Stand, Stoop, Stay

One person says, “I don’t like that man; therefore I will not speak to him. When and if my feelings change, I will speak.” Another says, “I don’t like that person; therefore I am going to speak to him.” The person, surprised at the friendliness, cheerfully responds and suddenly friendliness is shared. One person says, “I don’t feel like worshiping; therefore I am not going to church. I will wait till I feel like it and then I will go.” Another says, “I don’t feel like worshiping; therefore I will go to church and put myself in the way of worship.” In the process she finds herself blessed and begins, in turn, to bless.

Most probably the people who were first addressed by this command were the professional leaders of worship in the Jerusalem temple, the Levites (“you priests of GOD, posted to the nightwatch in GOD’s shrine”). They worked in shifts around the clock during festival time, and through the night some of them were always on duty. The great danger in those hours was that the worship might be listless and slovenly. What can you expect at three o’clock in the morning? “No excuses,” says the psalm singer, “your feelings might be flat, but you can control your muscles: lift up your hands.”

Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.” That goes for a Christian too. Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that. Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.”9 The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.

It is as easy to find instances of people who bless in Christian ranks as it is to find examples of people who curse in the world’s.

Karl Barth is one of my favorites. He is one of the great theologians of all time, but the really attractive thing about him is that he was a man who blessed God. His mind was massive, his learning immense, his theological industry simply staggering. He wrote a six-million-word, seven-thousand-page, twelve-volume dogmatics plus forty or fifty other books and several hundred learned articles. Impressive as that is, what is far more impressive, to me at least, is what he called Dankbarkeit. Gratitude. Always and everywhere we are aware that Barth was responding to God’s grace; there is a chuckle rumbling underneath his most serious prose; there is a twinkle on the edges of his eyes—always. He never took himself seriously and always took God seriously, and therefore he was full of cheerfulness, exuberant with blessing. Speaking of his own work as a theologian he said, “The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science.”10

Once Barth was on a bus in Basel, the Swiss city in which he lived and taught for many years. A man came and sat beside him, a tourist. Barth struck up a conversation, “You are a visitor, yes? And what do you want to see in our city?”

The man said, “I would like to see the great theologian Karl Barth. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Barth, “I shave him every morning.” The man went away satisfied, telling his friends that he had met Barth’s barber.

Because he refused to take himself seriously and decided to take God seriously, Barth burdened neither himself nor those around him with the gloomy, heavy seriousness of ambition or pride or sin or self-righteousness. Instead, the lifting up of hands, the brightness of blessing.

Charles Dickens described one of his characters as a person “who called her rigidity religion.”11 We find that kind of thing far too often, but, thankfully, we do not find it in Scripture. In Scripture we find Jesus concluding his parable of the lost sheep with the words “Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue” (Lk 15:7). Not relief, not surprise, not selfsatisfied smugness. And certainly not the “deadness inside me.” But joy.

Blessing is at the end of the road. And that which is at the end of the road influences everything that takes place along the road. The end shapes the means. As Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” A joyful end requires a joyful means. Bless the Lord.

I have a friend who is dean in a theological seminary where men and women are being trained to be pastors. Sometimes he calls one of these people into his office and says something like this: “You have been around here for several months now, and I have had an opportunity to observe you. You get good grades, seem to take your calling to ministry seriously, work hard and have clear goals. But I don’t detect any joy. You don’t seem to have any pleasure in what you are doing. And I wonder if you should not reconsider your calling into ministry. For if a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to teach or preach convincingly that the news is good. If you do not convey joy in your demeanor and gestures and speech, you will not be an authentic witness for Jesus Christ. Delight in what God is doing is essential in our work.”

The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?” What is the final purpose? What is the main thing about us? Where are we going, and what will we do when we get there? The answer is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Songs of Ascents have shown some of them. But it is extremely important to know the one thing that overrides everything else. The main thing is not work for the Lord; it is not suffering in the name of the Lord; it is not witnessing to the Lord; it is not teaching Sunday school for the Lord; it is not being responsible for the sake of the Lord in the community; it is not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbor; not observing the golden rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”

“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”12 God is personal reality to be enjoyed. We are so created and so redeemed that we are capable of enjoying him. All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced. Every step of assent toward God develops the capacity to enjoy. Not only is there, increasingly, more to be enjoyed, there is steadily the acquired ability to enjoy it.

Best of all, we don’t have to wait until we get to the end of the road before we enjoy what is at the end of the road. So, “Come, bless GOD . . . . GOD bless you!”

May it be our blessedness, as years go on, to add one grace to another, and advance upward, step by step, neither neglecting the lower after attaining the higher, nor aiming at the higher before attaining the lower. The first grace is faith, the last is love; first comes zeal, afterwards comes loving kindness; first comes humiliation, then comes peace; first comes diligence, then comes resignation. May we learn to mature all graces in us; fearing and trembling, watching and repenting, because Christ is coming; joyful, thankful, and careless of the future, because he is come.13