THE MEANING OF REVERENCE
Robert Meyers

Someone tells of the request of some African natives that a missionary come to their village so that they might learn of the white man’s God. The trip was much delayed, but when the missionary finally arrived on a Sunday morning he found the village completely deserted. As he walked on into the middle of the circle of mud and straw huts he wondered if a pestilence or a raid wiped out the whole community. Then, to his amazement, he found the whole village gathered in one spot, quietly waiting for him. The black people stood in reverent silence, lifting their hands in a mute petition to a God in the sky whom they did not know.

Ignorance and superstition are here, but there is also a reverence and awe that seems astonishingly lovely when we compare it with what we often find in more enlightened religious gatherings. We are often much too comfortable in the house where worship takes place. Relaxed and casual, we let our minds sprawl at ease while the events of the service unroll before us. Whether participants or mere spectators, we are not awed, we do not have “a mixed feeling of reverence, fear and wonder, caused by something majestic and sublime.”

All of us have had friends from other religious environments who come to visit our church meetings and are startled at the easy, chatty approach to God. They are sometimes cool to our doctrinal pleas because of their astonishment at our casual devotions. Some notice this more than others, of course, since people vary widely in their sensitivity to moods and surroundings. But there is enough sentiment against this defect to give us pause.

The author of Hebrews says in the latter part of 12:28 that we should “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” If awe is a profound respect inspired by greatness, and reverence is a feeling of deep respect mingled with love for some thing one holds sacred or inviolable, can we say that we really follow the writer’s exhortation?

Awe, according to dictionaries, has an “immobilizing effect” upon people who are under the spell of the feeling. In view of this, try to recall the shuffling movements that run through many of our services like musical themes. How many in houses where we worship are immobilized in their awe at the magnitude of what is transpiring?

The truth is that we stroll into the building loose and relaxed in mind and body, carrying on the same glib talk of social and business events which had been occupying us outside. In the aisles or on the seats, before the first act of worship is announced, we plan an expansion of the store or joke about the prowess of last week’s fishing partner.

When the song is announced, we turn good-humoredly to find the number, wondering idly what it will be. In general, we do not sing nearly so well together as we might because we are unwilling to make the sustained effort required for real improvement. We do not care to hear much talk of what is good and bad poetry in the hymns, nor are we seriously concerned to understand the difference between music that is reverent in nature and that which is too jazzy to be offered to any deity except the gaudy Jukebox.

Someone leads us in public prayer and he, too, is relaxed and easy before his God. Without awe, confident and smooth, he says his say. He appears to be unaware of standing upon holy ground.

It is necessary that worship be carried on in orderly fashion, but sometimes this is so interpreted that ritual becomes unbearably efficient. The communion time, especially, has often been robbed of loveliness and dignity because of our practical attitude toward it. The professional techniques we adopt for preparing the communion meal, for passing it our among the partakers, and for getting all the containers, neatly back together again, are sometimes so much like a business enterprise that we cannot help but notice it. I am convinced that an aura of genuine reverence can surround this ceremony if we plan for that atmosphere as carefully as we decide who shall wash the glasses and how many bearers shall occupy the outside aisles. I do not want the ceremony to be crude in any way, but I cannot bear that the mystery of the communion time should be lost in practical efficiency.

People who can find anything at all good in religions other than their own are often impressed by the solemnity and majesty of the Catholic service, or by the awe and reverence expressed in some Mohammedan customs. It may be the vastness of space in the cathedral, or it may be the humility with which the Mohammedan puts off his shoes before entering upon what he believes is holy ground. In either case, the Protestant sometimes feels regret at the loss of such feelings of awe and reverence in the religion which nourished him.

Those to whom religion is primarily a matter of doing certain things and only very slightly a matter of feeling in certain ways will not be much affected by these comments. There are undoubtedly those who are incapable of comprehending why others are helped to worship God simply because the light of the prosaic world outside is stained through soft colors and falls into a hushed room. These are the unfortunate ones who are able to sing a hallelujah hymn to God with no more excitement or exaltation than if they were saying “good morning” to their fellow patrons of the office elevator.

