Worship as Eucatastrophe

I’ve already stated that I believe everything we do is worship. In my opinion, the only question is, to whom or what are we giving our worship at any given time with our day-to-day choices and subsequent actions? Consequently, I think there’s a great danger to spiritual formation when we perpetuate the modern entertainment/spectator approach to worship because it reinforces the sacred/secular split most of us live in every day and encourages us to remain largely disconnected from the business of being salt and light.

When I talk to Christians about this idea of integrating everything in our lives under the category of worship, they often express relief. People are hungry for more holistic lives, and overwhelmingly weary of managing their fragmented selves. Doing so takes a tremendous amount of emotional and psychological energy.

Still, there’s always some reticence about getting away from the big show we often refer to as “church” on Sunday morning. I think this is partly because we’re addicted to being entertained. Most of us are awash in entertainment from the time we get up to the time we go to bed, and don’t know what to do with ourselves when we’re not being constantly distracted from the deeper and more difficult longings of our own hearts.

However, I do also firmly believe there is a necessary place for congregational expressions of praise and devotion directed toward God. In fact, I think this is one of the deeper longings of our hearts and is one of the things people don’t want to let go of when I say, “everything is worship.” And rightly so. We need to shout from the rooftops together. We’re created to do that.

What would help is an understanding of worship that is holistic, everyday, and even mundane – yet culminates from time to time in a communal expression of joy, jubilation, lament, commitment, celebration, victory, and song as a response to God’s overwhelming goodness.

N.T. Wright, describing worship in Simply Christian, provides just such an understanding:

I have been to many concerts of music ranging from major symphonic works to big-band jazz. I have heard world class orchestras under world-famous conductors. I have been in the audience for some great performances that have moved me and fed me and satisfied me richly. But only two or three times in my life have i been in an audience which, the moment the conductor’s baton came down for the last time, leaped to its feet in electrified excitement, unable to contain it’s enthusiastic delight and wonder at what it had just experienced.

That sort of response is pretty close to genuine worship. Something like that, but more so, is the mood of Revelation 4 and 5. That is what, when we come to worship the living God, we are being invited to join in.

A good illustration. Yet, I think I have one that is more accessible.

I have been to many sporting events. I have been to baseball games, football games, hockey games, basketball games, and more. I have been to little league games with dozens of parents huddled in the bleachers, and I have been in professional stadiums filled with 50,000 people pulling for their team.

But only a few times in my life have I been in a sea of people who were bearing on their backs the hopes and dreams of their very own collective championship identity, which was slipping through their fingers as their team seemed to fall hopelessly behind, only to dramatically come back at the end and capture the victory. Nothing compares to the eruption of raw, deafening, human jubilation that occurs when a final dramatic shot wins everything as the clock clicks to zero.

That illustration, I think, comes closer to what the consummation of worship is like. More than a proper and dignified symphony, sports captures the cycle of drama inherent in the redemptive trajectory of humanity. We win small victories here and there, but lose seemingly many more. In the end, I believe, the day of the Lord will be the final surge of suffocating utterly surprising power that brings all things to finality in redemption, vindication, and ultimate victory.

This is the dramatic, story-ending moment of “eucatastrophe” J.R.R. Tolkien describes in his classic piece, “On Fairy Stories.” It is the unexpected twist of events which turns the story toward the sudden victory of good over evil. According to Tolkien, eucatastrophe can be found in virtually all the worlds fairy tales and myths (one reason why the reading of such material to children is a good thing), but more importantly, it is conspicuously present in the events of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I think true communal expressions of worship are as much our anticipation of eucatastrophe as they are our celebration of the moment. Just like loyal sports fans, we celebrate every regular-season victory as assurance of our hope, and agonize every small defeat as evidence of our fear. But all that emotion – both the hope and the fear – is wrapped in the knowledge that our ultimate fate rests in that future moment of white-hot divine consumption.

In this way our gatherings of praise become not only a culmination of our present worship-defined lives, but also our entrance – imperfectly and only for a time – into a future where God’s Kingdom is fully come, and this future place of hope, grace, and perfect worship becomes the source of our everyday lives of worship here and now.

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