Scripture: Psalm 95:1-7; Psalm 96:1-9; John 4:23-24
I often feel that I need to spend just a minute or two explaining myself at the beginning of a sermon, as to where the sermon is coming from. Today is one of those times.
At the retreat a week ago, one of the planned topics of discussion was how our social justice commitments are expressed, or how they ought to be expressed, in our worship services. In the course of that discussion a comment was made that one way to approach this concern might be to ask, “What is worship for?” That struck me as a question worth asking, not just in the immediate context we were talking about then, but in a broader context as well. The answer, it seems to me, is not an immediately obvious one. I remember some time ago reading something that Bill Gates was supposed to have said to the effect that in his time management way of looking at things worship was an activity that had no useful purpose. It didn’t produce a result that would justify the expenditure of time or effort, and so he didn’t do it. Something to that effect. I don’t know that Bill Gates was accurately quoted in what I remember reading, but the point is not whether Bill Gates holds that attitude, but that the attitude quoted is quite understandable from the point of view of a society that places such a high value on productivity and usefulness. And if worship is really not “for” very much in the sense of having an immediate, tangible, measurable return on the investment of time, then “what is worship for?” It seemed to me a question worth considering.
It’s a question that I also feel like I have some answers for, but the answers I have are sort of intuitive, so I thought it would be worth the effort to try to put them into words. The question “what is worship for?” is also a question that I suspect many of you have answers for, and maybe you have words for your answers that can be stated better than mine. Your answers to the question of what worship is for may be less abstract, less theoretical, more down-to-earth, more understandable, more realistic than mine. Unfortunately, you are stuck with the thoughts that have occurred to me in my ministerial weirdness (or maybe it’s just my own weirdness and should not be blamed on the ministry) as I reflected on the questions of “what is worship for?”
When I decided to do that for the sermon today, the scripture that quickly occurred to me was the one you heard from the gospel of John where Jesus concludes his conversation with a Samaritan woman by saying that “the hour is coming, and in fact is already here, when true worshipers shall worship in spirit and in truth.” I’m asking myself today “what is worship for?” and what does it mean to worship “in spirit and in truth?”
And the basic thought I have after reflecting on those questions, thinking about them and praying over them, is…well, something like this: that worship is for the purpose of taking us, spiritually, to some other place, to take us away from our concrete here and now and to take us outside of ourselves for a few moments so that we may get lost in God, or at least get some small taste of what it might mean for us to get lost in God.
I know that besides sounding a little bit mystical, this also may seem rather ambitious. Probably most of us who have sort of a non-charismatic, mainline Christian approach to worship would settle for a lot less. A few quiet moments out of a busy life, when we could just maybe take a few deep breaths and when we didn’t need to be productive. An opportunity to say pray for me, or to pray for someone else. A little bit of something worth thinking about. Some piece of music that lifts or soothes the soul. I’ve had people tell me over the years that worship served to sort of set their lives in order, that if they missed worship, they felt just a little bit off center or out of kilter the rest of the week. Nothing specific about it; just that it gives a kind of a frame or a context to everything else, and the everything else doesn’t hold together quite as well without worship. All of those things are good things about worship. And more real maybe and certainly less ambitious than what I was talking about earlier and maybe those more likely and more achievable things that worship might be for are just as important or more important than anything else. Still, I want to hold out for the possibility that there is this additional something that worship also might be for that I’m referring to as “getting lost in God.”
Worship I believe is meant to take us someplace else, give us a different way of seeing things, even to dare to try to see the world and ourselves through the eyes of God. Does anyone remember the Saturday Night Live sketches of some years ago where I believe it was Al Franken did a parody of self-esteem movements and would try to talk himself into not being down on himself and having a more positive attitude and would say something like, “by golly I’m good enough and I’m smart enough and people like me.” How different that is from an attitude of worship where we begin to catch a holy glimpse of ourselves and other people as children of God, which is one way of saying what it would be to worship in spirit and truth. In fact how different it is to say that we are all children of God as a human statement of belief, versus somehow being given the gift of seeing ourselves, the people around us, the whole world through the eyes of a loving God, and where saying that we are all God’s beloved children is just our feeble effort to put into words what we have seen because we have been transported some place where we can see ourselves as God sees us. I’m reminded of the verse in one of Paul’s letters, 2nd Corinthians, where he says, “From now on we regard no one from a human point of view…” That seems to me to be one way of saying what worship is for.
