Majesty and Intimacy
Our church is looking at changing the schedule for our worship. As part of that change my pastor asked me and some others about the terms majesty and intimacy and how they play out in our church. Specifically how their meanings are understood in two statements:
"As I gather with many Christians, I experience the majesty of God.”
“As I share in a small group of Christians I experience intimacy with God."
I was giving some thought to his question and how the words applied to our proposed change in worship schedules, and then my thoughts about worship in general. I wasn’t having much luck being focused on this until I started thinking about how the words carry very different meanings today than they did in the past, and how they are understood differently by each of us. I decided to do some word play and look at the synonyms for both majesty and intimacy in order to get my mental process rolling.
Majesty
Glory
Greatness
Magnificence
Splendor
Grandeur
King
Miraculous
Intimacy
Brotherhood
Communion
Fellowship
Friendship
Understanding
Closeness
Companionship
A major issue is with how we apply and use these two words today. In today’s use, majesty is more of an adjective used to describe an attribute of something else. Intimacy is a feeling or experience that is attributed to us.
Majesty
Majesty in today’s world is hard for most people to really grasp. We have lost our place (and I think God’s place) in the cosmological order due to our better understanding of Creation. As we come to understand how Creation works we lose sight of how the Creator is present in those things we come to understand. We know the science and mechanics of how a seed grows and produces a stalk of corn, we know how a person gets sick from many diseases and we can cure those diseases. We no longer see the miracle in these events because we understand them. As we come to understand things, our feelings about the majesty of God tend to get pushed out and applied to only those things which are so much bigger than us and those things we don’t understand. We are no longer awed by the miracles that take place around us. Bottom line is, we have lost the sense of the sacred in the everyday (not the ordinary as nothing about creation is really ordinary) and that would include those times we come together to worship God.
Intimacy
This is a loaded word in today’s world. It carries sexual overtones for many people. Most use it to describe a relationship where you are both physically and mentally close to the other person. When asked who they are most intimate with, most people would answer a spouse or lover. If you can get people to really think about the meaning of the word, they might expand it to include a really close friend.
Intimacy is a scary word since it does imply a relationship where one would be truly open to the other and in our culture, being open is not our strong suit. We build walls (physically and emotionally) that prevent a sense of intimacy with others and with God.
One synonym for intimacy that really struck me was communion. Communion is a word that has a very specific meaning for most of us, referring to that moment when we share the bread and cup. I wonder how many people in our congregation would say they feel an intimacy with God or with each other when we celebrate communion.
So where has all this mental rambling led me?
First, I think we need to use words that are experiential and are not easily put off on things outside ourselves (often far away from ourselves). We need a different word to use in place of majesty.
We need to consciously focus on bringing a sense of amazement, wonderment and awe back into worship, into communion, and into the everyday. We need to see (and help others to see) the miraculous in the small things around us, in the relationships we have with each other, as well as in the big things.
We need to reclaim the word intimacy and help people understand how it applies to both their relationships with God and each other. It’s too easy to replace it other words (like fellowship or companionship) that don’t really carry the full meaning of the experience. This won’t be easy but it is necessary.
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