Is God a Narcissist?

Once upon a time, a pretty nymph by the name of Echo spotted a hunter, Narcissus, in the woods. Now, if Echo was pretty, Narcissus was gorgeous—a handsome, beautiful man. He was so sculpted and so fine, in fact, that just to look at Narcissus was to fall in love with him. And that is what happened to Echo.

      However, Narcissus was having nothing of it. He rejected Echo. She was devasted—so much so, in fact, that Echo melted away to almost nothing, until all that was left of her was a stuttering susurration in the wind.

      Nemesis, another Greek God, looked on infuriated and decided to punish Narcissus for rejecting Echo. So, Nemesis led Narcissus to a pool. When Narcissus saw his reflection in the pool, he immediately fell in love with himself, just as Echo had, before. All Narcissus could do was bow down, like this flower, and gaze upon himself in wonder and awe with worshipful abandon—so long, and so intensely, that he was never able to leave that pool again, until he finally died of hunger.

      In any case, ever since, narcissism has wound its way through Western literature. Consider, for example, fairy tales such as Snow White or Cinderella. Both feature wicked step mothers who cannot abide the thought that someone besides themselves should be the most beautiful, or beloved, or have the most attention from the king. Both Snow White and Cinderella are exiled so that the narcissistic stepmother can have all the praise and glory.

      Well, and it isn’t just Western literature. Politicians might be narcissistic. One in particular claims to be the smartest man in the world. He says, “in his great and unmatched wisdom,” that he is a “very stable genius.” His critics are, “enemies of the people,” and his congressional opponents should be, “arrested for treason.” Of the current world crisis, he says, “I alone can fix it.”

      Narcissism. According the DSM-V, the standard diagnostic tool of psychologists and psychiatrists, narcissism is “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

      And doesn’t that describe God, too—or at least, how God usually shows up in scripture? There, God (or his scribes) describes himself, rather grandiosely, as “creator of heaven and earth.” He demands that we should admire and worship him and him alone, so that there be no other Gods before him. God—rather unempathetically, I’d say—even sends all of Israel into foreign exile after tens of thousands of them die in sieges. According to scripture, God does this mostly because they were practicing freedom of religion and living a bit high on the hog.

      Doesn’t this God sometimes seem narcissistic, to you? As when, for example, Jesus says that the first and greatest command of God is that, you ought to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind?” Isn’t this just over the top? What drives this divine need to be the centre of our attention—even of our adoration?

      I’ve struggled with this self-centered, jealous God—jealous—another Biblical word for what God is like, by the way. And I eventually concluded that this picture of God must be flawed. What would the God of the universe gain, if there be such a God, by my groveling? So now I think that though the ancient writers tried to explain who God was, it was as if they were staring into too bright a light, with too much anxiety, and therefore ultimately offered a mistaken view of God.

      It’s a common mistake. Humans have long bowed and scraped before their gods, hoping thereby to gain their favour, just as politicians and lobbyists bow and scrape to gain the favor of presidents or emperors. Humans have long thought that if they adored God and worshipped God in the right way, wore appropriate vestments, waved censors with incense or chanted Latin, and sang songs of praise—Jews and Christians and many from other religions have long believed that God could be bent to do their bidding, and answer their prayers or (at a minimum) give them a passing grade on the way to a heavenly promotion.

      We Christians have long believed, deep in our hearts, that God the narcissist craved this adoration and attention and that we better deliver, or else.

      But now I think this picture—and even milder forms of it—is all wrong. Remember that Jesus once said that if we saw him then we have seen God? I think that is a better clue to God’s real nature. Thus, as his preaching ministry drew to an end, we see Jesus set his face for Jerusalem, where he sacrificed his life in an act of defiance against rulers who would be worshipped, and in an act of solidarity with the least and last who lived under the thumbs of their High Priests and Kings and Procurators.

      Explaining himself, Jesus said, more or less, that yes, the first great commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. But, the second commandment, which is like it, is this: you should love your neighbour as yourself.

      Because, you see, Jesus had figured out that the only way to actually obey the first commandment is by keeping the second. God never wanted formal worship—even if some writers of scripture thought so. Jesus corrected that notion by suggesting that worship is any act of love on behalf of our neighbours.

      If Jesus was right, then God is no narcissist who demands our burnt offering and calves a year old or thousands of rams or rivers of oil. Not at all. He (or she or they!) has told us what is really good, what he really requires of us. It is to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God, by bowing before and serving our neighbours.

