Jesus Jargon: Worship

Hey friends, welcome to the Pastor Talk podcast on our final episode of Jesus Jargon.
We’ve been looking at words in the Christian faith and thinking together about them a little
bit.
Today we get to one that is probably common,
maybe the most understood of the words we’ve
looked at.
I suspect this is not a new word for anybody, the word worship.
But when we use this word,
we often use it in a narrow sense of a thing that is much
bigger than we sometimes think about.
So today we’re going to just think with you a little bit about what do we mean when we talk about worship?
How do we use that in the church?
And how should we think about what it means to do that thing that we often talk about?
Right.
And there are many ways into that conversation,
actually.
It’s a very rich understanding in the Christian faith because we draw from a well much deeper
than even just what we would call the New Testament,
sort of the Christian understanding
of worship.
We draw from that very ancient Old Testament recognition of the encounter with God.
And we have in the Scriptures these images of the people of Israel being given this tabernacle,
this thing that literally moved with them in their itinerant stage of their nation.
And then this idea of a temple being built,
this physical place where God would rest,
where the presence of God on earth would be not only symbolized but realized.
And we get from that this idea that was very common in the ancient world,
that there’s some debt that is owed from the human to the divine.
Now in this case,
the Christian understanding and the ancient Jewish understanding was that
God was gracious enough to descend for that presence to be with the people.
But there’s still this idea of sacrifice,
of offering, of lifting up a thing that was human,
that was physical, that was of our world to be given to the one who is beyond
the world, the creator of that world.
There’s this idea that Paul uses of this sort of sweet fragrance being offered up,
the fruit or the crop or the thing that was offered was a gift to the one who didn’t need that
gift.
But yet it was a symbol,
a form of a real practice of what we call worship.
And it’s from that starting place,
which is in so many ways very different from what we
call worship.
It doesn’t look like it.
It doesn’t include a lot of those elements.
We don’t think of bringing the fruit of our gardens.
We don’t, you know, this isn’t the way that we conceive of worship.
But yet this is this very fertile ground that lives underneath what we understand worship
to be, because it engages with how God has interfaced with humanity and how we have sought
to offer up thanksgiving and praise.
And then we see how that’s transformed in the life of Jesus Christ, ultimately.
I think it’s a fitting graphic you have here behind us,
Michael.
The magnifying glass, the word worship means to magnify,
to make bigger or to lift up.
In other words, to focus on.
And so we think of worship,
and there are lots of words you can use,
praise,
exaltation,
glorification.
But worship is whatever we do that lifts up God,
whatever we do that makes God our focus.
And we most often think of that as the thing we do in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning.
We talk about that as worship.
But that’s one avenue of worship.
You can worship in almost endless ways and at any time.
But we often think of that moment where we’re together,
those moments we’re together in
the sanctuary as “worship.”
And they are, but they’re not the extent of worship.
But they’re probably the mechanism of worship that we practice the most often,
that we’re most familiar with.
And one of the struggles that we have always had,
we see it throughout scripture,
we see it throughout church history.
When we do something together in a room where we’re all there and some people are up front
and some people are in pews or chairs,
it is very easy to think that what we’re doing
is about the people who are there.
And this is the fundamental struggle of worship,
is that we have a tendency to want to make
it about us and our opinions and our practices and what we do in the sanctuary.
And sometimes we lose focus on the idea that the point is to focus on God and not us.
And that’s an ongoing struggle and has been, I think,
since the very beginning.
I think worship is one of those spiritual topics where the individual experience only
becomes magnified as it becomes a communal experience.
And what I mean by that is this,
that all of us are tempted individually to allow that
sinful nature to turn us inward for our own interests,
our own perspectives to become
of greatest importance.
Right.
This is just it’s a common thing,
you know, you go do a thing that everybody else enjoys
and instead of you being able to enjoy it,
you get wrapped up and I didn’t like the color
of that thing or I didn’t like this other thing.
This is fine to have opinions,
but it’s easy to see how we just become so fixated on our
own interests and concerns that it really restricts us from being able to participate
in things that are outside of us.
And if that’s true for you and for me individually,
which I believe it is,
it’s even more true
when we all get together.
And that’s for lots of reasons.
