Hearts Wide Shut

A woman yawns, lights flash, music blares, it is a dizzying atmosphere in a New York club. The woman seems indifferent, distant in an environment of engagement and celebration. She is a spectator not a participator. Too cool to engage and become one with the glorious revelry all around her. She is one who judges what is cool. The spectacle is for her entertainment. While she stays to party the night away, by her aloof mellow behavior it is apparent she cares little for the spectacle! Only glad for others that she is there!

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Have you ever heard of the word, ‘Overexposure’? It is a photography term. A photograph may be described as overexposed when it has a loss of highlight detail, that is, when the bright parts of an image are effectively white out because Simply put, it is when too much light is allowed to reach the film and the resulting image is too white. The Common Causes of Overexposure is when a camera exposes film to the light of an image just a little to long. Resulting in a loss of detail, thus a blurry picture.

This word has also moved over into pop culture. Forbes magazine in 2008 listed Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and others, as the most over exposed celebrities in Hollywood. Overexposed here means their fame is in jeopardy because they are experiencing so much media coverage.

In the church, God can suffer from Overexposure. We can make Jesus into a media star that came for your good and your entertainment. Making the gospel all about you, and nothing about God. People can hear about him so much that the picture they have of him in their head is ‘blurry’ and has lost all its glorious detail. As a result our worship suffers. We imitate the woman at the club. In a church worship service we become indifferent to the spectacle, unwilling to engage and be lost in the revelry, immune to the glory of it all. We become judgers not engagers, spectators and not worshipers.

In this light, Annie Dillard raises the question about the worship of the church: "Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?" She continues:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return[1]

I am stuned and grieved by her observation because of the truths they contain. We dare not wake the giant. We dare not get excited. We risk all if our eyes should behold His glory and our passion should burst forth. We dare not wake the Holy One. So we dare not!

Daring to see God for ‘who he is’ is no small exploit. And in our lack of daring, we have allowed the film to be overexposed. We have allowed the fame of our God to be in jeopardy. By not daring to see and seek God, we dare not be passionate, and so have allowed the God of all glory to be perceived as a ‘vanilla’ white all-purpose deity, more grandpa than Great Almighty. Donald McCullough writes:

When the true story gets told, whether in the partial light of historical perspective or in the perfect light of eternity, it may well be revealed that the worst sin of the church (in our time) has been the trivialisation of God [2]

In many churches, God has been re-fashioned; ever so slightly he has been amendment into a docile manageable God. We scale God down to more convenient proportions. Demoting him from a living God to something more economy size, something a little more out there, a projection of a caring but safer deity, is not an uncommon temptation. We see him as such a controllable and tame God we can call Him, “our homeboy” and not feel we have transgressed any ancient lines of propriety.

This tendency is not uncommon but trait we share with the unbelieving world. David Wells in his Book God in the wasteland writes about the level of importance western culture gives to God.

It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost His saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider Him less interesting than television, His commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, His judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and His truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. [3]

Wells clams that God has little importance in today’s culture. His word to describe this lack of importance is the word “weightlessness.” This weightlessness is not a result of ignorance. It is the result of a lack of heart. In one sense, a lack of taking God seriously and in another, the result of taking God for granted. In still another sense, it is the result of loving God with a weak affection. The blame is not on God as to say that His weightlessness is a result of some divine slim-fast plan but the evidence of human sin in the heart of our culture and the church. Wells continues:

it is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized life…. Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality. [4]

The weightlessness of God is not reserved for the unbelieving but includes the contemporary life of the church. In the church, such “weightlessness” expresses itself in the trivialization of God in the hearts of the faithful.

We are the women in the club. We are at the party just not a part of the party. Put another way, God is a part of our life and not our life. He is a concern but not our ultimate concern. He is, we confess, someone we value yet our distractions betray us for we value him little more than our beloved pets or favorite hobby. We like distractions. Distractions are safe and often convenient. They give us a measure of pleasure inoculating us from the grand pleasure. With hearts wide shut, we have trivialized God, diluted His character and the loss is all ours. We must be responsible for our careless ways. We have made permissible the idea of a Christian spectator and tolerable a small vision of God giving allowance for the toleration of lesser loves.

To recap the weightlessness of God is a result of three personal posters of the heart (but I’m sure there’s more). One, the result of loving God with a weak affection. Two, the result of not taking God seriously. three, the result of taking God for granted. In the final analysis, the church’s vision of God is anemic for we live with hearts wide shut.

In the coming weeks, we will look at the ways we have lost a vision of God and learn that the first step into the light is resisting the current cultural mindsets that have led us to trivialize God.


End notes
[1] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.
[2] Donald W McCullough, The Trivialisation of God: The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity,(Colorado springs, NavPress 2007) p13
[3] David Wells, God in the wasteland: the reality of truth in a world of fading dreams (Grand rapids, Eerdman, 1995) 88
[4] David wells, God in the wasteland: the reality of truth in a world of fading dreams (Grand rapids, Eerdman, 1995) 88, 90