      Not narcissism, but neighbours. No falling on our knees before a jealous God, but rather, rolling up our sleeves for each other. This is our true worship.

How to Do Church When People Don't Read

           The verdict on television and every other form of contemporary multi-media has been in for some time. Watching electronic screens, even infrequently, has a profound impact on nearly everyone’s desire to read, ability to read deeply, and ability to read for any length of time. All of it makes us—well, if not stupid—deeply distracted and increasingly shallow.

            I’ve written about how this is so for years (here, and here, for example) and reflected on this insight as one of the basic shapers of contemporary faith in my book, Not Sure. I’ve also spoken frequently about how preachers and worship planners might adapt their approach to a changing audience. I’ve based some of my ideas on Walter Ong’s insights about how oral audiences—that is, audiences from the time before most people could read. What follows are talking points—ten ideas that might have some traction.

One: Practice Simplicity. Today’s audiences are made up of people who read less. Many know only what they remember or Google. They are often not reading scripture either, and almost certainly not reading much about scripture, unless it is something in the health and wealth genre. So, when preaching, keep it simple and forget the huge swaths of doctrine. Augustine said preachers should leave difficult matters to books. Walter Benjamin says that Berthold Brecht kept a toy donkey on his desk with a sign around its neck: ‘I too must understand.’” The Bible says that the common people heard Jesus gladly. And he kept it simple. Think parable, think the Sermon on the Mount’s proverbs and beatitudes, think of illustrations that will make children smile. Keep it simple like Jesus did.

            Simplicity is not an excuse to practice shallowness, however. And there lies the great challenge for most preachers today. And by the way, preaching a ten-point sermon with the help of a projector is not simple. No one can go home and remember ten points. If you do this, do it once a year to mix it up, and make sure all your ten points are really restatements of one core insight.

Two: Don’t shy away from pathos. Digital audiences respond more to honest emotion than to carefully constructed rational arguments—which they can’t remember ten minutes later anyway. Leonard Sweet once wrote something like, “Postmoderns don’t come to church wondering, ‘is it true.’ They want to explore whether or not it is real.”

            I don’t mean you should get on the pulpit and cry. Pathos is a seasoning rather than the main course. But audiences resonate with the authentic emotional life of the preacher. A bit of self-deprecating humor is good, too.

Three: Be local. Fill sermons with local color, local personalities, today’s news, familiar memories and stories. Fill sermons with the everyday stuff that people are going to talk about after church, no matter what you preached about. Like Jesus did in his parables. His sermons brought people into their homes, marriages, businesses and fields. And his audiences were with him.

Four: People whose memories are not shaped by the patterns written words make, or by the interior journeys that are so much a part of modern literature, usually do resonate with amazing battles in the heavens or our mythic cities. This is called agonistic storytelling. Stories like that of David and Goliath, or Moses and Pharaoh, or Harry Potter, or The Lord of the Rings are heavy on plot and action, miracle and spectacle, and that makes them memorable to non-readers and readers alike. These stories can hold a non-reading audience’s attention. Walter Ong says that, “Oral story tellers played to audiences who wanted action and movement and thus the stories showed no great command of character drawing.” So make up amazing stories, or retell them, or refer to them. The Bible does.

Five: Preach as if the rest of the liturgy matters. Digital audiences love the clutter of multiple channels of communication—even though this clutter can also get in the way of focus. Church services ought to be full of song and bulletins, of visuals on the wall and in the classroom, of liturgical smells and bells as in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, of processions of laughing children and solemn adults. A wise old document of the Reformation, the Belgic Confession, notes that God added the sacraments to the Word because people sometimes couldn’t understand the Word without signs and seals. Right. We need church that is much more than sermons made of words.

            By the way, this does not mean church has to be “high,” as in the Anglican or Catholic traditions. It needs, rather, to be visual and diverse. At Lawrence Park Church, we’ve decorated the sanctuary as the Emerald City and members came dressed as Wizard of Oz characters for a sermon based on that book. We’ve done a series of four sermons on Les Miserables using the music from the Broadway production as the clothesline on which the rest of the service was based. We put the words of choir anthems on overhead TV screens and have a children’s sermon every week.

Six: Practice the Way of Beauty. Beauty is the Spirit’s favourite path into our hearts. That’s why Psalms and Songs have always been important; why banners and children’s art and solos and sermons that are full of aesthetic delight grip people of every time and era. Sermons should always “make sense,” of course, but to the degree that they can also be poetic, they should be.

