Tomorrow is the Lord’s Day. This morning I finished my yearly rereading of The Lord of the Ring trilogy. It is always a bittersweet experience and puts me in a certain mood. “The Scouring of the Shire,” the next to last chapter in The Return of the King, is, arguably, the climax and point of the entire story. If it is not the central point, it is certainly a major one, and it never fails to fill my heart with hope. May the Lord raise up such noble hobbits in our own day to awaken the Shire from her slumber and consent to madness and folly! The next chapter, the last, describes the Ringbearers’ final journey to the Grey Havens. (Don’t email me and tell me I missed one. I’m quite aware, thank you very much.) If you can read that chapter without tears in your eyes, you are made of sterner stuff than me or simply are not paying attention.
I love the story of the Ring the more I read it. I read many books because they are assigned to me. Most advanced degrees are given mainly for persistence (and a bit of politicking) rather than creative or important work. (I’ve known too many people with doctorates to imagine intelligence has anything to do with it.)1 There’s nothing like a university to tempt a man to hate books, and many a child has been turned off reading because some foolish grown-up thought they ought to read an “important book” instead of a fairytale, which turns out to have been the really important book after all.
Do we think of the Lord’s Day in much the same way? Have we lost or obscured the wonder of the story of redemption and the grandeur of coming into the presence of God? Have the outward trappings of religion caused us to overlook the sheer delight of communion with Christ? If so, it is not religion, per se, that is to blame. The substance is delightful, but something is lacking in our communication of and contact with it.
The first time I visited Rivendell, I thought I would never get past the songs sung in its halls. They seemed to go on interminably. Now the songs that punctuate the entire trilogy are some of the most delightful, and oddly important, features of the story. Likewise, the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel used to seem to last forever, and the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were tedious, at best. But this morning as I finished Ezekiel once again, the picture of grace flowing from the Temple and becoming a mighty river that waters the whole earth was freshly precious to me. Have you noticed the Bible gets better the more you read it? If you haven’t noticed that, it’s at least partly my fault as your teacher. The Bible is not boring, and only a stuffy theologian could ever make it so.
It’s hard not to laugh at our self-importance in all things religious. Far more of us are Shirriffs than mighty men like Strider. This is not to say worship and religion are anything other than serious things. The problem is that we take ourselves seriously and Christ unseriously, and that is never more true than when we imagine that we are taking Christ seriously. What will our children remember about the Lord’s Day? Will it be a delightful memory to them, days of joy and celebration, or one of stiff collars, straight backed chairs, and parental hypocrisy? Have we given them Jesus, in all his splendor? Is the story of the gospel like the story of the great ring, so that our children would plead with us: “Read it again!”
The first thing to do may be to weep at our own stupidity, then confess it to our wives and children who already know all about it. Then we should laugh at the mess we have made and our neglect of God’s good gifts. Then we should get serious about enjoying the journey. What better thing do you have to occupy your heart and mind than God’s goodness and the Church’s praise on this holy day? Even the Fellowship on the road to the Black Gates paused regularly for a pipe and period of holy contemplation, no matter how brief the moment or bleak the situation may have seemed. The courts of God’s house are open, and if you listen carefully, you can already hear the heavenly choir as it sings. Orcs can wait until Monday morning. Come and rejoice in the glory of the true King. --JME
1 I often wonder whether anyone in their right mind has ever voluntarily chosen to pursue a terminal degree. Perhaps it ought to be like a call to Christian ministry and personal desire ought to be considered a potentially disqualifying factor.
