Worship as Weapon in Cultural Change

Here are some thoughts by Rev. Bart Martin sent to me by my daughter Erin. Rev. Martin is right on.

“When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.”
– Jacques Barzun[1]

When a young state senator from Illinois ascended the platform to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, many considered him a rising star in the Democratic Party. But even his zaniest fans could not have anticipated that, in four short years, Barack Obama would have made the leap from state senator to United States Senator, and from United States Senator to the President of the United States.

What does Barack Obama’s rise to power mean? For one thing, it means that the “absurd” has become “normal”: when a large proportion of younger “evangelicals” vote for a man who will help perpetuate the war against the unborn, decadence has obviously set it. For another thing, it means that modern conservatism—the conservatism of William Buckley and Russell Kirk, of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—is dead. As a matter of fact, it has been dead for a number of years: Election Day 2008 simply provided us the coroner’s report.

For we who consider ourselves “conservative,” it will do us no good to pine away for the glory of days gone by. We can’t re-live the Barry Goldwater campaign; we can’t call Ronald Reagan back from the dead—nor would we want to if we could.

What we Christians in America need to do is to rediscover what our vocation is: we are salt and light; we are strangers and sojourners; we are a nation of priests. This does not mean, as the pietistic Christian might take it to mean, that we are to withdraw from the public square, and simply build our own little Christian ghettoes while clutching our Bibles and waiting for the end of the world. No: the Scriptures call on the people of God to take dominion by being salt and light, to take dominion by being strangers and sojourners, to take dominion by acting as priests on behalf of the world. We are not called to withdraw; rather, we are called to engage the world, ruling as God’s co-regents.

But we have forgotten what it means to rule. We have confused the biblical mandate to “rule” and “take dominion” with the hackneyed imperative to “win the next election.” So what should Christians do in the world of President Barack Obama? How can we better prepare ourselves to be the vice-regents that God wants us to be? I would suggest three things:

1. Pray like a Saint Augustine
2. Know the times like an Edmund Burke
3. Love the law of God like a King Josiah.

To read more, go to http://www.americanvision.org/article/what-to-do-in-an-obama-world/.

I would like to expand a bit on Rev. Martin’s comments as they pertain to loving the law of God like King Josiah. The first thing to note about King Josiah is that when he found the book of the covenant he re-established right worship. And that worship carried forth to destroy the pagan culture in the nation. Worship is our primary weapon in these absurd times. Therefore, change is a product of the effort to the Church community and not individuals.

It is abundantly clear from Scripture that people take on the characteristics of the thing that they worship. If we worship God, we become more like God. If we worship stone or wood, we become more like stone or wood. If we worship man or a human institution, we become more of the same.

To the extent we as individuals pin our hopes on a man or a political party, we worship them. We become more like them. In the past Christians have put their hopes for political change in political parties. This has not stopped the increasing shift to worshipping government. It has only increased it. Both Republicans and Democrats have continued in this shift. Can any now deny that there is a significant segment in our population that worships the president? You can’t if you have watched any of the media coverage of the recent election. It is time for the Church to become the Church and stop relegating itself to the position of a philosophy club intended to improve our own and save a few other souls, while allowing individual Christians to try to reclaim culture through their preferred political party. Christ came to create for himself a new worshipping body, one that would take dominion over creation.

In the early days of our yet unborn republic, the pulpits in the colonies resounded with sentiments of freedom and moral change for the people and their culture based on Scripture. They sent their people out to affect change in culture. The pulpits have lost that voice, fearing to lose their tax exempt status. The Church must find its voice once again. Only by the Church regaining its voice and heralding a message into the culture may we again find a rallying point worthy of our devotion. There is one man that we worship and His name is Jesus, the Christ. It is Christ who is head of his body the Church. We must look to him for change in our culture and the Church must herald that truth through its worship and especially in its benediction. Then the Church as a community must act in accordance with the benediction.