James L. Mayes has given those of us who care about Christian worship an exhilarating reminder: worship is about declaring to one another and the world ... and to God ... that the LORD reigns. Mayes not only calls us back to God-centered worship, but he also deals with topics that are not pleasant for our 21st Century social palates (ie. war-talk, calling on God to take vengeance on enemies). While we, in our 21st Century liberal sophistication tend to look down on the social ethics of a time long past, we tend to forget that we are just as beset with idols in our churches as they were in yester-year. In studying the Psalms the call to cast down our idols is larger than Buddha's belly.
"Worship led by the psalms sets the congregation in a polytheistic world, which it claims for Adonai. Does that make it anachronistic? Some serious assessments of our culture say it is as much pagan as it is secular. The idolization of sex, wealth, patriotism, armed force, ethnicity, for example--that is, taking a good for the power that define and orders human life-- continues and revives the old paganism. Tom Wright in his incisive book New Tasks for a Renewed Church calls the roll of the ancient gods to name the powers of modern culture: Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite, Gaia. He argues, rightly, I believe that it is urgent for the community of faith to identify the powers for what they are. You know, of course, that Gaia, the earth goddess, has been given a literary epiphany in Christian theology. The confessional situation of the church has haunting similarities to that of Israel in the eighth century and Christians in the second (sic). Monotheizing, liberating the good realities of life and world from the perversion of divinization, is again the crucial agenda. The praise of psalms as confession is the liturgy for the mission" (p. 68).
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