That’s just because, you know, multiple people all in the same space trying to do the same
thing just creates lots of opportunities for misunderstandings or for us getting crossways
as we’re trying to do that.
But some of that is because it exposes when we’re together,
those false assumptions that
we have and we carry around largely unchecked in our lives,
those assumptions get challenged
when we come together to worship because other people come with other assumptions.
And if we’re going to be honest,
some of their assumptions are more faithful than our own.
Some of our assumptions are more faithful than theirs, right?
We all together make the body of Christ.
No one comes in total error or in total truth.
And so as we get together for worship,
we’re trying to do this beautiful,
complicated, messy human dance where we’re trying to offer up the best that we have to a God who doesn’t
need it.
We forget that God doesn’t need our worship.
But we offer it to God as a form of exaltation,
as a form of praise,
as a form of gratitude.
And when we do that,
it lifts us out of our individual space.
It lifts us,
even Calvin would say,
as an entire community,
we’re spiritually lifted in
worship together, not just as individuals.
We all are lifted spiritually.
And in that moment,
we’re not only glorifying God,
we’re reminding ourselves or more rightly
put, we’re being reminded.
By the presence and spirit of God within us,
that ultimately it’s not about us,
not about
our own faith, even per se,
it’s about the God whose gracious love has intervened in our lives.
So it’s this beautiful shift that happens.
Yes, it happens in worship in the communal sense that we think of on Sundays.
But, you know, as you tease, it’s also more broad than that,
right?
It happens in every moment that our eyes are lifted beyond to the one who is above all things.
So it’s this beautiful, rich topic.
I think there is maybe some evidence of the struggle in the way that we have talked about
worship over the last maybe 40 years, 30 years.
We have added descriptors so that now often when you see this word worship,
there’s a word in front of it,
traditional worship,
non-traditional worship, informal worship,
seeker friendly worship,
contemporary worship.
And what we see in that is that on one hand,
those words are just descriptors.
They help people sort of understand the nature of the kind of service they might go to.
But unfortunately, in many cases,
in my opinion,
we have emphasized the descriptive
word more than the word worship.
We have put more emphasis on what style of worship we are doing than whether the thing
we’re doing is done worshipfully,
whether we are doing the work of magnifying God,
whether we are focusing in the right place.
And because we now have this kind of arena in which there are lots of choices about how we worship,
it reinforces that idea that worship is some sort of personal choice.
It’s my I get to exercise my own preference.
And it’s made it in,
to be honest, it’s made it a little bit of a struggle to really
help all of us remember that while having style preferences is fine,
that is secondary.
That is not the important part of being together in a service.
The important part is,
are we focused in the right place?
Are we lifting up God?
Are we about God’s work and God’s mission?
Or are we all here because we like doing it this way the most?
And there is a tension there that I think the church will always wrestle with.
So you’ve asked this question before.
I think it’s a very helpful question,
a frame for us to really engage with worship.
And the question is simply this,
how do you know if worship was good?
How can you discern good worship from bad worship?
If you live with that question for a second,
I suspect your first answer to that has
something to do with how you feel either during or after the service.
For some that
lives in the space itself.
I mean, you walk into a cathedral,
it is easy to feel odd.
By the worship experience,
when you hear choirs bouncing off of these beautiful
walls and these beautiful paintings,
it’s easy to say worship felt awe-inspiring.
Others, it’s the music.
It’s the hymns that maybe connects to our childhood or it’s the expertise displayed
in the musicianship itself.
Music, by the way, of lots of different kinds of styles.
Is that a band?
Is that an organ?
For others, it’s the spoken word.
Sometimes there are preachers who we think of as being particularly inspiring.
The way that they show up,
the words that they say,
the text that they engage in a
way that feels like they are speaking directly to us.
You know, all of these are things I think that to a greater or lesser degree we can
identify with, but the reality is all of those may be good things,
but they have no
determination on whether worship was good.
Let me make this point because ultimately God is not inspired by the sanctuary.
God is, there’s no scriptural reasonably that God likes one style of music more
than another.
There’s no reason to think that God was captivated by the golden preacher’s tongue.
No, ultimately, if worship is about a community offering thanks, praise,
honor to the living God,
then our metric by which we’re judging worship is by definition
inherent to who we are.
It’s inherent to our own life and experience and God has blessed us with the
grace and love to recognize that God does love us,
right?
