FIRST A WE, THEN SERVICE
Robert Meyers

The unknown author of Hebrews 12:28-29 writes: “The kingdom we are given is unshakable; let us therefore give thanks to God, and so worship him as he would be worshipped, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.”

I have brooded much in recent years upon this imperative. As a boy I was taught to smile at Catholics and Presbyterians and any other religious folk who insisted upon solemnity and dignity in their worship. What they called reverence, we called pomp; what they thought of as awe, we termed affectation and vain strutting. We were as much in error on that point, I think now, as on some others.

I remember our chatty pulpit prayers —trite, mumbled, monotonous. They often made me think of the old player pianos with their rolls of music. Put in a dime, and out comes the expected tune. Call on one of our men to pray, I thought, and out comes all the predictable phrases. I’m afraid I sometimes could not help running just a few phrases ahead of them as they droned through the ritual, just to prove how well I knew our unwritten Prayer Book!

Our people sauntered casually into church, talking business deals or discussing plans for next week’s party. The entire service often had a casual air; the posture of the participants was overly relaxed, sometimes even bored. And there were mundane intrusions everywhere. The ubiquitous clock from Smith’s or Johnson’s Funeral Home insisted that we be aware of time, although here was a place for timelessness if ever there was one. The figures on the wallboards told us about our contribution and our attendance, both practical matters but best put out of mind while we were in the very act of special attention to our God.

Reverence and awe? There was almost none. We were familiars of God, close friends on a plane of near-equality. Our furniture, our windows, our music, our sermons all contributed to a kind of grass-roots democracy of spirit.

Someone may object at this point, “But we are God’s family … and we ought to be relaxed and casual.” I agree that there is a time for relaxed, familial fellowship in our relationship with God and with each other. But I submit that it is probably not best accomplished in the meetinghouse. I believe that we should experience deep reverence and awe there, and find our relaxed fellowship in other phases of our Christian life.

If this is not an attractive thought, then I ask where it is that we are to “worship him as he would be worshiped, with reverence and awe”? Let every reader of these lines ask himself candidly about the degree to which he has fulfilled this imperative. How often have we felt the kind of awe suggested in Exodus 3:5 (“Put off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground”)? How often have we shuddered with Peter, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord”? (Luke 5:8) Do we appreciate from our own religious experiences the comment which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust: “The thrill of awe is man’s best quality”?

Perhaps we need to be reminded oftener of the closing words of the passage from Hebrews. The writer insists on worshipping God with reverence and awe because “our God is a consuming fire.” I doubt the writer means to speak of God’s punitive anger. I think rather that he means God destroys transient and trivial things so that what is timeless may emerge in its full glory. Recognizing this, we put aside the transient and trivial so that He may have His way with us. When I recall the worship services of my boyhood, and when I put beside that memory the majestic concept of God expressed here, I shudder.

Religion, of course, has another aspect. I have intentionally stressed first the reverential and awe-full experience which should occur to us frequently. But I see this experience as a prelude to another, essential manifestation of the religious life: service to the helpless and fallen. “The kind of religion which is without stain or fault in the sight of God our Father is this: to go to the help of orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself untarnished by the world.” James 1:27 is not, I think, occupied with the more formal aspects of worship at all. It is concerned with religion as it must be translated into all the hours of all our days. Just as God must be worshipped with reverence and awe, so must we pass from that experience to the practical, prosaic level of humanitarian service. Either one is defective without the other.

To worship God reverentially and cover your ears all week to the cries of the helpless is to insult him as Isaiah defined it in his great first chapter. Our solemnity, our awe, our reverence become the hollowest mockery if they issue in nothing more than an interior attitude. If we go inside to prostrate ourselves before him, we must go outside to express his love to all our fellows. Without this, the action is incomplete.

But those who would help the unfortunate without the aid of a reverent humbling of themselves before God will almost certainly find that they cannot adequately sustain the impulse to help. Our beneficiaries are not always grateful. They do not respond quickly enough. They betray us. We grow weary of helping them. Unless … unless we turn often to God in reverence and awe to replenish the very springs of our humanitarian impulses. After such an experience, we go out again emboldened to try yet once more.

First awe, then service. First the replenishing experience, high and holy and lifted up; then the exhausting and depleting giving of our energies in the name of the Father. This is the alternation which makes the religious life complete and workable. —338 Fairway, Wichita 67212