Seven: Preach as if words matter. Perhaps this is just another way of stating point six. But there is a peculiar kind of heaviness of heart that goes with sermons preached as if they were books. This heaviness is predicated on the notion that if a preacher says it, the audience must listen; but if a preacher says it like a professor might write it; the audience must listen without smiling, for written words know little of mirth. Well, while this approach to preaching makes sense in graduate schools, it makes a mockery of the many varied and rich and aesthetically delightful ways words can be used to become more than truth—they can become good news, too. Preachers who preach as if words matter spend more time writing and editing sermons than they do studying their sermons.

Eight: Learn from the ancient storyteller. More on point six. The preaching that works for digital audiences uses the ancient storyteller’s bag of tools: rhyme and repetition, assonance and proverb, parallel structure as found in the Psalms, and rhythm. Rap music was designed, from the ground up, as music for a digital, oral audience. Preachers can learn from that. Sweet says, “Postmodern storytelling is a plague on both houses; it is abductive—concurrent, stacked, loopy, nosequential and image-based,” like ancient storytelling and modern TV, both.

Nine: Preach short. This is related to command one, “be simple.” The bottom line is that people who watch TV have shorter attention spans than people who don’t. Too many preachers preach far too long. Give people one thing to remember, and finish. They might remember. Give them two things, or three, or four to remember, and they are likely not to remember anything at all—even though you took twice or three times as long to say it. I try to keep all my sermons for to less than twenty minutes. Many are fifteen minutes long. It takes a lot more work on the preacher’s part to achieve this, but I never met a person at the door who said, “boy, I wish you went longer, pastor!” A few masters can go longer, especially when their audience is more literate. But I know my weaknesses in this area. Do you?

Ten: Encourage high levels of literacy. This is counter-intuitive, perhaps. But the truth of the matter is that even in our reading-bereft society, deep literacy is a very valuable commodity. In part this is because historically, the leadership of all societies since the time of the Sumerians and Chinese has always inordinately represented by highly literate people. The highly literate control the flow of information and ideas. Why shouldn’t those highly literate leaders be Christians?

How do we encourage literacy? Well, great schools are part of the answer. But in my family, we threw out the television altogether. Not because we objected to what was on TV, but because of what TV does to our habits of mind when we’re not paying attention.  

Ten Commandments for Worship Leaders

            A few months ago I was asked by some aspiring worship leaders what it takes to stand up before a congregation and, well, “lead.” They wanted some advice from an old pro—me. So, after thinking about it for a little while, I came up with Ten Commandments for worship leaders—the people who greet the congregation, or pray, or introduce songs, or make announcements. It is an idiosyncratic list, based as much on my personal issues as universal truths. The list is not comprehensive. But based on the many years I've been a travelling pastor who sat in the pew for much of the service, before I preached, I thought I’d share this list of of advice I think people need to hear with my readers.

ONE: Thou shalt never use the word “just,” in worship, and especially in prayer. Worship is not “just.” It is actually a lot. Worship is special. Maybe even divine. Using the word “just,” as in “we’re just here to praise God,” or “we just love each other,” sounds uneducated, sloppy, dumb, and unprepared. Perhaps the fault here is that I'm an old English teacher. On the other hand, I've often noticed that the quality of worship leadership runs inverse to the frequency with which the word "just," gets used.

TWO: Thou shalt own your space, and smile about it. Worship leaders that slouch onto the dais, who don’t look the audience in the eye, and who frown seem insecure. Audiences catch on to such insecurity, and it unsettles them. So shoulders back, head up, and walk as if you know where you’re going!

THREE: Thou shalt not be trite, use clichés, or unnecessary God talk when leading a worship service. You know what I mean. The worship leader who insists, between every song, that “this is so meaningful to me. It is such a beautiful song. God loves it when we praise him. We’re being a missional, transformational church for him,” and on and on. Words in a worship service should be purposeful, intentional, and important.

FOUR: Thou shalt remember not everyone in attendance wants to praise God at this moment. Many come to church seeking comfort for sorrows, or encouragement amid anxiety, or meaning amid the chaos of their own lives. Include songs of lament for these people. Remember, there are more Psalms of lament than any other kind. A singular focus on praise and thanksgiving excludes far too many people.

FIVE: Thou shalt offer a clear lead-in with a clear cue to start the congregation singing. Pianos and organs and choirs are great for offering these singing cues. It can be done with guitars or violins—but it is much harder. Practice makes perfect.

