The worship laboratory. . .

If you are old enough, you can recall when Coke nearly killed itself by changing the old recipe.  New Coke was born to a people who wanted the classic taste of old.  It was a marketing nightmare.  To have a successful product and then turn that product into a lab experiment is to risk the financial viability of the whole company on a whim.  Business has learned to be careful.  Small things matter.  Remember when Bud Light shot itself in its foot by forgetting who it was and who drank it?  Well, the same is true of Christianity on Sunday morning.

Sunday morning has become a worship laboratory.  We all know this.  I am not saying this only with respect to the Evangelicals who have rejected the liturgy and its historic form but even of those who appreciate the liturgy and also among those whose liturgy is highly regulated by central authority.  You can blame the liturgical movement, Vatican II, or the advent of local publishing technology that can reproduce copy fit for a hymnal.  It does not matter who is to blame.  What does matter is that from Rome to Wittenberg, the liturgy has become one grand experiment that not only is an affront to God but a scandal to the people in the pews.

In some liturgical churches, nobody knows what they will find when they arrive on Sunday morning.  It may be a priest riding his bicycle around the chancel or spooky looking set of giant heads walking in procession.  It could be a clown service or a polka mass.  It could be an ancient text or words that were composed within hours of the gathering.  It could be a hymnal in hand or images on a screen.  It could be balloons on a string or champagne in the cup of Christ.  It could be a priest dancing or singing a contemporary ballad or a diva singing a love song to Jesus.  Who knows?  Whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic, we have turned the liturgy into a divine experiment as if it were a toy given to us to play with.  In the end we have betrayed our faithlessness to those assembled in solemn awe and to the world as if to say nothing really matters to me.  What a joke!

Church architecture has become the same kind of laboratory in which someone who does not understand what is happening in worship plays with shapes and materials to provide a space which serves nothing of its intended purpose and costs the faithful more than dollars.  Church music has become the same odd curiosity in which Jesus spins us round or we spin Him in a display of ignorance and foolishness that makes light of sin and even more of the cost Jesus bore to end its reign of death.  Church vestments have become no different that the blank canvases on which some play with shapes, textures, and colors only to betray the very purpose of the vestments themselves.  We are experimenting ourselves to death with the holy things of God.  

God has not given us the means of grace to play with but to observe with due solemnity because through these He does His bidding -- His Word that does that of which it speaks, His water that is no mere symbol but the means to accomplish what it signs, His food that feeds us not symbolic food but real flesh and real blood for the forgiveness of real sins.  Children seem to have better sense than adults in knowing what is sacred and holy -- too sacred and too holy than to toy with it.  A little child shall lead them.  We not only mock the things of God but God Himself and in the end we make ourselves fools because of how little the things of God matter to us.  I wish I could say better but I am tired of our constant need to express ourselves and then cover up our selfishness and foolishness by saying it is being done in the name of God.  When we make the liturgy into a toy, we are no more pious than the builders who built a tower of arrogance which God had to destroy.  If the Church is going through a time of cleansing, it may well be for the same reason God confounded the languages of those who would touch His feet with their accomplishments.  Don't play with worship and if you do be prepared to suffer the judgment of the God who really does care what we dare in His name.