In the House of the Lord

My mom wasn't functioning well enough to play piano and turn pages at the same time, so I wound up coming to church with her. They were doing good music this week, and even if I argued with most of the lyrics, at least there were good melodies and a nice beat. I really liked the Offertory. It was a spiritual, saying that if God saved Daniel, why shouldn't he save every man? Good question. My answer would most likely conflict with nearly all Christian doctrine.

The anthem was a song that I sang when I was still singing with the church choir. Wonderful melody and rhythm, but will someone explain to me how an all-powerful God can be so insecure as to demand worship and obedience? Gad. Any Being actually worthy of worship will certainly not demand it, and most likely not want it. To me, those kind of lyrics are just fawning over the supreme being: the equivalent of "yes-men" in a bureaucracy.

The hymns were mostly blah, but there was one good one. "Cuando el Pobre" = "When the poor one." Nice Spanish melody, actual loving words, about how you know God is near when the unfortunate offer up the little they have to help others. If I can steal my mom's hymnal for long enough, I might even post the lyrics.

Oh, and there was a sermon. It was laity Sunday, and the woman who was preaching had no enunciation whatsoever. I got maybe one word in three for the first minute and stopped listening.

Here's the thing: I feel this huge disconnect between the church (any Christian church) and God. I get the impression He's looking down and laughing at the people who get hung up over petty details and labels. I ran across an interesting quote on a Christian blog not too long ago. As best as I remember, it said "How can we know that God did not choose to reveal Himself in different ways to different cultures?" How indeed.