When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’
One of my most treasured vinyl albums is a very old and worn copy of Beatles '65. Sure, it's in pretty bad shape, and it's by no means rare--they pressed a gazillion of those things--but its value for me comes from an inscription in very clear, intentional sharpie marker on the top right corner: "DAVE JAHN." I figure my dad must have bought it when he was 10 or 11 years old, and played the heck out of it. Consequently, as much as I enjoy spinning it, objectively speaking, the thing sounds terrible. Snaps, pops, skips and scratches galore. Still, in the whole history of the universe, there is exactly one copy of Beatles 65 that sounds like this, and even this one has changed since it was new.
That's part of what makes digital technology "superior," isn't it? There's no decay. A digital sound file will sound exactly the same from now on until forever, until the data is no longer accessible. It's just a sequence of one's and zero's, so it will sound the same wherever and whenever you play it. But analog is different. Every time you make a copy, you lose quality. You're making an imperfect approximation of the original, which may itself be an imperfect approximation of the actual event being recorded. Now, when I started making music of my own, I did it in the analog world, on a four track tape recorder, and I learned fast that you guard that master tape with your life, because the more times you play it, the more it will degrade. In very minute ways, it plays back differently each time.
So...analog worship. What all this makes me think about is our current "digital" approach to all kinds of personal experience, and by extension our experience of worship. I'm sure you've all seen this photo, comparing the announcement of Pope Benedict's election and that of Pope Francis:
In 8 short years, it became as important, or even more important, to record a historic event in "perfect" digital detail, even though everyone around you is recording the same event, as it is to witness that event with your own eyes and ears. And hey, I'm a major offender in this department. Just this past Wednesday, I was one of many preschool parents snapping photos of my daughter's graduation so obsessively that I finally had to snap myself out of it and actually be present there, in the room, as my little girl became a kindergartener before my eyes.
I think that for as long as there's been worship, there has been what I'd call the "digital" approach to worship: the attempt to take some huge, life-altering experience, and pick it apart into its tiny components, in the hopes of putting it back together in a "perfect" rendering that you can recreate every Friday, Saturday or Sunday from now on until eternity, just that way. For some churches, the event being recorded was something that happened in Biblical times, like the walk to Emmmaus above. Or maybe it was the house church worship of the early Christians. Or the spirit-filled worship or Reformation times, or maybe good old J.S. Bach's time, or theAzusa Street Revival of 1906, or the way worship sounded and felt when you were in Sunday School, or some amazing worship at a revival or conference you went to last year.
But digital doesn't work for worship, doesn't it? Our experience is analog. By that I mean, the harder we try to recreate a past experience, even a really amazing one, the more muddled it sounds: like a tape of a tape of a tape of something you got off the radio. Or like my Dad's almost 1/2 century old copy of Beatles '65, love it though I do.
To take a digital approach to worship, and try to take apart and put back together some seminal moment, will never work, because the past is only one part of what worship is. Worship is made up from what happened then, but worship is live. Worship is what's happening now. So even if you go to a liturgical church that goes through the same seasons every year and the same stories every three years, or even if you go to a non liturgical church that tends toward many of the same songs and Bible passages based on the taste of those in charge, those songs and stories mean a different thing today than they did last year or last week. They mean something different because the person speaking and singing and preaching them is a different person from who it was a week ago, even if the name on their driver's license matches. And it's a different group of people listening, even if the same twenty people come to your church each week. And oh yeah...you are different. You have lived and changed since last week, and God's Spirit has a different message for you today than last week or last year. It's not about trying to recapture an experience you've had, even an experience as important Jesus' last supper with his disciples, and his death on a cross for us. Because, "This is my body, given for you" means something different to the pain and brokenness and loneliness of this week--and this very moment--than it did for any other moment in history. It means something different because we are different: scratched and cracked and warped in slightly different places than before, yet needing it no less than before.
All worship is analog, in the sense that if your goal is to perfectly copy what's already been, the copy will degrade over time. But if you treasure the experience itself--how it has stayed the same, and how it has changed--you'll discover that, in fact, it's live, every time. Jesus promised it would be. You gather in his name, you bring your own unique, imperfect copy of obedience and faith, and he shows up and creates a brand new thing. Count on it.
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