From this morning's Matins

First, the incomparable hymn: "Father, most holy" usually attributed to St. Gregory the Great.

What never ceases to strike me in this hymn is stanza three:

Maker of all things, all Thy creatures praise Thee;
All for Thy worship were and are created;
Now, as we also worship Thee devoutly,
Hear Thou our voices! (LSB 504:3)

Everything there is was created to worship the Blessed Trinity. The flowers worship by being flowers. The trees worship by being trees. The dogs worship by chasing their tails. And humans worship by being humans - being what we were intended to be: the image and temple of God upon the earth. We were created to worship. To spend our time in anything else is to miss out.

And because that is so, because of the fallness of our world, we had in today's reading from Proverbs 14:11

The house of the wicked will be destroyed;
But the tent of the upright will flourish.

House verses tent. It's the difference between the wicked and the upright. The wicked have here in this world their permanent home. They settle down and live it for all its worth. But its worth, its true worth, is how it manifests and declares to us ceaselessly that it is NOT our final home, but that we are meant be pilgrims, that we are passing through this age to the age that is to come, which is our true and lasting home. Here the righteous live only in tents - even if the tents are made of brick and mortar. They know that nothing here lasts. "The form of this world is passing away." We are journeying to that Age and that home where praise and worship of the Blessed Trinity will be all in all. Even now we get the teasing taste of what it will be in the Church - the colony from the future, the life of the age to come planted on this soil so that we might ever remember that we live in tents.