Ed McMahon Syndrome

At church last Sunday it was the usual: Official starting time is 9 a.m., but the pews at that hour looked like a hockey player's gap-toothed smile. People drifted in for another 20 minutes until the four opening hymns were over and the "real" part of the worship service was about to begin. I used to be the worst offender.

I am guessing that this happens because of the Ed McMahon Syndrome-the unspoken cultural idea that the hymn-singing part of the service is just the "warm-up act" to the Johnny Carson monologue (which would be the sermon). But it's possible that the phenomenon has longer roots, reaching way back to the 16th-century Reformer Zwingli, who eliminated music from church worship.

Or maybe the practice of slighting songs in favor of the sermon is analogous to traditional American culinary practices that envision a big slab of beef as the sine qua non of a meal, while the vegetables are just the non-essential embellishment (a view that seems very odd to our Asian friends who consume much less meat).

Or maybe we have a screwy or unholy notion of what Sunday worship is for. We pay our admission (the offering basket) to see a show (the pastor's performance at the pulpit), and we regard the hymns as the mood music the theater pipes in before the performance.

But the Bible says, "Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song" (Psalm 95:1.2).