The Enduring Church

One of the things I learned in my study of church history is how the early church began to make the Eucharist ceremony more elaborate. I think about the first church services, and how they were overseen by men who had walked with Christ, and later by men who had walked with these men, and seen their miracles, and heard their stories while looking into their haunted, awe-filled eyes. The Christian church in Jerusalem was founded on a miracle witnessed by its members. Surely, when they came together to pray, the simplest of vestments and ceremonies would have done nothing to diminish the stirring in their spirits, the sense of a God fearfully, blessedly close.

Subsequent Christians, however, coming to the church two or three hundred years after the apostolic miracles, must have felt less awe. Moses glowed in the wake of seeing God's hindquarters; surely something similar must have held for the first church. That glow faded over time, and with it, Christian awe.

This, I think, might explain the introduction of more elaborate ceremony, as an effort by church fathers to instill in their flocks a greater and rightful sense of holiness. Ornately crafted tools of office accompanied the rise of ceremony itself, the intricacies of prayer and liturgy that became an integral part of early -- but not earliest -- church worship. These devices all served an iconic function, pointing their practitioners to a holy God of creation and judgment and redemption.

In modern times, however, an opposite tendency emerged, born of the same impetus, which was to give people a closer intimacy with the fullness of their God. Whereas early church leaders developed ritual to evoke awe, modern leaders began to strip away ritual, in service to the same end. Repetitive praise choruses replaced theology-laden hymns, jeans and a blazer replaced the priestly vestments, Father Wilson became Pastor Mike.

What strikes me is how either trend, toward or away from ceremony, is vulnerable to becoming a vehicle for hubris and corruption. The golden chalice from which communion wine is poured easily leads to the gilded trappings of the church leader -- be he Pope Alexander VI or Joyce Meyer. While one might have expected modern elimination of ritual to reduce priestly hubris, these changes simply became new means of aggrandizing the church head rather than the Godhead. Pastor Mike, disencumbered of hymns and liturgies and the demands of close exegesis, had the opportunity to become, if he succumbed to temptation, the rock-star center of a mega-church.

It is curious and hopeful that God would entrust the care of his church to the likes of us. I suppose most of us feel like our church is getting it right, and harbor various levels of disdain for the others. This church prohibits dancing, that one sings only psalms, that other one burns incense. We come to Him in suits or jeans, pierced and unpierced, clapping or stern-faced, and I suspect we are all in some ways dreadfully wrong, and in others, by grace alone, in glorious communion. Somehow the church endures, despite churches.

Do you ever wonder what the service in Heaven will be like? I suspect we'll all of us be surprised, except perhaps the children, the at times clapping, napping, dancing, babbling, solemn, curious, out-of-tune children. They'll probably fit right in. The rest of us will have to pay attention from the back pews for a while, and likely unlearn a good bit of that which we once held certain.