Today’s Scripture Reading (July 24,
2015): Exodus 19
Of all the people who are alive right now, who would you most
like to meet tomorrow? Stephen Hawking and Queen Elizabeth would probably be on
my list. If tomorrow was the day that you were to come face to face with someone
from your list, what would you do tonight? Would tomorrow be just another day?
How would you sleep tonight? What would your ritual look like tomorrow morning?
For most of us, tonight would be a night of preparation. We would probably
obsess over simple things like what are we going to wear for the meeting. We
would check and. if you are like me, recheck to make sure that our clothes are
clean. Tomorrow morning we would clean ourselves, we would make sure our breath
was fresh and do whatever we could do to make the right first impression. This
would be important to us, because meeting with these people would be important
to us.
Moses was about to meet with God. And so Israel was
instructed to prepare for the meeting. They were to wash their clothes. It was
not that they would dress like kings and queens as they drew close to God, but
they would wear their best, cleaned and pressed. This meeting with God was
significant – and Israel needed to be prepared.
As Christians, we have lost this idea. We used to believe in
the concept of wearing our Sunday Best to the weekend worship service. The idea
behind the practice was simple – as we come to worship God we are preparing for
a meeting with him. Just as with Moses, God is preparing to draw near to us,
and it is up to us to prepare to draw near to him. It is not that we should
arrive dressed beyond our stature, but if we are truly meeting with God as we
come to our weekend worship services – if we really expect that we will be
meeting with God – shouldn’t he benefit in the same preparation that we would
give if we were about to meet with someone on our ‘most like to meet’ list.
But this might be the problem. Maybe we have lost the
expectancy that God is coming down to meet with us as we gather to worship him.
That the presence of God that we experience as we worship together is not
something that is manufactured by the music and message, God’s presence is not
found in clever lighting and it is definitely not part of the multimedia
display. When we worship him, God really comes down and meets with us. Who
could be more important for us to prepare to meet?
Tomorrow’s Scripture
Reading: Exodus 20
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