The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
September 28, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 38

Everything But...
           What would you rather do, tremble or murmur? While we have worked hard to eliminate excessive emotion from our faith, preferring a less stressful rational approach to church stuff and religion, this preference has become our strength, yet also exposes our weaknesses.
           If there is an original sense of “trembling,” it is to be found in the African-American spiritual, “Were You There?” which we sing during the Office of Tenebrae or Shadows on Maundy Thursday as we anticipate the coming crucifixion of Good Friday. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? .... Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” It’s not so much a physical shaking as an inner feeling that we are in the presence of something awesome. Too bad ‘awe’ has been overused and diminished in our language, for it means that you are in the grasp of God.
           Awe shucks. What we are good at instead is murmuring - or is it mumbling? Sometimes we murmur about God, how we are not receiving our fair share of grace and the good stuff. A lot of times we murmur about other people who just haven’t been good enough for us, especially when we believe they have been given our good stuff. The Israelites exited into the wilderness, and despite the awesome events that led them there, they gave up awe for a long Lent of forty years and preferred to murmur. Is this church living in awe or too busy murmuring?
           When God’s Spirit invades and a deep sense of humility seems to inhabit you, you tremble. When you inflict your dissatisfactions upon a convenient target, people, divinity, or just life, murmuring is the medium. It didn’t help the Israelites, for none of the murmurers ever made it out of the wilderness. It’s healthier to tremble.