It’s not that our opinion doesn’t matter.
It does mean that our view of whether worship is good or not is not a good lens
to apply over worship because ultimately it misjudges the goal.
And that is an unbelievably easy thing to say and complicated thing to really apply
because of how deeply that muscle in us runs to want to define what the worship
experience should be because that’s what we bring to it.
It’s very tempting to leave a worship service and ask the question,
did I
enjoy that?
Did I like it?
It is more important to leave a worship service and ask the question,
did I worship,
did I give myself to God in that moment?
Did I sing?
Did I engage with the prayer?
Did I listen to the presentation of the word in such a way that I was open to
what God might want to say?
Was I challenged to be more gracious,
to be more generous,
to be more loving?
Was I confronted in any areas of my,
did I worship?
Did I magnify God?
Worship,
again,
because we sit and people sing to us or pray with us or speak to
us, we have the sense that worship is something that we receive,
but it isn’t.
Worship is something we give.
We are not the objects of it.
We are the participants in it.
And it is, it is very easy to become confused on that.
It is hard to consistently remember that,
but that the guiding question probably
best asked of each of us on any given Sunday or whenever we worship is not,
did I like it,
but did I do it?
Did I worship today?
Now, that’s not an excuse for doing things poorly.
Those who lead worship should try to do it well because we owe that to the people
who worship with us.
And more importantly,
we owe that to the one we worship.
But that again, ultimately is not the most important question.
The most important question is the personal question for each of us.
Did I in fact worship?
And one of the really interesting facets of a conversation about worship is how
universally shared it is by those who call themselves Christians.
So whether you are Presbyterian or Methodist or Lutheran or Pentecostal or
Anglican or Baptist or Congregational Church,
you know, that list just keeps going, right?
Everybody has the experience of running into Christians who have different
theological vocabularies.
So they talk about different governing structures.
They have bishops.
Well, I don’t even know what a bishop is or we have a presbyteries.
What’s a presbyteries?
The thing that we all share is an understanding of worship.
The thing,
especially when you consider that the Sunday worship experience,
all of these Christians go to their places of worship,
virtual and physical.
And when they go to those places,
they do the thing that they call worship.
What I find instructive is within the practices of each of those different Christian communities,
some of the ways that they do worship is very illustrative
of differing ways of understanding worship.
And let me make sort of that clear what I’m trying to get at here.
One of the things that’s always struck me is you can tell a lot about what a group
of Christians believe about the relationship between the worshipers and God
based upon where the worship leaders physically are in the sanctuary during
worship.
So there are many congregations where I’m sure you’ll notice this,
especially when it comes time to communion.
The pastor stands in between the worshipers and the table,
the communion table,
and we could tease out what different denominations and Christian families that are.
But you will notice in the Presbyterian tradition,
the pastors stand behind
the table looking at the worshipers.
There’s no one in between the table and the people.
And that’s on purpose.
The reason for that is that that’s a reflection of our theological belief that
no one gets in between Jesus Christ offering for the people and the people
that ultimately though every single person in that congregation is welcome
and free, not because of the pastors,
the pastors stand there offering the
invitation of Jesus, but it’s Jesus’ invitation.
It’s not the pastors to give or take away.
It’s only his.
And ultimately, that’s a reflection of our belief that worship is a task of
everyone gathered.
There’s no particular thing in worship.
We have roles.
You know, we believe very strongly that you shouldn’t have people yelling over
each other at the same time of worship.
It should be orderly,
but we only have that order for the sake of everyone
being able to participate.
There are other church families where the idea is that there are some who do
things on behalf of other people,
that other people can’t do that particular
thing, but the person does it for them.
That’s neither right nor wrong,
though we’ve had many debates about that over
hundreds of years, but rather that is a reflection of some of our deepest held
values and what we believe is true about being people of faith.
And I think what I find so illustrative and wise about the Presbyterian way
speaking as a Presbyterian is that when we think of worship,
we think of no one
in that sanctuary as being better or worse or more important or less important
or able versus not able than anyone else.
We believe in ordered worship,
but there’s a beautiful image of equipping
every person in that sanctuary to offer up their own worship as a community.
And I think that’s a note that we have that’s particularly beautiful.
And our understanding of the practice.
