well to bear in mind the counsel of the book of James:Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.—James 3:1 (ESV)

Here’s a noteworthy admission

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God bless them. . . .  Over 50 million people voted for me and Sarah Palin—
mostly for Sarah Palin.—John McCain
That, courtesy of CNN’s PoliticalTicker blog, was one of Sen. McCain’s comments today at the Heritage Foundation.  It’s a remarkable comment—remarkably honest, I think, and really remarkably gracious, too; it reminds me again of all the things I really do like about the man, for all the issues I have with him.

No matter how far you run, the Father’s heart goes farther

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Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace,
nor are your best days ever so good that you are beyond the need of it.
—Jerry Bridges

That summarizes the message of Luke 15 about as succinctly as anyone ever has. It’s unfortunate that the crowning parable of that chapter is usually referred to as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” because the reality is, both sons are lost. One betrayed his father publicly and abandoned him physically, while the other betrayed him privately and abandoned him internally, but each in his own way was a prodigal, in desperate need of grace; neither realized it or asked for it until it was offered (no, the younger son didn’t come home repentant, but in hope of earning his way back into the family), but the father offered it to both of them anyway. As he always does, whether we want him to or not. Such is the gospel.

HT:  Of First Importance

This is what a political cannonization looks like

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and no, that’s not a misspelling; British MEP Daniel Hannan definitely broke out the rhetorical cannons for this one, and his aim was unerring.  The Aged P called this a “very polite and beautifully enunciated assassination,” and he’s right; to his description I would only add “devastating,” because it’s that, too.  Here in the U.S., Republicans like Aaron Schock ought to be taking notes, because most of what MEP Hannan said to PM Gordon Brown could be said with equal point to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others in the Obama/Pelosi administration.

