You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.
Yesterday, I led a service at our Church called iPraise. iPraise is designed to be a family time. I suppose it could be called all-age, although phrases like that carry connotations and expectations with them which I find deeply unhelpful. Wouldn’t it be better if all of our life together as Church counted as a whole? Some times would specifically help younger, some older, but we live and learn best when we’re together, and when the older are willing to learn from the younger, and vice versa. All of which to say, around half way through the service, whilst people were sharing prayer requests in groups, one of the younger members of the congregation came to me and asked if he could help to lead the congregation through the Lord’s Prayer, which we were shortly to say. I was keen. Our Church is the kind where unexpected things like this can happen often. It’s good to encourage them. It keeps us from sterility. He asked me to test him to make sure he remembered it correctly and then, as he and I spoke it out together he delivered it faultlessly, not even noticing, I don’t think, that the words were on the screen behind him, should he have needed them. He didn’t. I found it very powerful as, for a brief moment, this young man led the whole of our Church family in worship.
As I read the latter part of today’s reading, this fresh memory returned to my mind. It would have been easy, perhaps even ‘right’ in certain circumstances, for me to dismiss this request out of hand. I’m the leader of the worship. I’m trained. I know things. I’m called and equipped to lead worship, to lead in prayer and to teach (although, before you get too concerned about my humility, I have a lifetime’s worth of learning to do about all of those things). But to assert my authority wrongly in this moment would have been to miss the prophetic voice of the child singing, in effect ‘hosanna to the Son of David’ in our temple.
It’s easy for us to get sophisticated in our faith and our expression of worship. Technology helps with this. Screens, video, new songs and forms of worship being presented all the time as ‘the fresh way to worship God’ can all aid us. So can traditional expressions, established prayer books, scripture in beautifully prosaic language which seeps in to the bones and takes a lifetime to build to fruition. What we need most of all, though, are lives fixated on Jesus, so trusting and confident in him that what we really want is to pray and praise without ceasing, wherever we are and whatever that looks like. Simple faith is not simplistic faith. Simple faith is a faith which is just as real as one honed at the academic coal-face, or hewn from the rocks thrown at us by the trials of life. But if, somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the simplicity which causes us to want to speak out praise, unreserved and unashamed, simply for the sake of it, then it’s us, like the temple priests in our reading today, who are ultimately the poorer for it.