Worship Wars, Cadbury and You.

A few months ago, I had my first experience with Cadbury Chocolate Bars.  I'd had their eggs before, and having found them to be offensive both to taste and to health, had rejected them entirely (also I'd never trusted that egg-laying bunny.)  I'd never understood why anyone liked the company so much, especially when they were so critical of Hershey, which produced a far better product as far as I was concerned. I visited the factory and received free samples as a boy, ensuring my unwavering support for some time. But I had read an article, detailing the reasons the British were so very worried by an American company buying their beloved choclatier, explaining that the content of American chocolates were just not the same on a chemical level.  So I gave a Cadbury bar a shot.

Experience is directed by understanding.  I had not received the chocolate as any more than a thin coating around a sickeningly sweet filling.  I did not understand what I was missing, so convenience, loyalty,(the principle I'm driving at certainly allows for novelty instead) and sensation were more important than they should have been.  How often is this the case in our worship?  Our theology?

My first real memorable experience with traditional, liturgical, sacramental worship didn't come til my first year of college.  And I had the doctrinal knowledge to be excited about it.  I remember thinking, "This is like pure doctrine set to music! Should someone tell them?  Do other people know about this? Why didn't I?"  It seems to me that the errors in contemporary worship are born more of ignorance of the good things the hymnody has than anything else.  Perhaps if we taught the full beauty of our liturgy the worship wars would not be so much about proper theology because we would not be in dispute on these things.  Wouldn't it be nice if we really were in disagreement over adiaphora?  If the worship wars really were just about what instrument accompanied the divine service?  But instead we talk about the beauty of our worship amongst each other, and to those outside of our view, scream, as my middle school choir director once did, "No! No! No! You're doing it wrong!"

I don't need 5 words to know you shouldn't eat the yellow snow.

I find myself growing weary of the church espousing that there are three forms of love, because there are three words we translate "love" present in scripture.  The modern Christian does not have the linguistic framework for that threefold distinction, and a weakness in translation should not be the basis for a teaching.  Sure.  The Inuit have five words for snow. The Inuit at some point felt they needed five words.  I certainly don't, and if I ever do, it will be the need for extra words that will drive me to learn new ones, not the simple presence of the words in another language.

So if we want to talk about our duty to love one another as the body of Christ, there's one word we have for that.  Love.  It's worth noting that the major verses that talk about love that we go back to again and again (Matt 22:34-40, John 13:33-35, 1 Cor 13, 1 John 4:7-21) use one word for Love.  This is the love we're supposed to have.  This is the love that shapes our Church.  We don't need whole books to tell us that this is different from sexual desire.

And as for John 21,  which uses one word for Jesus' love and another for Peter's love for Jesus,  John shows elsewhere that he is comfortable using the words interchangeably, both in describing how the Father loves the son, and describing how John was beloved by Jesus.  At any rate if there is a signficant difference between those two words, it is one debated by scholars and generally irrelevant to the layman and as it holds no relevance for the layman and arguable relevance for the scholar, can we please let it go?

Christ's command is simple, and we complicate it, because as a church we are allergic to simplicity. Does "Love one another" really need a book to explain it?