Yesterday, as I was preaching, I noticed a bee had flown in. From the front, the bee itself was a little distracting. But what was much more distracting was watching most the congregation following this wretched insect all around the room. It was even harder to ignore when it decide to land on various people, who got a little animated as they tried to shoo the creature away. All the while, there I was preaching away whilst everybody was looking this way and that, everywhere but at me or a bible.

I don’t blame anyone for that. If a bee, or worse – a wasp (or worse still, in some parts of the world, a snake or a lizard) – start coming at you, you’re going to be alert to it. Nobody wants to get stung or bitten. It is hard to concentrate when it feels like there is a live threat to your person. Some things are just inevitably distracting and little can be done about them. The question is, what to do when it happens? Do you carry on? Do you stop? Do you take a break? In the end, we just stopped for a minute. Somebody went and caught it, let it out and we carried on (if you’re inclined to see how that all panned out, and just how close to Rowan Atkinson’s Man vs Bee it was, you can see it all unfold in glorious technicolour here).

Whilst I don’t think there is a biblical answer concerning what to do, I was set to thinking about a little incident that was more than a little distracting for the gathered church. You can find it in Acts 20:7-12:

On the first day of the week, we assembled to break bread. Paul spoke to them, and since he was about to depart the next day, he kept on talking until midnight. There were many lamps in the room upstairs where we were assembled, and a young man named Eutychus was sitting on a window sill and sank into a deep sleep as Paul kept on talking. When he was overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third storey and was picked up dead. But Paul went down, bent over him, embraced him, and said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, because he’s alive.’ After going upstairs, breaking the bread, and eating, Paul talked a long time until dawn. Then he left. They brought the boy home alive and were greatly comforted. — Acts 20:7-12 (CSB)

It probably doesn’t get much more distracting than a bloke falling out a window and dying! And to be fair to the guy, it was an evening meeting and Paul was speaking until midnight. Now, we don’t know when Paul started speaking so it’s hard to say how long Paul spoke for. But late at night, sat up high with a load of oil lamps making you a bit woozy, everything was against the lad. Nevertheless, they entirely rightly stopped the meeting and dealt with Eutychus – what else are you going to do if someone dies! After he was made alive again (a point the text fairly quickly skips over), Paul decides to carry on. This time we do have some time markers and it seems he went from somewhere near midnight until dawn; which is presumably around 5 or 6am!

Now, I didn’t speak as long as Paul did. Nor was a bee anywhere near as serious or distracting as a man dying. But it was heartening to know, in that much more serious instance, they stopped for a bit and dealt with the issue before carrying on. It is good to know there is at least some biblical precedent.

But I sometimes think this kind of thing shatters the illusions of some. Those who wish to insist on particularly “reverent” worship – more often than not meaning sombre and dour in practice – often struggle with this kind of thing. What do you do when funny things happen? There is little quite so funny as a child as being in a very sombre, serious, fairly dour service – particularly one where only the ancient hymns played on an organ are acceptable and everyone is wearing what appears like funereal dress – only for the organist to accidentally set off the pop-tastic demo mode. Whenever children doing and saying what kids do because they didn’t get the memo or the sheer ordinariness of normal life broke out mid-service, the often pompously pious sense of awe and reverence was punctured. And few knew quite what to do about it.

I am not suggesting that we should be actively and purposefully irreverent towards the Lord. But I do often think that our view of what is reverent and proper worship is often undermined by incredibly ordinary things. They aren’t irreverent in and of themselves; they just puncture the the artificial sense of reverence we have created. An atmosphere of our own creation that we can’t find in scripture. Where, for example, are suits, ties, organs, pietistic silence and all manner of things some deem “reverent” found in scripture or commanded for worship? Nowhere I have found them.

When these things are undermined by ordinary stuff happening – whether a child making funny noises, a bee flying around, the demo button getting pressed or whatever – it belies our reverential artifice. Ordinary things can make the apparent reverence seem silly or funny and end up undermining it altogether. But when funny or ordinary things happen – or even serious things that legitimately interrupt what we’re doing – and we’re simply able to ride them, or stop and then carry on, I think we may be doing something closer to the intended heart of true worship.

We are gathering together to build one another up and to encourage one another. When the ordinary stuff of life rears its head or things happen that are inappropriate in context and therefore quite funny, it doesn’t ruin what we’re doing altogether. We may need to sort it out. We may need to deal with the distraction. But nothing is punctured. No artificial sense or feeling is ruined because we are worshipping God together, with the aim of building one another up in our gathering, just as we worship him throughout the week. We are building up the church even as we deal with the distraction. We are building up the church when the funny thing happens and we laugh because it is okay to find it funny. It isn’t a matter of the reverential atmosphere being ruined; it’s a matter of simply dealing with the ordinary distraction or problem ordinarily so we can get back to the business of focusing together on the Word of God.

I was just set to thinking how silly some of our practice must appear to our Heavenly Father. After all, that is the kind of reverence with which we now approach him. Not as people seeking to impress by outward dress, our big words or our funny voices that we use to pray in our special church tone. Rather, we are children of the living God who delights in his people. We are part of God’s family and, as we approach him, we do so as family members, loved by him just as much when we are gathered together as when we are home. We may be coming together with particular purpose, and that purpose may be helped or impeded by certain things, but we are nevertheless gathering as family where all manner or ordinary things inevitably go on and do not ruin our gathering.

Just as I don’t find it irreverent when my children do funny things when we are spending time together, and it doesn’t ruin our time together when we laugh at things that impact what we’re doing, I’m fairly confident God does not find it irreverent when fairly ordinary and, let’s be honest, sometimes funny things impact on our time with him. It doesn’t make us irreverent when we acknowledge the distraction or we laugh when the funny thing happens; it just punctures the false sense of reverence some of us insist upon. It undermines the unnecessarily sombre tone and heavy atmosphere when (and it pays to remember this), the Lord sovereignly determined to prick our pomposity by causing the funny thing to happen. If the Lord sits in the heavens and laughs at the foolishness of kings and peoples (cf. Psalm 2), I suspect he may sit there laughing at some of what we determine to be vital acts of worship and modes of reverently approaching the throne of grace. And perhaps just as we find some of these things a little bit funny, he might find it funny too; after all, he caused it to happen!