Worship Thoughts

Worship is the offering up of ourselves in totality to the Lord - sacrifice. It has little, if anything, to do with
particular rituals, traditions or preferences. It has everything to do with love - that is, it has something to do with
ethics. Worship will only occur as I give my heart to the Lord, however imperfectly or incompletely I may be able to
do that at any given time - which is indeed all I have to offer and even that is beyond me accept as I live
eschatologically. This, then, is the bottom-line of worship. The Lord will accept nothing less than all of me: And he
will demand nothing more then what I am able to give in that direction at a given point in time.

Jesus, when asked by a Samaritan woman about worship (a woman “dying of thirst” so much so that the question
that popped out of her mouth when she realized she was talking to a prophet, was something like, “Our fathers tell
us to worship at this mountain (Samaria) and you Jews say to worship at Jerusalem! Where am I to go to worship?
(Where do I find God?!)) Jesus told her, “Believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in
Jerusalem will you worship the Father. “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for
salvation is from the Jews. “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in
spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. “God is spirit, and those who worship Him
must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-24 (NASB95))

What did Jesus mean be this? That is the question. It is a question that we must answer when we find ourselves at
odds over forms, traditions, purposes and opinions (Samaria, Jerusalem (for the woman at the well); seeker,
believer, traditional; blended, contemporary, convergent, emergent, world…terms used by those who are writing
and reflecting on the current state of the art). My desire here is to express, if incompletely, some thoughts on
“worship in spirit and truth” as I have come to experience it.

Above I mentioned what must be the rock bottom foundation of any philosophy or practice of worship: Love! You
shall LOVE the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength (Mark and Luke add “mind”). Love, biblically
speaking, includes all that we are, emotionally, materially, and mentally. Love is for sure a big word and we use it in
many ways to describe many relationships with both animate and inanimate objects. We use this word for both
the most narcissistic and altruistic of people. We use “love” for the most trivial and banal things in our lives as well
as the most profound and sublime. Nevertheless, it is the word used to express the very nature and essence of the
being of God- “God is Love” declares the Beloved Apostle, and thus my usage of love as the only possible
irreducible essence of true and spiritual worship (For a stimulating and thought provoking discussion on “love” I
recommend Robert W. Jenson, “On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions,” chapter 6, ‘Thinking
Love’).

Love, at one level, is obedience to the revelation of God in how we think and how we conduct ourselves in the
world. We understand this to be so because of the recognition that the greatest commandments are what we have
just mentioned above along with, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In these two commandments, all the law and
the prophets are summed up and fulfilled…, that is love…, and that is worship. Thus, we find another dimension of
worship in that if we do not address love for our neighbor we have yet to attain to a full expression of worship that
would qualify as being in spirit and truth. Though we can say and must say that to love the Lord means at the very
least, that we will keep his commandants, nevertheless, to equate love simply as obedience to a code, even the
Biblical code, is often misleading, and, I think, is some of what causes confusion in our attempts to define and
practice piety and worship. For in reality, love far exceeds the law and asks things of us the law is never able to.

How, then, are we to understand the “in spirit and truth” part? The truth is that we cannot worship at this level if
left to our own! This is the whole testimony of Scripture and it is the reason for the coming of Jesus into the world.
He came to set us free and to provide for the possibility of new birth. That is, the fulfillment of the promise that
God would remove our hearts of stone (an image that conveys our utter inability to love and thus to worship!) with
hearts of flesh (an image that conveys a new capacity to actually be able to love and thus to worship). These are
words of life in the sense of empowerment. Freedom language is power language as is heart-of-flesh language.
As we come through faith to understand our position, our identity, as Klyne Snodgrass would have it, in Jesus
Christ we come to understand the true nature of our being and the true nature of God. If we are able to embrace
that truth, we experience new creation (born form above) and, filled with the Spirit of God who gives us our true
humanity, we find ourselves to have hearts of flesh. We are alive and able to love, thus obey, and thus worship in
Spirit and in truth. (I am uncomfortable with the use of “obey” here, though it is certainly appropriate to use the
word. My discomfort is with our very real tendency to lapse into pragmatism in the sense that love is often not at
all pragmatic. Love, as the defining essence of the being of the Lord God Almighty, cannot be circumscribed by any
codification of conduct that is comprehensible to our human minds. Jesus stretches our understanding of love both
in his teaching (try again to read attentively the Sermon on the Mount) and in his actions. Paul gives us a summary
of love in 1 Corinthians 13 that certainly outstrips our attempts to codify our relationships to one another. Love
certainly encompasses the law, but it just a certainly transcends the law and any attempt on our part to codify
righteousness, ethics, morality, etc.)

Worship, then, is a way of life and includes times for gathering as the community for the purpose of mutual
edification and praise to God. However, when we say that these gatherings are worship and then debate over the
form of these gatherings we move away from worship not towards it. Where does that leave us? It leaves us at a
place where we need to humble ourselves before the Lord and seek his grace and wisdom.

