I had the odd experience this month of having something I wrote wrongly
attributed to someone else. It was a book review for Alban Institute's Congregations magazine, so I
guess I can be grateful that it wasn’t the most original piece I’ve written.
But I looked in the magazine and there was someone else’s name at the bottom.
And the then the book review next to it,
for a book I've never read, had my name
on it. Very strange.
But it sounds like I may have been critical of this other book
in the same way that the reviewer named Pamela Fickenscher might have been. The
author did a tour of U.S. churches, a sort of mystery shopper deal, and like most of us she had her list
of criteria for what a “good church” looked like. She claimed she wanted a
place that didn’t care about her politics, but then criticized churches whose
politics seemed different from hers. She claimed she wanted a place with little
hierarchy and lots of member input in every decision, but she wanted great
music and a transcendent worship experience.
What she didn’t seem to understand was that being “caught
up” in worship is something that necessarily gets us to 
set aside our lists of
criteria, our evaluations, what writers call our “editors mind.” I’m sure brain
scientists have a term for this, but checklists and transcendence don’t usually
go together.
I'm preaching on Psalm 98 this weekend, and on praise as a dying form of speech. Not praise as in "Good job, God, I approve of what you did there!" but praise in the biblical sense, which gets us over ourselves.
Or, as Kevin Henkes puts it, in Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse: "'Wow,' [Lilly's teacher] said. That was all he really could say. 'Wow.' "
Or, Alleluia.
May you be lost in wonder, love and praise some time this Sunday.