It may be that when we, as Protestants, turned against what we believed to be an unbalanced emphasis upon mystery and awe, we went a bit too far. We sought a plainness so extreme that in some cases it became ugliness. We properly insisted that church buildings should not be proudly expensive, but we forgot that the house should be put together with a view to helping its occupants feel the presence of God. And above all else, we went to extremes in making our worship sermon-centered, so that all other elements of our assembly became peripheral. We were often content to go away thinking about what the preacher had said rather than about the motivating potential in what we felt.

These are but some evidences of our casualness. They suggest that we have come a long way from the spirit which could respond to this adjuration: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5) Some of us, products of a particular religious tradition, may never have felt the wonder in the heart and voice of the bluff fisherman who said, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” (Luke 5:8).

Reverence was a central part of the Jewish religious experience. “Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house which you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? But this is the man to whom I will look, he that is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.’” In his temple, the Jew tried to realize God’s presence even while he knew that God was too great for any building. He knew that God filled the world and that He demanded of His children a reverent response. This chain of thought hushed the casual babbler, laid an admonishing finger upon the lips, stirred the soul of the worshiper to its depths and prepared men to receive the thoughts of God and the grace of God.

The same feelings were a part of Christianity, as dozens of familiar incidents and sayings remind us. Perhaps since Christ has talked with us of the fatherhood of God, we do not think of Him as being quite so remote. But even Christ, with all his feeling of intimacy with God, hinted at times that it was a majestic will which he obeyed without question and that none, after all, was good but God.

It is this feeling that is missing so often among us. It may be that we have been too sure that we possess in all its fullness THE TRUTH, and that no others apprehend it so perfectly as ourselves. This attitude would keep us from being reverent and full of awe, since complacent certainty inevitably leads to a feeling of equality with God and of easy carelessness in His presence.

J. Edgar Park defines reverence as “the response of body and soul to lofty mysteries, deeply felt and only partially understood.” These are thoughtful words and they indict many of us who have grown up among brethren who espouse the Restoration plea. All too often we remember church as a social gathering at which people test their vocal cords, look over their neighbors, and manage to get through the sermon by seeing into what devious paths of thought some chance remark of the preacher’s may lead them.

It may even be true that our immersion in democratic ideals is partially responsible. We have pulled our Deity down, too, and made Him a familiar friend. Unabashed before our country’s leaders, we are unabashed before our God. The whole relationship is cheapened when we lose that “thrill of awe” which Goethe has his Faust say is “man’s best quality.”

It would be a tragic irony if we, who insist so carefully upon proper worship, were to find ourselves blocking the channel of God’s grace because we fail to worship him with that acceptable measure of reverence and awe which Hebrews 12:28 demands.

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Robert Meyers (Ph.D., Washington University) was recently at Harding College. He is now Associate Professor or English at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas.

THE MINISTER AND CHRISTIAN UNITY

Since the Lund Conference on Faith and Order in 1952, it has become the feeling of some that the minister is the center of the deepest differences. Who is a minister? Who can baptize and serve the Holy Communion, and conduct the worship of the church, and preach from the pulpit? The Disciples of Christ would say, “Anyone who has confessed his faith in Jesus Christ, has been baptized, and is in fellowship with the church.”

The demand of the Disciples for well-trained ministers in schools of high standing brings respect and dignity to the office of the ministry. It does not change the relationship of the minister to the other members in a theological sense. The elders regularly serve the Lord’s Supper, and many an elder has performed baptisms, especially in earlier days. A host of members have led worship service, and the pulpit is not “consecrated” to the use of particular persons. We have sometimes spoken of the minister as a “preaching elder” to emphasize the belief that he does not belong to a separate “order.” It is very difficult to make this view clear in ecumenical circles, and it does not always appear in a list of separate concepts of the ministry.  —Howard Elmo Short in Christian Unity is Our Business

What is the position of the people whom we ordinarily regard as ministers? Are they just laymen who have lost their amateur status? Are they specially proficient laymen employed to do what the other members of the congregation are too lazy or too incompetent to do for themselves? Or do they, after all, constitute an “Order” within the Church?  —T. W. Manson in Ministry and Priesthood: Christ’s and Ours