It’s practically noon, and I’ve only been up a couple hours – the cost of being glued to ESPN until the wee hours basking in the glow of a Cubs World Championship (can’t stop humming “The strife is o’er, the battle done” either; sleep deprivation and Easter hymns – gonna be a strange day).
But the lifting of a 108-year-old curse wasn’t the best thing I got to witness last night. I hope you were at the Advent for Mozart’s Requiem Mass because it was, as a friend just put it, “stupendous.” Mozart gave us an amazing cultural artifact, delivered last night by supremely talented musicians (led by the best choirmaster in the world), to a full house.
Here’s what I’m still thinking about on the day after, even in the wake of something like that Game 7 – it’s the Dies Irae. I’ve heard the words a thousand times, even celebrated Mozart’s Requiem Mass once as a curate back in Washington, DC, but last night was different. Somehow the rhyming had always seemed, I don’t know, hokey? But Thomas of Celano or Latino Malabranca Orsini, whichever one (or neither) wrote the Dies Irae, got something right. It’s something we desperately need. And it’s something we miss almost every day:
I hold a high view of God, I guess you’d say. I preach about the holiness of God a lot. I quote Lewis’ Mr. Beaver:
‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.
Or I crib Annie Dillard’s warning about our explosive God:
It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.
When and how did we make God a house cat? Whatever we think we’re worshiping, I suspect it ain’t God. We need the Dies Irae:
Day of wrath and doom impending / David’s word with Sibyl’s blending! / Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
Oh, what fear man’s bosom renders / When from heaven the judge descendeth / On whose sentence all dependeth!
That’s why I need more 12th and less 21st century in my life. Modernity, an old seminary professor of mine says, has “flattened” everything. The modern God isn’t holy, he isn’t even all that “heavy.” But the God of the Bible, and of whomever wrote the Dies Irae, is aflame. That old seminary professor again:
Without such a vision of the burning holiness of God, “worship loses its awe, the truth of his Word loses its ability to compel, obedience loses its virtue, and the church loses its moral authority.” (John Jefferson Davis, Worship and the Reality of God: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2010): 56 (quotation omitted).)
The church needs the Dies Irae. (Oh, and by the way, it’s not all medieval superstition and bluster, either, just in case you were wondering. Think, kind Jesu, my salvation / Caused thy wondrous Incarnation / Leave me not to reprobation. Hello – the Gospel, anyone?)
We need the mass, not a concert.
We need worship … real worship.
Without worship of a burning God, the church doesn’t have a chance. But on nights like last night, that God sneaks up on us and comes crashing in. That’s what He does for a living. N.T. Wright says:
God’s way of action, now as then, is through a people, maybe even though an individual, who have glimpsed a fresh vision of his fire … . They will almost certainly be unlikely people. Like Moses, they won’t be expecting it. They may well not want it. But if they will only stand in fear before the living and burning God, they will be enabled to stand without fear before the Pharaohs of today. (N. T. Wright, For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1997): 72-73.)
I’ll never forget last night. Been waiting for the Cubs to win a World Series for my whole life. But I suspect the thing that’ll stick with me, or at least I hope what sticks, is what happened in Boston, not in Cleveland. I remembered God is a fire. And I wouldn’t have got that but for what happened in worship. Check that; make it Worship.
Gives a whole new meaning to #FlyTheW.
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