Do It Again!

(Ecclesiastes 1:4-9) A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

I spent the late winter and early spring of 1975 living in a Christian community nestled in the northern hills of South Korea. I learned many things during my short stay at Jesus Abbey, but one of the most enduring lessons I learned from two of my littlest sisters in Christ, Chung-hee and Suk-hee, who were 1 ½ and 3 years old respectively.

Almost every evening after dinner but before our evening Bible-study commenced, I found myself playing with these two little Asian pixies. After a few weeks we had developed a set of pseudo-gymnastic moves that we would rehearse each evening, all of them involving me lifting, spinning and sometimes even throwing the girls at sundry angles and in different ways. At the conclusion of each “move” I would set whichever of the girls I was tumbling on the floor in front of me, and regardless of which one it was, she would immediately look at me and earnestly plead, “Doe uttekae, Gee-in (Gene). Doe-uttekae.” If you have ever played with children, you already know the translation of that wonderful little phrase. For indeed it is common to children the world throughout. Every culture, every language, even the ones without the light of special revelation, has its own gleeful version of the English, “Do it again!”

Which begs the question, “Why is this seemingly insignificant petition common to cultures across the millennia and around the globe?” And the answer is really quite simple. Children delight in what we jaded adults consider boring repetition because they bear well the image of their Creator, who every morning in the pre-dawn darkness looks to the eastern horizon and gleefully issues this command to the sun: “Do it again!” Who, each Spring beholds the myriad landscapes of barren brown-ness and clapping His mighty hands together, accompanied by a divine, joyful sort of jumping up and down, commands the dormant trees, plants and bulbs to “Do it again.”

The universe bears a Trinitarian resemblance to its Creator who is many and one in sublime perfection. And so each day, and each season, and each year, considered one way is identical to its predecessors. But considered another way, delightfully different.

Sadly, there are many enemies today of the sort of historical liturgy that we are currently in the process of adopting as our own here at Trinity Church. These moderns want everything to be new and improved, spontaneous and different, unplanned and unpredictable, and consequently ungodly. But for some inscrutable reason the Lord has shown us mercy (there is no cause for boasting here), and so we assemble each week, often seated in the same chair and next to the same people, and during the piano prelude to the Lord’s Service, as we think of the several elements of our liturgy that are repeated week after week in unvarying order (such as the set prayers, the psalms, the sursum corda, the sermon, and the Lord’s Supper) by God’s grace, we silently but gleefully cry out to Him, who is our Father, and whose image we bear, “Do it again.” And wonder of wonders, He does.