There are times when our kind of typical church architecture really helps us,
you know, to have people gathered,
for instance, in our sanctuary, which is really well-designed in a kind of semi-round or angular so that you can put a lot of people,
nobody is real far away.
You know, if you’ve been in some of those old sanctuaries where there’s 35 rows of
pews and the people in the back are sitting under a balcony,
that’s a tougher space, but one of the unfortunate side effects of our architecture in the
sanctuary is that we still have this idea of a person behind a stand or a stand.
And again, that cuts against the idea a little bit that worship is something we’re all doing.
You’re doing it at least as much as the pastor.
In fact,
arguably more,
that we are all worshiping together.
We’re not giving something to you.
Together, we are all offering something to God.
And offering is probably in the last 15 years or so,
offering is really one of
the most dynamic ways that people in the church have talked about worship,
that worship is our act of giving,
giving praise,
giving devotion,
giving service,
giving dedication,
giving financially, giving stewardship.
That one of the best ways to describe what we do when we gather together in
worship is that we offer.
We offer various parts of ourselves ultimately as an expression that we offer
our entire selves to the one that we’re giving praise to.
And worship is unique,
I think.
I can’t think of many other spaces.
I don’t want to overstate my case,
but there’s really not another place I can
think of that has a regular gathering of people that demands what Christian
worship demands of all of the people.
Consider a normal Sunday at First Presbyterian Church.
We have two services.
It would be impossible because it’s always changing based upon what’s happening that day,
but we have had services where you have a choir of people singing,
a bell choir of people playing.
You’ve got potentially a youth choir of children participating.
You have a liturgist reading and praying.
You have ushers who are helping people be gathered,
helping facilitate and worship.
You have, of course,
the worship leaders.
You have pastors and whoever else are contributing that.
You have people in the sound booth.
You have the people who have prepared the space.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to just keep going out,
but when you really consider
how many people are required weekly to do this thing that we call worship,
you begin to get a glimpse,
just a faint glimpse of how communal worship really
is.
It’s not something done by one.
In fact,
those few instances where you have that rock star worship leader that
actually hides the real beauty of worship,
which is this whole communal effort to
lift up something that is a true reflection of our heart song,
of our heartfelt desire to offer gratitude and thanks,
praise, to offer to God all
that we have, that is really beautifully seen in the communal work it takes to do it together.
It’s also testified to by the very way we talk about worship.
When you look at an order of service,
we call that in the mainline church,
our liturgy and liturgy literally in Greek is two words and it means the work of the people.
Liturgy is what the people do.
It is our work.
It is our collective effort to praise God.
Yes, we use it to describe the elements of the service and how they’re ordered,
but the word itself speaks beyond that particular arrangement to what we do when
we go into the sanctuary together.
We work on worshiping God.
It is the people’s work.
It’s not just the pastor’s work or the singer’s work.
It is everybody’s work.
We’re in that together.
And I think one of the beautiful examples of that is when for whatever reason
there’s, and I think it probably happens most often with music,
Michael, there are probably other instances,
but music is that thing that tends to get the most
people at once, I think.
And so we’ll have someone sing or play a piece and there will be after it concludes
this kind of very heavy moment of like a profound silence.
And at first press,
as you well know,
we’re clappers.
So you know that somebody is going to start the clapping,
but right before it
happens, there is this sense of,
I don’t know if awe is too strong a word or not.
There is a moment of collective recognition that something beautiful has just happened, that something,
that someone has done something that helped all of us
focus on God, that brought God closer to each of us in some way, shape, or form.
And those are wonderful moments.
They’d be great to be able to recreate them at will,
which is very difficult.
But when they happen,
I love the sort of universal experience for people.
You generally know,
oh,
everybody just felt that.
And, you know,
again,
the work of the people.
And that’s important because ultimately the work of the people is not meant to say
that everyone is doing everything all the time.
Musicians use their gift for music.
Speakers use their gift to speak.
Readers offer their gifts.
I just continue this out.
Everyone who comes to worship has something to offer.
And what I find so beautiful about that understanding that worship is the
work of the people is that fundamentally what that means, worship is not.
It means that worship is not by its nature,
entertainment.
And that is really tricky.
It is really, really tricky because it can be illustrated very simply.
So I once attended a very large Presbyterian church,
wonderful, vibrant congregation,
and they have a very, very good choir.
