Pastors

Singing Though the Scroll is Sealed

What happens to worship when questions overwhelm?

Leadership Journal February 20, 2014

Where do leaders turn when the hard questions of life and culture press in? For one take, enjoy this grounded piece from PARSE regular Mandy Smith. – Paul

Church staff retreats rarely go according to plan.

I usually come with a list of decisions we need to make. Sometimes God has something else in mind.

Our most recent staff retreat was no different. During our breakfast together, the conversation turned to relationships in our lives where we felt burdened. One staff member was wrestling with how to respond to a family member who had walked away from faith and now called herself an atheist. Another staff member was being asked almost weekly about what the bible says about homosexuality and reading every book on the subject. A third member of staff was engaged in an intense creation/evolution debate with a friend. After a while we realized we were all burdened in a similar way: How can we ever know enough, read enough, explain enough to keep up with all the questions our people and culture throw at us? If convincing people of our beliefs is our job, we feel terribly inadequate. It was good to be able to put words to our burdens and to know we were not alone but we finished breakfast feeling heavy.

By now we had missed the fact that our retreat schedule had said "8:30: Prayer." So we prayed. But the kind of prayer that flowed from our breakfast conversation led to one of the most powerful prayer times we've ever had. Instead of our usual, reserved prayers, these were cries for help from our deep sense that we could never keep up, heartfelt calls of longing for God to reveal himself. At one point during the prayer, words from Revelation came to mind. I assumed it was just because I'd been reading them to prepare next week's sermon. But they wouldn't go away. I almost felt that God himself was telling me to say them. I didn't feel them. I didn't feel like saying them. It made no sense to me that God would tell me what he wanted me to say to him. But I felt like I was just supposed to say them. And so, awkwardly, I prayed:

"Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

Who was, and is, and is to come."

It was only days later, while working on my sermon, that this made any sense.

The lion, the lamb

These words of praise come from the beasts worshiping around the throne in Revelation 4. It's a gorgeous, colorful scene filled with movement and light, a grand throne room with one seated on a throne, holding a scroll. But as I read the passage to prepare this sermon, the most moving part for me was something quiet and small. It was John's tears. He sees that this scroll has writing on both sides, packed solid with truths but it's sealed with 7 seals, sealed up tight. He longs to know what the scroll contains. If it's in His hand, it must be something worth knowing. But when it seems that there is no one worthy to break the seals and open the scroll or even look inside it, John's heart breaks. He weeps and weeps.

Still feeling the weight of our retreat conversation and prayers, I felt John's frustration. I felt his longing to understand, to know how to answer every question, how to respond to every issue the media and culture throw at us. But for all my reading and thinking, I always come up short. To know what the Bible meant for its own time takes an effort, to try to work out what it means for ours seems impossible. So I often, like John, feel like the scroll is rolled up tight and the knowledge is kept hidden. Like John, I long for answers.

As John is weeping, one of the elders standing around the throne comforts him, saying,

"Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed, He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals."

I imagine that John raises his head then, looking for this great Lion. His tear-blurred eyes see something happening in the center of the throne room. I imagine his great surprise, as his eyes clear, and there, instead of a great, triumphant Lion, he sees a Lamb. And not just any lamb. A lamb that has been slain. It is standing, yes, but it has known suffering. Blood and dirt are still caked in its wool. And yet it stands. It takes the scroll from the one on the throne.

And what happens next is astounding: The place erupts into praise.

He's a raggedy lamb standing in a lion's place.And he hasn't even opened the scroll yet. But the 24 elders and the 4 magnificent beasts and thousands upon thousands of heavenly hosts and every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea break into praise.

They worship him, without even knowing what is in the scroll. They worship him because He is worthy to open the scroll.

I'm reminded of Paul's doxology in Romans 11. When he is overwhelmed by the unknowable ways of the God he is trying to explain, he breaks into worship:

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgements and his paths beyond tracing out!

Who has known the mind of the Lord?"

Worthy of wranglers' worship

Which brings me back to the conversation on our staff retreat. And the many conversations like it going on in college classrooms and churches and living rooms around the world. When, in our constant wrangling with ideas, will we know enough to worship? At what point will we have him figured out enough to confidently state things we know and believe about him? Because we have doubts or holes in our logic or incomplete doctrinal statements, we don't know what to say to or about him. So we don't say anything. We don't want it to be inauthentic. We don't want it to be awkward. So we wait until we have it all figured out. It's great to engage our intellects, to be thoughtful, well-read Christians who are able to respond to the important issues of our day. But if we wait until we totally understand before we worship, we will never worship. Maybe instead of worshiping because we understand, we could worship because we don't. Worship the unknowable wonders of our God. Worship because he is worthy.

Worthy to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and power. Worthy because the Lamb was slain and with his blood he purchased people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.

I don't even fully understand how that works. But it sounds like something worth worshiping.

I don't know exactly why yet but I think there's something to be gleaned from this for our generation, some reason why I sensed that the answer was in praying a prayer of praise when all I wanted to have was the answers. Maybe this is the only way out of the endless loop of seeking answers: if we can remember how to worship, even if it's awkward, even if it's while we're still seeking, we will know something we've never known before.

It may not be the answer to all our questions but it may be the Answer.

Mandy Smith serves as lead pastor at University Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is the author of Making a Mess and Meeting God: Unruly Ideas and Everyday Experiments for Worship

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