SIX: Thou shalt sing new tunes through, especially with the help of a choir or a soloist, once or twice before you ask the congregation to join in.

SEVEN: Thou shalt keep a reign on your emotions. Naturally, worship leaders will always be wrestling with a range of emotions and feelings as they stand before the congregation. Perhaps there was an argument with a spouse before church. Perhaps a loved one is in the hospital. Maybe you just received a big promotion at work. As worship leader, however, you must not let such emotions run away with your leadership. Remember, you are there for everyone, not merely yourself. So, think slow. Speak with assurance and purpose. Know what you are going to say. Exhibit a range of emotions that resonate with the actual content of what you have to say to the audience.

EIGHT: Thou shalt especially beware of drums overpowering all singing, and instruments drowning out the voice of song leaders. In churches with praise bands, this happens all the time. I tend to think of it as an ego issue—some musicians just have to make a statement. But that is wrong—church musicians are supposed to help people sing. They are not there to be centre stage.

NINE: Thou shalt write out your prayers. I’m thinking back to numbers one and three, above. We put inordinate emphasis on the need for unrehearsed, spontaneous prayer. I’m not sure why. Surely the work that goes into crafting prayer is good work, spiritually beneficial, and a thoughtful way of being sure that you will pray for what really ought to be prayed about. If you want to memorize your prayer, or reduce it to notes, fine. But prayer is not the right moment for sloppiness.

TEN: Thou shalt remember that aesthetic excellence is excellent. Beauty is holy. God loves a lovely song played well. Not many of us can go to churches whose soaring arches remind us of the vaults of heaven and the mysteries of God’s love. But all of us ought to go to churches where even the simplest song does the same.

In summary, worship leadership is undertaken for the benefit of the audience, and especially their desire to worship. So lead with that goal in mind.

Small Churches

Although the crowds at Cobourg's Waterfront Festival might make you forget it for a day or two, Cobourg is actually a small town. In fact, every town or village in Northumberland County is small. Like the church I pastor.

Most of us are not impressed with small, unless it's our cell phones we're talking about. If we had a choice, we're rather shop at Yorkdale or even the Oshawa Centre than Northumberland Mall. A 3,000 square foot house on ten acres seems more impressive than a 1200 square foot house on a city-sized lot. And, unfortunately for the earth, most of us prefer to drive trucks or SUVs than Chevy Cruzes or Honda Civics.

My church is small. I think this is frustrating, sometimes, for Grace Church's members. I hear things like, "if Grace was big we could have a bunch of more programs, a renovated sanctuary, a real pipe organ, and a parsonage on the lake for the pastor." Sometimes it is frustrating for me, too--and I'm not even thinking of that parsonage. I'd love to have a full-time youth leader instead of a half-time leader, a full-time professional musician and a second pastor on staff, and plenty of people to do drama and volunteer and play different instruments every Sunday.

From God's perspective, though, size isn't everything. In fact, God has a soft spot for small. God runs his kingdom on a "little David and big Goliath" economy. His heroes are people of little courage, like Jonah; foreigners of little account, like Ruth; and just plain little people like Zacchaeus. God chose Israel to tell the world about his grace--a people about as small and insignificant as you could find in the ancient world. Jesus made do with just twelve disciples. The parable of the mustard seed teaches us that God's kingdom is like the smallest seed, which will nevertheless grow--not into a huge tree--but at least a large bush. Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt 5:5). And while the apostle Paul wasn't immune to the drawing power of big cities like Rome and Ephesus, he spent most of his time working with little churches in middling towns with funny names like Lystra, Derbe and Berea; Philippi, Perga and Iconium. Several times he even greets churches so small that they meet in homes.

Small can be frustrating. But if you go to one of the small churches in Northumberland County, your likely to find a group of people who keep track of each others' birthdays and anniversaries, who care for each other's children, and who continue visiting each other even if when move into a nursing home or hospital. Youth groups in small churches are for making life-long friends, and music in small churches is sung with fervor rather than played by a band as entertainment. Small churches are communities where, even if you can't quite remember everyone's name, you know everyone loves you, and keeps an eye out for you.

In fact, in a lot of ways, small churches are like Cobourg or Port Hope or Brighton. It's nice to know that a big city is just down the road for those times you just can't do without the symphony or the Blue Jays, or even Yorkdale, I guess. But do you really want to live there?

And that's why I'd rather go to a small church too. After all, Jesus also said that, "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them." And if he is there, when it comes to church, you know the main thing has already happened.