Waldo Beach - "The Encounter of Worship" (January 15, 1961)

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	(wind whooshing)	0:04
Priest	At this nervous time of the university year,	0:22
	when everybody is walking on the edges of their existence,	0:27
	and both the academically secure	0:33
	and the academic cliffhangers share a dread	0:36
	at the prospect of exams in the next two weeks.	0:40
	A terrestrial rehearsal of the last judgment.	0:47
	It may speak to our present condition	0:53
	to consider this character	0:58
	of this strange activity of worship	1:00
	in which we are here engaged.	1:03
	What are we gathered in this chapel to do?	1:08
	No need to explain in a fancy way	1:15
	why we line up outside the cafeteria doors for meals,	1:20
	or go to the gym for exercise,	1:25
	or go to the library to study,	1:28
	but it's a more elusive matter to explain to ourselves	1:33
	what is involved in the Sunday morning track to this place	1:39
	to worship,	1:45
	to pray,	1:48
	we say,	1:49
	but what's that?	1:52
	In this transaction of worship,	1:56
	are contained a host of theological problems,	1:58
	and many of the problems of human existence,	2:03
	including the problem of how to survive the next two weeks.	2:07
	All are wrapped up in a definition of what worship is.	2:13
	Worship is some encounter,	2:22
	a meeting of subject and object	2:25
	where the self is engaged in a dialogue with another.	2:31
	Who or what the other is,	2:39
	how the encounter is,	2:43
	begun,	2:45
	continued,	2:46
	how it ends,	2:48
	these are matters of great moments.	2:50
	Worship begins with some subjective need.	2:56
	There are plural motives, I suppose, that brings us here.	3:05
	A Southern or American habit of church going,	3:10
	a custom like the Sunday newspaper	3:14
	that we observe almost by inertia,	3:18
	although this morning	3:24
	it would take a little more than inertia to get us here,	3:25
	a chance to wear some new clothes and to be seen therein,	3:31
	a respect for family expectations.	3:39
	Mixed with these upper reasons, are deeper compulsions,	3:44
	a vague panic at too much to do,	3:50
	a sense of lostness in the face of dark circumstances,	3:56
	when you are as Robert Frost puts it,	4:02
	weary of considerations,	4:06
	and life is too much like a pathless wood	4:09
	where your face burns and tickles	4:13
	with the cobwebs broken across it,	4:15
	and one eye is weeping from a twig	4:19
	having lashed across it open,	4:22
	or perhaps it's some moral quandary,	4:28
	a hard choice to be made	4:31
	among the graves of right and wrong,	4:34
	or perhaps it's a sense of drift and indecision.	4:40
	When we cry out with Kierkegaard,	4:48
	my life is all in the subjunctive mood,	4:51
	would to God I were in the imperative.	4:58
	Or it may simply be	5:04
	to seek help out of a tight place of physical or mental pain	5:05
	and assist from any source	5:12
	for release from numbing agony or uncertainty.	5:16
	Maybe to find survival rations	5:22
	to use on Tuesday morning's ordeal.	5:26
	These are all subjective needs.	5:32
	And the usual secular explanation of worship is	5:36
	that when men are hard up,	5:41
	when the usual resources for supplying food	5:43
	or serenity fail,	5:47
	they have a curious primitive way	5:50
	of turning for help to some divine power to help them out.	5:53
	They have a rain dance around some totem,	6:00
	or in the 20th, century they go to church.	6:04
	When their earthly fathers fail,	6:10
	they cry their needs to a father image,	6:12
	a projection.	6:17
	What is prayer?	6:21
	Our Father who art in heaven,	6:24
	who must be in heaven	6:29
	since all earthly fathers fail on the hard empirical earth.	6:33
	But according to this way,	6:41
	if the harsh truth be told, this father is only man	6:44
	who eat large on the sky.	6:50
	We have no divine kinsmen, we have only each other.	6:54
	If we take as final,	7:02
	this typical anthropologist's or psychologist's	7:04
	account of worship,	7:09
	it is no dialogue,	7:12
	no encounter with anything more substantial than a shadow.	7:15
	It is only monologue.	7:20
	We stew in our own private juice of lament and need,	7:23
	or to use a crude figure of speech,	7:32
	worship as prayer before battle	7:36
	is an act like spitting on your hands	7:41
	before you get to work.	7:44
	It's nothing but a superstitious gesture of self-help.	7:47
	Isn't it odd that so many intelligent people,	7:53
	university people with PhDs and things,	7:59
	who ought to know better,	8:05
	seem to persist in this primitive superstition?	8:08
	Well,	8:18
	that's one account of what worship is.	8:18
	No encounter at all, just a group soliloquy.	8:21
	The biblical faith is more subtle and wise.	8:28
	It affirms that prayer and worship	8:35
	start with subjective need.	8:37
	Yes.	8:40
	But it also affirms that	8:43
	there are kinds and kinds of prayer and worship	8:44
	from low and primitive to high and true.	8:48
	From the gimme prayer to the prayer of Christ,	8:54
	"not my will but Thine be done."	9:00
	It says that authentic worship is objective encounter,	9:06