We should have seen Sarah Palin coming

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When I started this blog, I lived in a small town in the Colorado Rockies—and when I say “small,” I mean it; to give you an idea, there are more students in my oldest daughter’s new elementary school than there are people living in Grand Lake.  (Full-time, anyway.)  If you’ve never lived in a small town in the mountains, you need to understand that it’s a different world up there.  You might have the idea that mountain towns are full of colorful characters, and it’s true; they also tend to be fiercely independent, even more fiercely stubborn, and not always so good at compromising and playing nice with others.  As I’ve written before, the downside of that is that you tend to get communities that range from mildly dysfunctional to complete trainwreck towns like Leadville was (and maybe still is, for all I know).I’m not just going on my own experience in saying this, either; during my five years up there, I compared notes fairly frequently with other mountain pastors, because we were all dealing with similar issues that our flatlander colleagues just didn’t understand.  All our communities were different, to be sure, but we shared common root issues and struggles.  Our town made the headlines twice during my five years there:  once when one of our residents sought redress for his grievances against the county’s commercial hub in the cockpit of the 60-ton Komatsu D355 bulldozer that he’d turned into a 75-ton tank, and once when our church’s oldest and most-beloved member died of an unprovoked attack by a rogue bull moose, something which really isn’t normal moose behavior.  None of my colleagues had anything quite that out of the ordinary happen, but they all had some pretty strange stories of their own; that’s just how it is in the mountains.  Or as my organist from Colorado would say, that’s life in a tomato can.All of this is the reason why I found myself starting to write in an e-mail yesterday, “If there’s a Patrick Henry left in this country, he lives somewhere in the Rockies”; but as I wrote that, I suddenly remembered how many of our most characteristic people—the sort of folks who were still climbing fourteeners in their eighties and musing that when they died, they’d have their bodies autoclaved and set out to fertilize the roses—spent significant time in Alaska every year, and/or had lived there in the past and loved it.  It occurred to me that outside of Anchorage and Juneau, the spirit of our little mountain towns, which is the spirit of the old frontier folks who just had to get out from under the conformity of society, is also very much alive and well in Alaska.  (Maybe even in Anchorage and Juneau to some degree.)That having occurred to me, I suddenly realized that that said something very important about Gov. Palin.  Her emergence was a complete shock to most of the Washington elite—of both parties, which is why she took some heavy hits from many who should have had her back—but it shouldn’t have been; the fact that it was says a lot more about them than it does about her.  I don’t say that we should have expected someone as purely gifted as Sarah Palin to appear on the scene, because she’s a once-in-a-generation political talent (yes, I think she’s a level beyond Barack Obama in that respect, for all his evident gifts as a campaigner), but in a more general way, we really should have seen her coming.  In particular, the very elites who were so scandalized by her arrival on the landscape should have seen her coming, if they were actually doing their jobs.Why?  Well, what is the Republican base looking for?  Another Reagan—and by that I don’t just mean a “real conservative.”  Newt Gingrich was more conservative than Reagan, and I don’t believe we’re looking for another Newt (or even the return of the first one, though many folks would accept that in a pinch).  No, the base is looking for a common-sense, common-folks, common-touch conservative, someone who’s conservative not merely pragmatically or even philosophically but out of an honest respect for and empathy with the “ordinary barbarians” of this nation; we’re looking for someone who understands why Russell Kirk, the great philosopher of American conservatism, lived his entire adult life not in one of the media or academic centers of this country, but in rural Mecosta County, Michigan (the next county south of where my in-laws live)—and who understands that that fact has everything to do with his conservatism.  We’re looking for someone whose conservative principles are anchored in the bedrock of this nation, and who understands our conservatism not merely as an intellectual exercise, but out of shared life experience and a common worldview.That, I think, is why George W. Bush won the GOP nomination in 2000, because he projected that—and indeed, he has many of those qualities; he just wasn’t all that conservative, and so he disappointed many.  For all the Texas in him, he still had too much of Harvard and D.C. in him, too, and so was too prone to play by the rules of the political elite.  It’s telling that the great success of his second term (the surge) came from standing up, not to the mandarins of his own party—some of them, yes, but they were balanced somewhat by John McCain, who’d been arguing for the surge for years—but to the senior leaders of the U.S. military, whom he could approach on very different terms.  He could tell the Joint Chiefs to shut up and soldier; he doesn’t seem to have had it in him to do so to the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the White House correspondents, and in that lay much of the malformation of his presidency.The problem is that the qualities the GOP base is seeking aren’t qualities which are rewarded by the political process in most places; in most of this country, to achieve the kind of prominence and to compile the kind of record that are necessary to justify a run for the White House, it’s necessary to compromise those qualities.  To get to Washington, you must increasingly become like Washington—that’s just how the political process works across most of this country.The exception to that—the only great exception I can think of—is the remaining frontier communities in the American West; and of those, it may well be that the only one that’s really large enough for anyone to rise to political prominence without extensive exposure to the elite political culture in America is Alaska.  I don’t hold our mountain communities up as any sort of ideal—I know well from experience that they’re no Shangri-La—and I’m not going to try to do so for Alaska, either; but if anyone in this society was ever going to rise to political prominence as a true champion of conservative ideals, of the spirit of us “ordinary barbarians,” without being co-opted and corrupted by the spirit and outlook of the political elite, it was going to have to be from someplace like Alaska.  We aren’t going to get another Reagan from Massachusetts, or Minnesota, or Arkansas, or Florida; from Alaska, we have a chance.  The fact that few in the elite would be likely to take such a person seriously is actually part of the point, since they didn’t take Reagan seriously either; the revolt against elite opinion (which is not, mind you, the same thing as populism, for all that many in the MSM confuse the two) is part of what the base wants, and someone willing to lead it and stick to it is one of the qualifications.All of which is to say, we might not have predicted specifically the remarkable and gifted woman who is governor of Alaska, or that she would arrive on the scene exactly when she did (though as bizarre as the 2008 presidential election was, when would have been a likelier time?), but we should have expected someone to come out of Alaska, and probably fairly soon.  The “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” sort of incredulous reaction that we got from so many in the punditocracy was not only unjustified, it was a clear sign of their myopia, that they’re so burrowed in to being insiders that they’re largely incapable of looking out the window to see what’s going on outside.  The GOP base wants another Reagan, and won’t be truly happy until it has one; and where else could such a figure come from?Update:  Welcome to all of you coming over from C4P and HillBuzz—it’s good to have you drop by.  The moose stew should be ready in a bit.  If you want to check out a few more of my posts on Gov. Palin, the links post is here.

Thought on worship

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I’ve been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven’t managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I’ll just put this out there as best I can at the moment.  There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it’s still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor’s/worship leader’s job is to give people what they want in worship.  All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption.  I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the “worship experience” is the core of the “attractional” part.  It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook.  It’s the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they’re still doing that in the current economy; I’ve had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to):  the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch.  If the music’s good enough and you like what he’s selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we’re asked to put in.  Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on.  What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it’s a discipline because worship is a discipline.  It’s not about what the liturgy does for us, because it’s not about what worship does for us:  it’s about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.It’s the discipline of recognizing that we don’t come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God’s call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don’t look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together.  It’s about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need.  It’s about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance.  It’s about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren’t strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he’s given us.  Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline:  it’s the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.As we look at the form and content of our worship services, “Is this what I want?” really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, “What is this asking me to do?  How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?”  To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.