And so there would be certain Sundays in the course of the year where that choir
would have a concert where following the church service that night,
Sunday night,
they would have different orchestra members from the local orchestra would
come and they would play.
And it would be a concert.
And this is the amazing sort of difference that happens in that space.
But it’s the same sanctuary separated by about six hours before those same
musicians were offering their voices on behalf of the congregation,
doing the work of worship,
gratitude,
joy,
Thanksgiving.
That’s the express purpose for which everyone gathered that Sunday morning.
Sunday night,
this is where it gets tricky,
same exact space,
same exact musicians,
except this time it’s about the enjoyment of the music.
That’s good.
That’s beautiful.
We enjoy music because that’s a gift that God has given,
but it’s not worship in
the way that the thing that happened six hours before was because it’s no longer
the work of the people.
Now it is the work of a few being enjoyed by everyone who gathered there.
That is a good thing,
but it’s not the same as worship.
Worship isn’t entertainment.
It’s not what we get out of it.
It’s what we do together.
And that’s what makes those moments of awe so beautiful is for me who can’t sing.
I don’t have the gift of music in that way.
When someone sings something that resonates deeply in my soul,
that is for me a moment when I say, yes,
and amen.
God, yes, if I could do that,
I would offer that to you.
And that’s a beautiful sort of recognition of, hey,
that was an amazing
gift and I’m glad that I got to share as part of it.
And that’s what we do in worship.
We do enjoy some of the things that happen in worship and that’s good,
but that’s not why we’re there.
I would even go so far as to say that there are perhaps times when worship
can be entertaining, but it is not entertainment.
I mean, the alternative is not that a bunch of people file into a sanctuary
week after week and are bored to tears for 60 minutes.
That worship should be engaging.
There should be a life to it, a livelihood.
There should be laughter.
For a while, Presbyterians in some circles had this idea that you couldn’t
laugh in a sanctuary,
you know, you would not laugh during a church service.
Well,
that’s, I think that’s just simply false.
Laughter belongs in the sanctuary.
Joy is a genuine expression of the faith.
So are tears.
All of that we bring into the sanctuary with us and we bring to God collectively.
So it is a tricky balance because you want worship to be engaging.
You want it to resonate with people.
You want to offer people something that works for them.
You know, we don’t, we’re not going to have a bunch of Latin anthems
because nobody speaks Latin, right?
We’re going to try and do things that work for the people who are coming.
And yet there’s more to it than that.
It is different than going to a movie.
It is different than going to a concert.
It is nothing short of trying to offer our best before God to lift him,
to praise him, magnify him.
And yes, we, we benefit from that.
We are often filled by that.
We are often strengthened by that.
We’re comforted by that.
But those are simply the byproducts of worshiping well.
The first and really primary goal is what does God make of our worship?
And secondly, it is wonderful that in God’s grace,
we also get things out of it.
But what we get is not the,
that’s not our first concern.
Yeah, this is essential.
I only want to emphasize that point.
This, this could easily be missed.
So let’s just make sure we’re all on the same page.
There is no shortcut to personal transformation.
The idea that you could come to church,
be inspired by like a motivational
speaker, that it could move you to be a better person and that you’re going
to leave the sanctuary and that that’s why you come is such a cultural
temptation in the moment that we live.
It, we are just tempted to believe that the function and role of church is a
weekly routine where we go,
where we get amazed by and engrossed by beautiful music,
we get moved by a speaker and a narrative and maybe even art,
depending upon what tradition you’re in and you leave filled up,
ready to be your best.
You, you know, that you’re ready to go out there and engage the world.
And that’s what worship is about.
It’s about doing that over and over and over again.
If that’s your goal,
you will never experience the transformation of the
gospel, because all that’s going to happen is the stuff that you assume about
you, that inward curve of human sinfulness will bend it back to you.
What you want for your life and what you think is the best path and what you
think everybody else should do.
That’s the stuff you’re going to leave worship with.
The only way the real transformation at the level that you’re talking about is
ultimately to encounter the living God.
That that’s the thing.
That’s the only thing that matters is for us to show up,
offer ourselves and to
allow God to do God’s work in our life.
Now, what will happen and what will follow for that will indeed change us.