	dialogue between the self's need and a real other.	9:12
	In the old Testament,	9:19
	the issue is sharply joined	9:20
	between the priests and the prophets	9:23
	on what the character of this meeting is like.	9:25
	At least in its commonplace form,	9:30
	priestly religion is not much different theologically,	9:32
	from a rain dance.	9:39
	The priests come to Jehovah with some subjective need,	9:42
	and seek to manipulate the other to serve their wish.	9:46
	God is a whimsical arbitrary deity	9:53
	who can be wheedled and cajoled,	9:58
	who will help them,	10:01
	who will be on their side in battle,	10:03
	a tribal deity,	10:06
	a pushover.	10:10
	but the prophets read the encounter differently.	10:13
	For them,	10:19
	worship is meeting with another	10:20
	who is not whimsical and wheedleable,	10:22
	but an absolute,	10:28
	a universal father.	10:31
	The Lord of the universe who cannot be manipulated.	10:34
	In prophetic religion prayer, He is indeed a projection,	10:41
	but not a mere projection,	10:48
	for the projection hates something other,	10:52
	something counter,	10:57
	something that may change the character of the projection,	10:59
	that may speak a sharp no to man's desire	11:06
	for a supporting, unpleasant guest.	11:12
	This prophetic understanding of worship	11:18
	finds its classic expression in our lesson of the morning	11:22
	from Isaiah.	11:27
	It is encounter of the prophet with the deity of God,	11:29
	high and lifted up,	11:35
	and his train fill the temple.	11:38
	Holy	11:42
	holy	11:43
	holy	11:45
	is the Lord of hosts,	11:46
	the whole earth is full of His glory.	11:49
	The confrontation with the divine,	11:53
	with the Holy one of Israel,	11:57
	whether it be in the year that king Josiah died	11:59
	or on a Sunday morning when I happened to go to chapel,	12:04
	or perhaps I want to study,	12:09
	this is an encounter	12:12
	which jolts me out of my small thumbsucking subjective lips.	12:14
	We really should check the small problem at the door	12:23
	when we come in to the great presence.	12:27
	For what we here meet is more important than my worry	12:32
	about how to read a 400-page novel by Thursday	12:38
	without really reading it.	12:44
	What we are here to do	12:48
	is to celebrate the presence and power	12:51
	of the one who is the ground of existence,	12:53
	the source and goal of all our lives.	12:57
	The encounter of prophetic worship	13:00
	is not projection or manipulation,	13:03
	but adoration.	13:08
	It is the total concentration of mind and heart	13:12
	on the divine for its own sake.	13:17
	We love the things we love for what they are.	13:22
	And it's to say, worship honors the intrinsically worthy,	13:29
	or as Bernard of Clairvaux puts it,	13:36
	that a Christian gives thanks to God	13:39
	not because He is good to him,	13:42
	but because He is simply good.	13:45
	With whatever subjective need it brings,	13:51
	worship becomes real	13:56
	as it is objective encounter with God.	13:57
	It is looking at God for God's own sake,	14:04
	not our own.	14:08
	And in such encounter, I can only say,	14:10
	holy	14:13
	holy	14:14
	holy	14:16
	is the Lord of hosts.	14:17
	Worship is not only adoration,	14:22
	it is also some contrition under judgment,	14:26
	for the God I meet is awesome,	14:32
	no easy charm,	14:36
	no man upstairs,	14:39
	no soft touch,	14:42
	but another who sets me upside down.	14:46
	If I have a small notion of worship	14:52
	as a sanctified coffee break or a rest-stop,	14:55
	and come expecting this,	15:01
	what I meet is the cross,	15:04
	which is not a symbol for comfort or coffee.	15:07
	And if all worship, this second movement of the encounter	15:13
	is a commentary on Isaiah's description,	15:18
	"Woe is me for I'm lost, for I'm a man of unclean lips,	15:23
	and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips,	15:28
	for mine eyes have seen the king,	15:33
	the Lord of hosts."	15:37
	When we are suddenly in the glare of the divine inspection,	15:40
	we know ourselves ripped shaken, tossed,	15:46
	stripped of pretense,	15:52
	revealed to ourselves in our pettiness.	15:55
	In the presence of God,	16:01
	I'm made aware that I have brought the mistaken questions,	16:04
	the wrong needs in prayer,	16:09
	for when mine eyes have seen the king,	16:14
	I will hear a voice which says,	16:17
	to translate Isaiah freely,	16:20
	"why so hot, little man?"	16:23
	In worship,	16:30
	whether I'm as student or teacher here,	16:31
	I'm confronted in this place by God of truth,	16:35
	and I'm recalled to what a university education is about,	16:41
	to what I'm about within it,	16:45
	pursuit of truth, not grades.	16:49
	The encounter then becomes a judgment	16:53
	on my small worries and devices	16:56
	in giving and getting grades.	17:00
	The judgment on my little manipulations,	17:05
	and writing term papers, for example,	17:09
	whereby I make the worst appear the better reason	17:11
	by typing it up with wide margins	17:16
	and adding all footnotes or effect.	17:20
	Or as a citizen on campus,	17:27
