I am about to ruffle some feathers. Forgive me.
Here’s the issue: I am personally uncomfortable with our commitment to comfort during church. More to the point, I have a problem with the emerging assumption that drinking coffee or water during the church service is normal—almost a right.
If worship is what we are supposed to be about—the total investment of our energy in the magnifying of another—then where is there room for satiating our own thirst? Understand, I’m preaching to myself, too, because I enjoy a bottle of water.
Recently I attended a Sunday morning service where communion was offered “self-service,” rather than the elements being passed out. Different—but certainly not problematic in itself. But while I was praying, I heard the unmistakable sound of a large candy box being shaken as two people in the row behind me discussed the weather.
Our unwillingness to suspend creature comforts—like a cup of coffee, or a bottle of water, or a handful of candy for even one hour I find suspect. If we will not allow our worship to cost us the suspension of personal pleasures for an hour, what price will we pay?
I can hear the voices of some folks who disagree. They’re saying, “Dude, chill out. We don’t live in the Old Testament anymore. This is the age of grace!” True.
Yet 1 Timothy 6:16 speaks of our God as one “who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.”
And I guarantee you that if God were to once again visit Mount Sinai as He did with Moses, you could count on there being smoke and thunder.
Given imagery like that, a cup of Starbucks or a sip of water from a BPA-free plastic bottle seems a bit out of place.
I see the casualness of man and the holiness of God on a collision course.
While we no longer live in the Old Testament, worship itself intrinsically requires a certain personal preparation. I doubt that a double shot latte is what God had in mind.