Musings on the Daily Lectionary

I love the LORD,because he has heard
my voice and my supplications.
Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.

So begins Psalm 116, and those two becauses jump out at me. On the one hand, they bother me a bit. Should I love God only if I get something out of it? But at the same time, how can I love God if I've never had any experience of God loving me?

I don't know that my experience is typical, but my growing up in church led me to think that being Christian was mostly about believing the right things. It was believing that this and that happened centuries ago. It was believing that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was somehow a good thing for me. And it was believing that believing all these things got me in God's clubhouse. But there wasn't a lot in my religious background that spoke about experiencing God. How was I to know whether or not God heard my voice or favorably listened to my requests?

We Presbyterians are sometimes called "the frozen chosen," but I don't think that our well deserved reputation for staid worship has much to do with my experience growing up. Instead, our position in the mainline, the dead-center of the culture made us such an integral part of that culture that God sometimes seemed to get lost. Mainline Christianity was about the ethics and values of the culture, about morality, about a philosophy that nurtured community and good citizenship. None of these things should be dismissed as unimportant, but they don't have a lot to do with God's ear inclined toward me, God rescuing me from the snares of death, or God keeping me from stumbling.

I don't for a moment doubt that many people in the congregations of my childhood had deep and moving encounters with the living God, but something about the way we did things and the habits we emphasized made it difficult for me to do so. And I think this remains a challenge for many congregations that came of age in middle of the 2oth Century.

I think it was Roy Oswald of the Alban Institute who I once heard say of mainline congregations, "People come to us seeking an experience of God, and we give them information about God." How do with share with them a little "because?"

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