Does God Twitter?

Does God Twitter?
By John K. Burk, Professor, Seton Hall University.

            On a recent trip to Texas I was traveling the Interstate 35 corridor between San Antonio and Waco and noticed a church sign on the side of the road advertising “30 Minute Worship” and directing passersby to a website for complete details. Curious, I obliged.

           The site details the approach of the church to weekly worship services, which is divided into three categories: worship, word, and response. Each of these is allotted a particular amount of time totaling—you guessed it—30 minutes. Worship lasts about 10 minutes in order “to connect you with God.” This is followed by “the most important part of the worship gathering,” the “word” section of the service, during which a sermon is delivered in 12-15 minutes. (One can access an audio file of a sample sermon on the website, which I did, and which lasted 13 minutes and 38 seconds).

            Finally, five minutes are offered for people to pray and give in response to what they have experienced in the previous 25 minutes. This got me thinking about a conversation I had recently shared with a friend who is a devoted Catholic Christian about the influence of Greek thought on the Christian tradition and the importance of patience in the modern world of limitless news, entertainment, and other distractions.

            There is an instructive line in one of Plato’s early dialogues, Meno, in which Socrates inquires of his conversation partner, Anytus, how Anytus can “know whether a thing is good or bad of which [Anytus] is wholly ignorant.”[1] At the risk of offending Socratic sensibilities, I must admit that my knowledge of the church advertised on the side of I-35 is bound to what is written on its website and what I have heard in its audio files.[2] Nevertheless, as a member of the Christian church, I am mindful of the traditions and theology that inform Christian worship practices and, consequently, I want to offer some general observations about what I think are potential problems to promoting shortness of a worship service and delineating with such specificity what one ought to expect with regard to his or her worship of God.

Stating the Unstated

            Presumably, the purpose in advertising a worship service that lasts 30 minutes is to attract those who believe their lives are too harried to include a service of worship that extends much beyond the length of a typical sitcom. The unstated message of the church in question is, of course, that Sunday worship lasts only 30 minutes, not more. It is doubtful that a sign advertising a four hour service every Sunday would be much of a draw for those who might consider attending that particular service (for good reason). To offer a service that lasts half the time of most church services seems an efficient, effective way of getting the message across to people that at this church, you can “get in, get out, get on with your life.” That shibboleth may be true for those hawking fast food, but there are some notable implications for applying a similar ethic to services of Christian worship.

            What does the championing of brevity in worship say about how we think of the ways God communicates? Does God “Twitter”? That is, does God communicate with humans in snippets, or 140 character descriptions of nature, sin, commandment, or revelation? It is not my intention to suggest that God is bound only by particular ways of communication, for surely that is not true. But if the witness of the biblical narrative tells us anything about God’s communication with people, it would seem that those with whom God communicated first “waited patiently on the Lord” (Ps 37:7) before hearing from God.

            Take, for example, the tortuous (and tortured) history of the Israelites. The recorded times during which God communicated with the Israelites—through fire, flood, stuttering leaders, talking donkeys, or directly—tend to come at the end of a protracted period of waiting. In the New Testament even Jesus frustrated the earnestness of the disciples who sought an answer to a seemingly simple question: “When will the things you have promised us become reality?” (Mk 13:4, paraphrased). After Jesus held forth in extended peroration on everything from false prophets to the “abomination of desolation,” he confessed to the disciples that he did not actually know the answer to their question with the enigmatic statement that “of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Mk 13:32). In other words, Jesus’ advice to the disciples was “to hurry up and wait.” But not only are they admonished to wait; the implicit reminder is that they are to wait according to a timetable that they did not author.

            How much more is this true for Christian worship? Tom Schwanda suggests that those who advocate concision in worship (which he amusingly refers to as the “McEucharist”) encounter difficulties when considering that “the Scriptures remind us to slow down (Ps 46:10) and to linger in and enjoy the presence of Jesus Christ (Lk 10:38-42). They call us to wait on the Lord, not to hurry the Almighty so that his appearance can fit into our overpacked schedules….”[3] If the purpose of worship is to connect the worshippers to God, it seems plausible that the connection between God and humans must be established on God’s terms, which brings me to my second point.

The “Hidden God”

            In his “Theses for Heidelberg Disputation,” Martin Luther suggested that one begins to understand God rightly when that person “perceives what is visible of God, God’s ‘backside’ [Ex 33:23], by beholding the sufferings and the cross.”[4] This, what is known as Luther’s concept of the “hidden God,” means that it is impossible to understand the majesty of God without looking first to the suffering, cruelty, and death of the cross.[5] In other words, the relationship between the nature and character of God is paradoxical: God is at once majestic and powerful, and at the same time capable of powerlessness to the point of ignominious execution.

