If I Came Back From the Dead, I'd Want a Party

So this thing happened on Sunday. It was called Easter. It was pretty cool. And stuff.

No! I don't like that thing I just wrote. Why? Because it wasn't nearly excited enough!

Just be clear, Easter is a pretty fantastic occasion, on so many levels. The event which is celebrated on Easter has, sadly, become a cliche in our culture. I think we should be a bit more excited about the fact that hundreds of years of prophesy was fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus and in that fulfillment we were given the opportunity to have a relationship with God. How many times have I heard that over the course of my life? I don't think I could count, but I am overjoyed that now, 21 years in, I'm finally letting it mean something.

It would be silly for me to talk about Easter and not mention the historical aspect of it all. In celebrating the amazing event heretofore described, we're joining with people from over a thousand years of faith, all of us proclaiming what Jesus did for us, and the freedom which His victory over death brings us. My apologies for internet yelling, but HOW COOL IS THAT!?

As I think on these centuries of celebration, I can't help but ponder all the various different ways worship has presented itself over those years. We've had everything from gathering in houses and simply praising, to beautiful high liturgy in ornate cathedrals, all the way to what my church did this last Sunday. Brace yourselves.

We had a DJ in our worship band.

Some of you may be crying now because of how painfully contemporary that is. Honestly, I did chuckle a little when I walked into the sanctuary on Sunday and there this guy was, up on stage, scratchin' fo Jesus. In the end, I just enjoyed it. I think Easter should be a blow-out party, and the DJ helped make it just that.

For some of us, though, this issue of what is the proper way to worship God is one of the big questions of our faith. I've seen it tear apart individual relationships, even whole congregations. In particular, it seems as though there is this constant fear of new methods of worship, a fear that an introduction of something outside of normative practices of praising God will somehow distract us from the purpose of our gathering; celebrating what the Lord has done.

For me, this begs that ever important question. Why? Why are we so obsessed with protecting tradition at all costs? In particular, why are we so obsessed with protecting our understanding of what traditional is? Our traditional would have freaked people out just a few centuries ago. For example, the fact that we read a Bible printed in English was straight-up heretical when the word of God was first transcribed into that barbarian language in the 1380s. That to say, it's a bit arrogant of us to claim that our current understanding is what should define the pinnacle of "tradition".

The fact of the matter is this. Worshipping God is a good thing. I think it is a bit of a waste of our time if we actively critique the methods which other people use to worship the Lord just because they're not what we're used to. It would do us all a world of good for us to recognize that, when people are worshipping God through reading a common book of prayer, they're hopefully doing it with the exact same heart as a group which calls in a drum line in the middle of a song. Sure, different forms of worship might make us uncomfortable, but it's still worship. Let's come together, all of us, under the banner of praising the name of the one who gave so much that we might come to know Him.

With His love and grace,

Taylor