And I would argue for the better,
stronger lives, people of better character,
families that reflect the generosity and grace and love that we find in Jesus Christ,
it’s going to be better for our personal lives, for our communities,
for our nation, for our world.
The benefits are beyond our ability to really name,
but that’s not why you
worship.
And indeed, if that is why,
if that’s your motivation for worship,
you’re not going to find it.
The thing that you’re looking for isn’t going to be there.
The only way that we really truly find ourselves transformed in worship is to
encounter the transforming God.
Which is why I think worship always starts with the simple,
humble request.
God show up today in the music,
in the prayers, in me, in my neighbor,
in
relationships,
in what we say and do here today,
show up, show us something, teach us something,
convict us of something,
challenge us of something.
We come to worship with the idea that we will literally leave,
to some extent, different people than when we arrived,
because we are not who we’re called to
be.
That’s the continual confession of being human.
We are not fully yet who we are to be,
which means there is constantly an ability
and a need to grow.
And when we show up in worship,
it is to say,
“God,
we’re here to lift you up.
And as you join us here,
be praised by us and show us something of how we can do
that better.
Show us something of how we can live more faithfully,
more fully, more joyfully, more generously, more graciously.
Teach us something about who we can be and then help us take a step in that
direction as individuals and together as a body of faith, as a congregation.
And when we get that right,
worship, there’s a wonderful book that I read and
this phrase has stuck with me,
“Worship is always the work of amateurs.”
There are no professional worshipers.
No congregation has it figured out.
We’re always kind of doing our best.
And sometimes our best is not great at times.
You know, on one of those days when the screen hasn’t worked or there’s misprints
in the bulletin or there’s whatever or a singer’s a little off or the sermon isn’t
very good.
I mean,
we are always amateurs at worship.
And yet God is faithful and each and every time we join,
joins with us to
participate in that and allows us that opportunity to make those steps forward
in our faith.
And when we get that right,
when we make worship about the right
things and when we bring the right spirit to it,
it is one of the most
astounding and beautiful things that the church does.
When you, if you’ve ever been blessed to be a part of a worship service where
things just spoke to you and God showed up and it was clear,
those are remarkable moments.
They don’t happen each and every week.
I wish that we could engineer it that way.
But when they do happen,
it is remarkable.
And I think it is the clearest sign of what it means to praise God,
to worship God together.
And one of the things that worship works within us is a spirit of humility.
And I’ve learned this very practically in my very short time being in the church
because I’ve now been able to be here for enough time that we,
I’ve been part of
those services where things just really landed.
That sometimes happens,
you know, even the choir anthem meshed with the message
and the message was strong and the people felt connected.
And you know that because people come up to you after service and they say this
was meaningful to me.
This is the thing that’s interesting, though.
We’ve all, I hope, had that experience at some point in worship where we just felt
like it landed on our hearts.
So we felt like that’s the word I needed today.
What may be encouraging to you is to recognize I’ve had services where I’ve had
a person come up and say,
you know,
this thing was just exactly what I needed to hear today.
And literally in the space of a minute,
another person came up and said this
other thing, which is a lot different than this other thing,
was the thing I
exactly I needed to hear today.
And what’s happening there is the Spirit of God is at work.
The Spirit of God is speaking to people exactly where they are and with what they need.
It’s not that the words were perfectly engineered to hit two,
three, four, hundred, four hundred people all at the same time.
No, it’s that God is able to do what God shows up to do.
And that’s what we believe happens in worship.
We forget that sometimes when we make worship more shallow than it actually is.
When we are tempted towards that idea of believing that worship serves us instead
of us serving the Creator,
what we discover is that when God shows up,
God speaks to God’s people.
And sometimes that word is very different to different people.
But yet that is because there’s something more mysterious.
There’s something beyond just sort of human rhetoric or great preaching or
great storytelling or even great music.
Those are elements.
But ultimately it’s God showing up that is the one that communicates to our hearts.
I don’t think it will surprise anyone that pastors struggle with this idea that
worship is about them as well.
And, you know, I’ve been preaching for a long time now and I would say that I have
some ability to discern what is a good sermon from a less good sermon.
And I have had moments that are very humbling for two reasons.
The first is that I’ve had Sundays where I just know I missed.
I people didn’t seem engaged.
I couldn’t find the words.