	I'm confronted here by a God of love,	17:30
	a moral God,	17:32
	the Lord of the heart as of the mind,	17:36
	who in the cross brings all my moral shoddiness,	17:40
	my moral pretense,	17:46
	my self-righteousness,	17:49
	and my deviousness to bay,	17:52
	and pours contempt on all my pride.	17:56
	In other words,	18:02
	the encounter changes the character of the need,	18:03
	the question, the worry which I bring.	18:06
	It sets to write the fundamental dislocation of values,	18:10
	which exist as St. Augustine says,	18:15
	"when men worship what they should only use,	18:20
	and use what they should only worship."	18:24
	Prayer and worship remake the heart's desire.	18:30
	So we may come into the chapel or to an alter anywhere	18:37
	seeking the divine to secure our temporal end.	18:44
	The encounter transforms the relation.	18:51
	Now we meet the divine seeking the human	18:55
	to secure eternal end.	18:59
	First movement of worship is	19:04
	the adoration of God for his deity.	19:06
	The middle of movements is contrition under judgment,	19:12
	the transformation of need.	19:17
	The closing movement of the encounter of worship	19:22
	is it's subjective result,	19:26
	forgiveness, and renewal.	19:30
	For the God met in Christian worship is a God of grace	19:35
	as He is a God of glory, and the God of thunder.	19:40
	"Behold your guilt is taken away and your sin forgiven.	19:46
	And I heard the voice of the Lord saying,	19:54
	'whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'	19:56
	Then I said, 'here I am, send me.'	20:03
	The Lord encountered as judge brings me low,	20:10
	but the Lord encountered as redeemer picks me up,	20:15
	sets me up on my feet, answers my prayer,	20:21
	though in different terms than in the way I first put them.	20:25
	The last movement of worship then	20:31
	is to restore the worshiper to his true self,	20:34
	to send him forth on a higher level of spirit	20:39
	than when he came in.	20:43
	This is the curious last paradox of prayer	20:45
	as understood in the Christian faith.	20:50
	Just as happiness is the aroma	20:56
	not the intention of virtue,	21:01
	so serenity,	21:06
	perspective,	21:10
	renewed morale,	21:12
	these are the fruits, not the intention of real worship.	21:14
	If I really seek the Living God, not a cosmic bellhop,	21:23
	then I do not manipulate Him, but adore Him.	21:30
	But then he gives me by surprise,	21:37
	serenity, peace, sanity.	21:43
	To the mind, is given fresh perspective.	21:49
	I come with blurred vision,	21:54
	looking at everything,	21:57
	a squint preoccupied with the small.	21:59
	By the light of the vision of God, I see light again.	22:04
	I see things in their right to relations,	22:09
	small for small, and large for large.	22:12
	I see the point of it all.	22:18
	To the heart, is given fresh motivation.	22:22
	By contemplating the divine urgency and the divine patience,	22:30
	I am given a morale both of urgency and patience,	22:39
	for the human encounter is with the tough and the humdrum,	22:46
	the nasty, which daily I meet.	22:51
	I can then pick up my small problem,	22:57
	tomorrow's task that I checked at the door,	23:01
	and find that the problem has not been solved	23:07
	by incantation to a great magic man.	23:12
	But now I can live with it and see my way through it.	23:18
	I can surmount it by the resources of faith and calm,	23:23
	for mine eyes have seen the change."	23:32
	Amen.	23:39
	Let us pray.	23:41
	Oh, thou searcher of hearts,	23:52
	whon no man can deceive, and who deceives none,	23:57
	purify by Thy grace	24:03
	the motives that have brought us to thee.	24:05
	Lift up our hearts from self seeking to true worship,	24:10
	from preoccupation with ourselves to praise of thee,	24:17
	that we may go forth from the height of this place of prayer	24:24
	to live as becomes the children of the most high.	24:31
	Now may the Lord bless you and keep you,	24:38
	the Lord make His face to shine upon you	24:43
	and be gracious unto you.	24:45
	The Lord lift up his countenance upon you	24:49
	and give you peace, both now and evermore.	24:53

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "The Encounter of Worship" (January 15, 1961)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4cv4gs8k

Date:

January 15, 1961

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0130
ref5464_cud
uachapelsermaud
duke:628374
dcrau002149
ark:/87924/r4cv4gs8k
7158800a-a3ab-416c-a6e3-4e61cf921c2a

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

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United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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Waldo Beach - "The Encounter of Worship" (January 15, 1961)

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1. Waldo Beach - "The Encounter of Worship" (January 15, 1961)

Duke University Archives

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Waldo Beach - "The Encounter of Worship" (January 15, 1961)

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