Blogotional

Yesterday's post On Worship inspired my friend and sporadic guest blogger, who contributes under a nom de plume.

Mr. Blah-gotional writes:

Worship, to my mind is not an action -- it is a life.

Too bad my kind host is reduced to such grammatical absurdities.

Worship is a noun. It is also a transitive verb. You'll hear it occasionally used in contemporary church circles as an intransitive verb, but that's incorrect.

And why is this bit of grammatical arcana important? Because THE WORD ALREADY HAS A MEANING! It's had a meaning for millennia. Paul the Apostle didn't invent the word for private use. He used a word that already meant something in order to communicate actual content to actual people.

Worship is something Egyptians did to animals. Greeks did it to gods. Romans did it to Caesars and to the Greek gods all at the same time. According to Augustine, the Romans did these plays that chronicled the gods' really obscene behavior because they thought it amused the gods. And that was worship. The Romans also sacrificed sticky buns to the gods. No, I'm not making this up.

We Christian-types have gotten so cozy with the word that it has become one of those context-heavy, content-light words that ends up in poetic-sounding romantic sentences because the author doesn't really know what the word means, nor does the reader, but it sounds great. Like this sentence:

Worship is a life

.Mr. Blah' has been reduced to such inanities in order to be heard by those who find a dictionary difficult reading. I; however, don't mind mounting my high horse and proclaiming the stupidity of this usage.

If we just bothered to look up the word in a dictionary, most of the discussion about contemporary worship would end. Abruptly. NOTA BENE: One doesn't have to FEEL anything to worship God. Or Caesar. Or Ra. So when you hear contemporary Christians talking about how they FEEL about their particular WORSHIP STYLE, you know immediately that they don't know what they're talking about. But they're definitely not talking about worship.

So inspired was my friend that he sent a second post:

If a seeker shows up at your meeting, they're not looking for salvation, inclusion, community, spirituality, meaning -- none of that. They're looking for Jesus.

I don't mean that metaphorically. Not: they say they're looking for meaning and only Jesus can give meaning but they just don't know it yet. No, they're looking for Jesus and they know it.

Seriously. That's all we got. They heard somewhere about a guy who did some miracles, died, came back to life and says he's God. And they show up because you claim to have him. They may SAY that they're looking for spirituality, but only because it's too much to hope that you might actually deliver the goods. But that's what they want.

Believe me. They'll do anything to try to get to him. Be celibate. Sit atop a pole for eight years. Starve themselves. Climb a mountain on their knees. Give away bazillions of their own dollars. Collect chunks of dead former seekers. Put their hands on a TV set to feel themselves glow. Bizarre stuff.

Anything you say beyond "here he is" is montebancery with which the world is rightfully impatient.

by Davis X. McKenna, Liberal Trade-Spokesperson for the North American Blogger's Congress