There was no flow.
The idea I thought would work in the sermon just didn’t feel like it worked at all.
And I come out of the pulpit.
I come out of the sanctuary thinking,
boy, I did not do that well.
I really dropped the ball today.
And inevitably someone will reach out to me and say,
boy,
that was exactly what I needed to hear.
And that’s the second humility.
That’s the first humility is thinking it didn’t go well.
The second humility is the reminder.
I don’t even know what that means.
Right. This thing that I know wasn’t very good did something that God took and did
something with it in somebody’s life.
And I didn’t even know it happened.
I didn’t.
I didn’t do it.
It wasn’t because it was well done.
It wasn’t because it was the perfect word.
It was because God shows up with us in worship and some of the things that move us.
You know, a good another good example of this.
We have all been moved by hymns that to be honest,
maybe aren’t great hymns.
But but they speak to us.
We’ve all had moments where it wasn’t the quality of the thing.
It was something else.
And that’s something else is the Spirit of God moving among us and within us.
And those are those are important moments because they remind us,
OK, it’s not really about how we perform.
It’s about being open to listen.
And that connects back to that original talk about the liturgy of the people being
the work of the people is because one of the distinctive elements of worship is
that it is consistent and that it goes on and on and on.
And we maybe sometimes we even pass by how important it is that the church.
And I’m not speaking of First Presbyterian Church in Spirit Lake.
I’m speaking of the Church of Jesus Christ has been worshipping for thousands
of years in every situation imaginable under the rule of authoritarian leaders
trying to stamp out the church to seasons of great bounty and plenty and joy to you
fill in the blank,
right?
Depressions and wars and everything you can imagine the church has gathered for worship.
We did not miss a Sunday during all of the staying at home stuff during
Covid that we miss how significant it is that the church does not stop this thing
that we do weekly because that thing isn’t the thing itself.
That thing is a signal and reminder,
a symbol in the deepest sense.
I don’t mean that flippantly.
The worshipping practice of the church reminds the people of the church that our
work is to constantly be worshipping.
And that is significant.
All of us have had jobs that some days felt like work.
You just had to do it.
Sometimes you went to work and the day flew by because it was a great day and you
loved what you did.
Worship is going to have all of that.
It’s going to have days where it felt a little bit like,
man, that was tough.
You’re going to have other days where worship flies by and it was the most meaningful experience.
But all of that is a pointer and reminder that ultimately it is the consistency of
this in our life.
It’s the constant transformation,
the constant offering ourselves up.
One worship service a year does not make for a disciple.
It just doesn’t work that way.
We continually return to this because it’s sort of like coming back to the
master sculptor and every week he chips off a little bit more.
And this thing slowly begins to take a new shape.
The faith that was given us becomes a visible faith etched into our character as people.
And it’s this sort of beautiful transformative process that happens.
But it doesn’t happen because you did it one time.
It happens because you’ve submitted in this work,
this process throughout an entire lifetime.
This may date the podcast,
but one of the reflections,
one of the lessons
perhaps in this last year of being online has been a chance to think about
worship.
And what does it mean to worship when we don’t gather together?
And how have we been able?
And I think the church has been challenged.
And in some ways it has helped the church remember that worship is not the
patterns that we’re used to.
We don’t have to all sit in the same space and physically hear the organ or
the piano to worship.
We have gathered for nearly a year or for almost a year.
We gathered largely,
almost exclusively online,
and yet we worshiped together.
We gave ourselves to the same words together.
We shared some similar experiences together.
We listened to the same scripture together and we looked for God in the
midst of our experiences together.
And I think the church should be deeply challenged by that because again,
we are so able in the long run to put worship in the box that we experience it most often.
And one of I think the opportunities that COVID has given us is to think larger
thoughts, to maybe dream of a bigger picture of what does it mean to worship God.
And in those cases,
maybe not even in a particular place or in a particular style,
but by connecting with one another and simultaneously lifting God together and
going together before God,
even when we can’t see one another.
And I think there’s a lot to think about there.
There’s a lot to unpack there.
And I think it may be for the church in the long run,
it may be generative of some helpful conversations.
Yeah, that I think is a really interesting touch point.
I think many people I’ve heard have engaged with that season of very disruptive
worship, and the thing that they sort of reflect upon is,
is it digital or is it
in person?