            There is, moreover, a paradoxical nature to the ways that God relates to humans. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, the only thing he was granted was a glimpse at the backside of God (Ex 33:18-23). The reason that God is considered “hidden” in this Lutheran sense is that God seems silent, or absconded, in those places where he is most expected.

            Consider 9/11. How many pop-culture atheists offered the hackneyed (and philosophically sophomoric) argument that the presence of tragedy necessarily precludes the existence of a benevolent God? And how many well-meaning, though misguided, Christians pointed out “signs” of God’s presence among the wreckage of the twin towers (e.g., metal beams in the shape of a cross)? Rather than offering apologies for God, the task for Christians should have been one of continuing to affirm the presence and grace of God on a day when he seemed most absent. “Lord we believe, help our unbelief” (Mk 9: 24, paraphrased) should have been, and should continue to be, the collective prayer of the Christian church.

            When thinking about the ethics of Christian worship practices, it is helpful to take note of Luther’s wisdom. Delineating a worship service into blocks of time with the promise that one will “personally connect with God” betrays a hubris that is both ignorant of the theology, history, and purpose of Christian worship, and unwilling to accept the fact that there are times in our lives when God seems hidden from our understanding. Far better is the promise to seek God earnestly and to “walk humbly with God” (Mic 6:8), with reverence for the mysterious nature of God.

            All worship services are obviously constrained by the limits of time in some way. A service that lasts an hour may not be any more meaningful or reverential than one that lasts only 30 minutes. The point, though, is that worship is meant to be a time for Christians to take a break, disconnect from the wired world, and collectively to wait upon God. It is not a time to put God “on the clock.” As Schwanda suggests, “While not every person enters a church service with pure motives, from a biblical perspective the purpose of this gathering is to recognize God and respond to him with appropriate joy and gratitude. This implies that the God who is greater than humans who meet together in his name is the one who sets the agenda for worship, and not the reverse.”[6]

Virtuous Patience

            Not only is the capacity for patience an important characteristic for everyone involved in a worship service, but the association of patience with honorable intentions has a long history in the Christian tradition and in the Greek philosophy that influenced Christianity.

            When Aristotle wrote his Nichomachean Ethics almost four centuries before the advent of Christ, he began by asking a question that later became central to Christianity: What is a good life? He suggested that the answer to that question is determined by acknowledging that a good life is constituted by the “highest” of goods, happiness. And that happiness is achieved by obtaining certain virtues; for example, courage and temperance (two of the “cardinal” virtues of Greek philosophy).

            When the apostle Paul spoke of those things like faith, hope, and love that make a person virtuous (1 Cor 13), he was continuing in the tradition of the Greek philosophers, but Paul was replacing their virtues with more theologically specific virtues. Thus it was love, not happiness, which was the highest good of human life for Paul.

            One aspect crucial to understanding virtues, be they philosophical or theological, is that early thinkers believed that virtues would only become a part of a person’s moral nature when they were developed as habits. In the same way that a violinist masters his instrument through practice, a person cannot achieve moral excellence without practicing the virtues. I cannot one day simply decide that I am going to be a more loving person; my desire to be more loving must be met by my attempts to learn what it means to love better, and to put my learning into practice to the degree that the capacity to love well becomes second nature to me.

            The reason that Paul pointed to love as the highest virtue is because love is synonymous with God. As a seminary professor of mine once said, “The most basic definition scripture gives of God is that ‘God is love.’” Notice that when Paul detailed the characteristics of love to the Corinthians, the first thing he mentioned was that “love is patient” (1 Cor 13: 4). In other words, we can begin to understand love better when we are patient. While love is the highest good for the Christian, according to Paul, patience is the virtue that enables love. In fact, patience is the virtue by which all other virtues are realized because nothing can be made a habit without first possessing the capacity for patience.

            With this in mind, patience becomes that much more important in the practice of Christian worship. If the purpose of worship is to “connect” a person with God, who is love, the first thing a person needs to be capable of is patience. It is difficult, if not impossible, to inculcate the habit of patience in a service where the seats barely have time to get warm before worshippers are dismissed.

            The above has been written not to suggest that the efforts of the “30 minute” church in question are in vain, but to suggest that in a world where time is “of the essence,” it is less than helpful to rush worshippers through a service that is arguably already too short.

            To connect with God, even when seemingly “hidden,” we must be willing to disconnect from all that discourages patience in our lives. To live as a Christian means to be willing to accept a life spent in waiting for that which has been promised to us by the one in whom all time begins and ends.