It may be that in order to honor all the various ways of expressing “worship” in our corporate meetings is to simply
allow for and schedule several times of gathering, each marked by different formats (there are churches that do
this with great impact on their communities). However, in the less than rather large congregation this is highly
impractical, not to mention somewhat undesirable. A better solution is to spend the necessary time and energy
before the Lord discovering how we can order our gatherings in a way that honors the God and Father of our Jesus
Christ in spirit and truth.

All this is not to say that any given format is better at creating an “atmosphere” of “worship” than another. In fact,
if the format or order becomes the focus, well, my beloved brothers and sisters, we have lost the “battle” already
since we have come to put the form, or format, or order in the place of priority instead of the Lord our God. That is
not by any definition of the word, worship and in fact is idolatry (though when we do this we are usually not aware
of it - thus making my comment here incomprehensible to those who are in reality doing this).

Let me back up a little and give you what I would emphasize in our corporate gathering. For me, the primary
purpose of our gathering on Sunday morning is for proclamation of the Word. Now, this could indeed include
singing of songs and praying of prayers and more, I’m thinking, for those in the habit of practicing non-Eucharistic
services, coming to the table. However, if these things become points of division, dissension and frustration, then
we are missing something and I do not know how to resolve this other than through seeking Jesus and his heart for
us in our gatherings. The problem here arises with our tendency to approach such seeking with our own ideas
intact and we tend to pray for the other person’s mind to be changed. Though we say that Scripture is our sole
source of faith, conduct and doctrine, we seldom take the time or effort to discover just what Scripture has to say
on most subjects. That is not to say that we do not have texts that support our opinions on such topics as worship,
nevertheless, to what extent are we willing to do the hard work of placing our understanding before the Word to
be examined by that Word?

Some issues at the core of this problem have to do with various ideas of why we gather and whom we are trying to
serve through our gatherings. Is this a time to include the un-churched in a desire to reach them with the message
of Jesus? Is it a time for believers to do the things believers do to show God our devotion? In other words, is our
gathering on Sunday morning for the initiated or the uninitiated? Or is it somehow to be for both? Indeed, if the
body is engaged in worship that is indeed in spirit and truth, will our worship exclude anyone?

If it is for the uninitiated, what then is the best way to communicate the gospel to them? If it is for the initiated,
which initiates is it for in this time of heterogeneous congregations (multi-generation, multi-ethnic (at least in a
few congregations), multi-tradition)? We can always use such terms as emergent, blended, traditional,
contemporary, modern, post-modern and we can set up various templates, Traditional, Praise and Worship, Story,
and Fourfold Worship, but none of these terms or models lead us to the actual act of worship. These remain at
most human attempts at ordering the formal gathering of the church and may or may not have anything to do with
our “reasonable service of worship” Romans 12:1ff).

What we are after is a way to gather so that we are offered the opportunity to encounter the Living God, to
encourage each other, to receive instruction from the word of God and to offer ourselves to him in new or
renewed devotion all of which are aspects of worship but none of which are worship in and of themselves. This
must be a work led and vitalized by the Spirit of God.

Still, all this does not answer the issue that has risen among us over the past several years, and I honestly don’t
know if the issue as it is being presented can be resolved, at least not with the wisdom that I have. Nevertheless,
some kind of decision about what we are to do when we gather as a community to worship is necessary. And this
then becomes a matter of leadership and our response to it.

For my part I am not interested in a debate about the “propriety” or “effectiveness” of any given “form of worship”
(and I must reiterate that if this is the debate then we have lost the “battle” already). What I prefer and what you
prefer and what they prefer are all fine…maybe… Does Jesus really care?!

When preferences drive our conversation about worship (even when we believe wholeheartedly that our
preferences aren't personal/cultural preferences but are the actual truth of God) I fear that we find ourselves in
the same place Isaiah's peers found themselves! Thoughtfully read Isaiah 2:10-20! It is amazing to me that we can
read such a text and not fall to our knees in repentance and great sorrow but instead start right in on each other
about... well about the foolish things we do and say about what we have self-deceptively practiced as worship.

Yes, truly, Jesus does care deeply about worship and its place in our lives. You cannot read Scripture like the Isaiah
text and think otherwise. So really, how in the world do personal preferences even fit into this conversation?

If we carefully attend to such passages as I just pointed out form Isaiah, to worship in "spirit and truth" is not at all
about the cult or liturgy that we normally associate with worship. Spiritual (God engaging, God pleasing) truthful
(reality honoring) worship is taking place when we find ourselves becoming aware of the travesty of justice and the
unrighteousness of our economic, cultural, political system and we do so in such a way that we actually lay our
lives on the line to work against the powers that support and propagate such injustice and unrighteousness for the
sake of the victims of our unjust and unrighteous systems.

In this way we turn back to the opening thoughts about the association of love and worship. For the acts
necessary to work against injustice and unrighteousness are acts of love and no one can claim to love and not be
driven in some concrete way to try and do something for that individual who is being oppressed by the systems.
The Beloved Apostle puts it this way, "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone
who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us
this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother."

This then, I propose, is worshiping in spirit and truth and it has nothing to do with either "Mt. Zion" or the
"Mountain in Samaria."