Grace and Peace from Our Lord Jesus Christ!
We have been exploring the themes of Christian imagination and formation in the last couple “Pastor’s Green Pastures.” A good illustration of the theme of a Christian imagination is the effect of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. Not every child who absorbs these books is consciously aware of the extent to which those books woke up their imaginations to the glories of God’s story or aroused within them a yearning for a world beyond the one we can see. Yet that is the very thing that these books do for people of all ages. Actually, James Belcher’s book In Search of Deep Faith: A Pilgrimage into the Beauty, Goodness and Heart of Christianity tells us that this was why Lewis wrote the Narnia series.
Today’s “Pastor’s Green Pastures” column invites you to exercise that same Christian imagination on Sunday morning. And what I want you to imagine is that you are going on a pilgrimage to the Heavenly Mount Zion as we are gathering around the word, sitting on that mountaintop when we are hearing the word and responding to the word, and then as we leave the service we are descending the mountain to take the good news we have heard back into the world. The difference between the Narnia series and the picture that I have just painted is that Narnia is a fantasy but I am encouraging you to imagine what is reality.
The worship service on Sunday morning is not a tourist stop for visitors but it is a pilgrimage that should transform your week. In Ancient Israel the faithful would sing psalms as they went up to Zion and then a prophet would challenge them to repent at the Temple gate. Often worship, especially when it involved sacrifices or celebrating certain liturgical feasts like Passover, was a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Likewise, Christian worship today is a mountaintop experience where the congregation Spiritually is lifted up into heaven for a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. The people are invited and encouraged during corporate worship to imagine seeing themselves in Christ in the heavenly places, to join in a conversation between God and His people, and to receive healing and blessing from God. In other words, the entire liturgy is sacramental, bringing together heaven and earth. Observing this corporate liturgy, therefore, is not a religious duty done in order to check it off your to-do list each week but a redemption-event that rocks your reality with more than just hints of hope.
Many of you reading this no doubt realize that I have been talking a lot about these themes over the last four plus years. In Isaiah, for example, we saw this mountain and also the seraphim flying around us that come and touch our lips with burning coals. But I bring all this up again because as we practice seeing this vision of the invisible reality in our worship on Sunday we will begin to see it even more clearly during the week.
In Christ,
Pastor Justin
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