And that’s sort of the equation that that’s the conversation.
Which one is better?
What pros here cons there,
that kind of thing.
But when we’re thinking of worship,
that’s an entirely unhelpful framework,
because ultimately worship is about the worshipers offering up to God,
thanksgiving and praise.
And as a result of that encounter with the transformative God being transformed and changed,
worship is really irrespective of whether you’re standing by a river or
whether you’re under a bridge or whether you’re in a cathedral or whether you’re in your sanctuary.
Now, we associate worship with places.
And I would even argue that some places help us worship.
And I mean that meaningfully,
they really do.
They help us worship.
And sitting in our living rooms on couches in front of TVs,
that may not be a natural place to worship.
But if we boil it down to digital versus physical,
what we’re going to miss is once again,
the point of worship.
The point of worship was never and never will be to connect with our own inner sense of
I like that, but rather to call us out of ourselves into the presence of a living God
who promises to show up and then transform us.
And so as we sort of consider what worship is,
I really hope the takeaway for you from
this, if we’re going to boil this down into a very simple takeaway,
maybe the practice that could change would be when someone asks,
how was worship instead of responding to that was,
I thought the music was beautiful,
though you may believe that it may be more
helpful theologically to say,
well, I believe that we together glorified God.
I believe that God was glorified this morning.
Thanks be to God,
because that’s the purpose of worship.
If we can even in those small ways point ourselves,
this isn’t pointing others.
This is pointing ourselves to the purpose of worship as we think about that experience
that we had that may help us to reframe why we’re there and therefore the very task
that we’re trying to do in that time.
And once again, you know, it probably doesn’t work in terms of our language,
but I wish we could switch the words now that we’ve added this category of digital or in person.
And we’ve put yet another set of modifiers on the word worship.
I wish that we could start with the word worship instead of the instead of the sort of
implication that this kind of worship is good and this kind of worship is less good.
We could say worship digital worship in person and and let worship be the first word.
And it is the most important word that that we worship that we so often emphasize the style.
But the truth is that worship is about the presence of God.
And if I enjoyed if I go to a church service and I enjoyed the music and I enjoyed the
sermon, I thought the pastor did a great job.
The children’s sermon was a lot of fun.
I liked everything about it,
but I did not experience the presence of God and I did not
open myself to the presence of God.
Then I’ve not worshiped.
I’ve sat through something that I enjoyed,
but I did not worship because I didn’t open myself.
I didn’t offer myself to God.
And so I think it is it is a constant struggle for all of us,
but maybe one of the most
important we face in the church to continually place worship as point number one of what
we do in the sanctuary.
We are there to focus on God together.
And everything else is secondary.
It’s good,
but it’s not most important.
That act of lifting God up is the reason that we’re there.
I think that this is really the perfect word to end this series on.
We are ending the Jesus jargon series,
and I think that this word really represents one
of those words that could so easily be jargon.
It’s such a simple word.
And in fact, in the church, we use it so often.
We talk about worship all the time from so many different lenses.
I hope that this conversation is invitational in seeing how deep the well of worship really
goes.
We’ve not even scratched the surface of the thought and energy and care that has
been taken in the Christian tradition to be people who maintain the worship of the divine,
of God the Creator,
of Father, Son, and Spirit.
And so I
hope that in this word you are inspired,
and then I hope that for all of these words
that we’ve covered in this time,
that if there’s questions that remain,
if you would like to
engage in a maybe deeper or more specific conversation,
let us know.
Put that in the comments.
Contact us through the website,
whatever is most convenient for you.
But we’re glad, certainly, that you’ve spent this time with us reflecting on worship.
Yeah, we appreciate you tuning in to this podcast and any others in this series.
Next series of podcasts will be very interesting.
I hope it’s a look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Life Together,
really one of the seminal
classic books of the Christian faith in the last century and a half or so.
Just a beautiful, endearing,
enduring work of what it means to be in the practice of faith together,
what it means to be in Christ together,
and what Christian community looks like for each of us.
And I think that there’ll be a lot of great stuff.
If that’s not a book you’re familiar with,
I would very much encourage you to stick with us
as we move into that series,
because I think you’ll be blessed by it.
Thanks for spending time with us friends.
We look forward to seeing you next episode.