Weird

It used to be -- or at least a nostalgic portrait of Norman Rockwell's 1950s would have us believe -- that everyone went to church.  10am Sunday morning, you knew where your neighbors were going to be. You knew where you were supposed to be.  The only "Call to Worship" needed was societal expectation.

Not so the Millennial!  But this is NOT yet another long-winded, hand-wringing polemic about why "our young people are leaving the church in apocalyptic proportions!!!"  This is NOT yet another strategy-session, try-it-this-way infomercial for the coolest (maybe, in a fit of hipster irony, not coolest) way of doing church.

This is a recognition of the fact that what we do in corporate worship is -- and always has been -- profoundly weird.  It has always creeped me out a bit that the nostalgic portrait of Norman Rockwell's 1950s seems oblivious to the fact that they are doing a profoundly weird thing.

Church is weird, y'all!  If you exchange more that a "Christ be with you" with the person next to you in the pew, you would realize the church is full of weird people -- beginning with you.  And the things we do are weird.  We sing out loud. Together. With exception of baseball's 7th inning stretch, where else do we do that?  We let someone yammer at us for 20 minutes (without commercial interruption.) That's weird.  But the weirdest thing of all:

We talk to God.
And we listen believing that God talks to us.
Weird.

Pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson reminds us that the Psalms teach us to pray, to talk and listen, by turn, to God. In worship, then, "We decide to leave an ego-centered world and enter a God-centered world."  

Everything about our daily lives points us in the direction of ego-centrism.  Everything about worship points us in the direction of God-centrism.  We are acclimated to the former, and alien to the latter.  Maybe that is why the Psalms are filled with "Calls to Worship."  Because if we truly understand what we are doing, it might well take some cajoling to get us to do it.

"Sing to the LORD a new song."
"Shout for joy to God, all the earth."
"Praise the LORD."

The "Call to Worship" that begins a service of Christian Worship is not formality.  It is not simply a greeting, like a handshake.  The "Call to Worship" is an invitation to subversion. It is a coaxing to patterns, behaviors, ways of thinking, believing and feeling that are not immediately comfortable to people shaped by an ego-centered world.  It is a drawing back of the curtain to reveal the possibility of a God-centered world.  A "Call to Worship" is a call to be weird. Thanks be to God.