Heart Warmings

I am not sure when I first shared in an All Saints Sunday worship service, but what I do not know is that after one, I was hooked on making sure I gave leadership to it for all the years which followed.   Perhaps, it had to do with the way it enabled me to connect with a deep loss of my own within the context of a moment in the presence of the God who knows the day of our coming before we come and the day of our going before we go.  And at another level, it gave life to something so often ignored in our contemporary worship:  the expression of emotions that sometimes range out of control.

 

How we got to such a place has not always been easy to figure.  The early days of the history of spiritual life in this country has stories of powerful spiritual awakenings, protracted meetings, and camp meetings.  The preaching did not seek to educate, or to enlighten, but to persuade those who gathered to believe in Jesus.  While there may have been more fire and fear than love and mercy in that early preaching, the purpose was to bring people into a life changing encounter with the Christ.

 

It often seems that we have not only suppressed the expression of raw emotion in worship, but that we have also come to a place where we preach about Jesus as a nice guy who wants us to do better.  At best such preaching is a perversion of the gospel.  The gospel is about how Christ makes us new, not better.  It is about the blood of Jesus being shed on a cross as a divine means of making it possible for us to be at one with God again.  It is about a love that makes every love pale in comparison.  It is a gospel not just meant for the brain, but for the heart.  I have always liked the Wesleyan expression, "a heart strangely warmed" and wish that there were more heart warmings in worship than we seem to be seeing.