An Audience of None

Let’s continue to talk about worship.  In an excellent sermon on worship yesterday, my pastor used an image that had never occurred to me.  In speaking of the creation story in Genesis 1, he invited us to imagine a magnificent fireworks display, in which one stunning set of rockets after another bursts into the darkened sky (”without form and void”).  My mind went immediately to Job 38.7, where God, bellowing and booming out of a category-4 theophany, calls the old sore-scraper’s attention to the boot-up of the cosmos, “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  In my thoughts I pictured the angels packed like so many picnicking day-trippers onto the grassy slopes outside the Heavenly Jerusalem.  As God’s “Let there be” lit the six-fold succession of fuses, they gazed earthward and gasped, “Oooh…ahhhh!  Oooh…ahhhh!” 

Then (as we preacher-types are prone to do), I thought of the context of that line, and remembered the Almighty is basically emphasizing that Job’s good opinion is not an essential element in the Lord’s glory.  A few verses later (Job 38.26), God describes the global waterworks which he uses, “to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth.”  The Message renders that last line as, “Drenching the useless wastelands so they’re carpeted with wildflowers and grass.”

My point is that God doesn’t need an audience.  Or a creation, for that matter.  Dallas Willard, asked what God did in the eons of eternity past, replied, “He was enjoying themselves.”  The mutual glorification society, the unbroken communion of love between Father, Son, and Spirit, was sufficient unto itself.  He created us, not to increase his glory, but because the increase of his glory overflowed and spilled out as you and me and, as he reminds Job, the hippopotamus. 

Which has what to do with worship?  Just this:  if God doesn’t need an audience, neither do we.  So why do we measure the value of worship by the number of spectators it attracts?  G. K. Chesterton, in his essay, “About Widows,” criticizes the modern trend toward publicizing private lives.  Such an obsession indicates, he says “a lack of interest in private life” as something worthy in itself.  Paris Hilton broadcasts every aspect of her private life because, one suspects, it would be unbearable being Paris Hilton all by yourself.  “It is the idea that life inside the house is wasted if people outside the house know nothing about it,”  Chesterton continues.  And church-as-show says the same thing about worship inside the house of God.

I like a big turnout at church as much as the next person.  There’s an energy in a packed auditorium that is really enjoyable.  But I think we do well to remember that God grew flowers on Saguaro cacti in the Sonoran desert centuries before the first pilgrims slogged down from the Bering Strait to take a gander, and that worship contacts the Eternal equally well whether offered by few or many.

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