Speaking of the scriptures, something similar could be said about their place in worship. To worship in spirit and truth, to approach the scriptures worshipfully, is not so much to stand outside the Bible and ask what it says, or interpret what it means, or follow its instructions as though they were timeless and unchangeable and as though every passage or verse had some lesson or instruction for us. It’s a little hard to get past that way of thinking because I think it has been sort of drummed into us, but I don’t think it’s the most helpful approach, or the most worshipful.
The ideal, it seems to me, is rather to somehow be taken outside of ourselves and to be placed inside the scriptures so that we see ourselves and see our world from that different vantage point. This is not only hard to do, but we often resist it because we modern people tend to look on the Bible as a very old book, with therefore a lot of outmoded ideas, and a lot of things we don’t need to pay attention to. Quite the contrary to wanting to get inside the Bible, we want to maintain our distance, maybe because of what I just said, and maybe because so many of us have issues because the Bible has been used, misused, so often as an instrument of judgment and a weapon of oppression.
As you know, I am not against questioning the Bible, not against analyzing and interpreting the Bible as best we are able according to whatever lights God gives us. I’m not against that in any way. But a worshipful approach is something different. By a worshipful approach I do not mean worshiping the Bible, as our worship is always to be directed toward God and not the scriptures. Acting like the scriptures are something we owe absolute allegiance to would be to put the Bible in the place of God. But a worshipful approach to the scriptures is to let them take us to a place where we may gain a different perspective on ourselves and our world. If we were able to do that, it seems to me the idea of interpreting the scriptures literally or not literally loses any real meaning, because the point is more to inhabit the scriptures, similar to the way an actor inhabits his role.
I chose the readings from the Psalms this morning sort of arbitrarily as just one small example. Reading these Psalms from the outside, we might be led to ask where they came from, who wrote them, how they were used in worship 3,000 years ago; we might be led to analyze or appreciate the poetry, ask questions about what it means to sing a new song to the Lord, feel like we are being instructed that praising God is a good thing, feel like we are being commanded to praise, or all sorts of things. But if we are able to be transported into the psalms themselves, if we inhabit the psalms rather than examining them from the outside, then maybe we can find ourselves being lost in praise, or lost in the miracle of creation that the psalms speak of, or lost in God.
Another example from scripture is Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God, which I find to be central to the gospel message. If we stand outside those scriptures from both the Old and New Testaments that speak of a coming time when swords will be beaten into ploughshares and when God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven, if we stand outside those words and try to imagine such a time, we may consider it religious fantasy or utopian dreaming and therefore of not much relevance to us. But what Jesus does time and again is invite us to take a different approach. He invites us to let ourselves be taken to that place, the realm of God or however we may think of it, so that we can view our present from that different perspective. He invites us not to stand here and ask questions about the realm of God, what it will be like, whether it is realistic to even think of such a thing, what we are supposed to do to get there, that sort of thing. Instead he wants to transport us in spirit so that we live spiritually already in that place, enough so that the world we live in now can be seen as the strange, distorted, gone astray place it really is, rather than the comfortable, familiar place it too often becomes for us. For Jesus, I believe, preaching the realm of God is not about getting us to stand here and imagine some idealized future, but is about trying to take us to that place already so that from that out-of-body place we can see ourselves in a different light and know how unaccustomed and uncomfortable we are meant to be in the world as it is.
Today is world communion Sunday, which may offer another example of what I am trying to say this morning. This is a day which originated in the hope and the prayer that Christians would come together much more in a spirit of unity around their central beliefs and their calling, and would fight much less among themselves over things that aren’t central to what the Christian faith is about. Now, some 75-80 years later, Christians are more divided than ever, even farther away from the goal of unity, and partly because the things Christians are fighting about are not seen by the people who are involved in the conflicts as being in any way trivial or insignificant. There is a lot of conflict these days among Christians, as much within denominations as among them, and simply appealing for unity does little to actually resolve any conflict. Rather than appealing for unity, perhaps the more important thing is to try to find our way through the conflicts with both integrity and love. In this atmosphere of conflict within the Christian household, world communion seems to be observed less often, less widely, and less passionately than may have been the case a few decades ago.
But perhaps our worship needs to take us to a different place than was being generally imagined 75-80 years ago. Perhaps we need to be transported to that place not where Christians have been united with one another but where all people have been reunited as God’s children. Then what we see as we look at ourselves from the outside will not be a Christian church divided but a world that is sadly and violently divided, often divided by religion. And with that vision in our heads, with that way of seeing ourselves, we will know that communion cannot be a celebration of Christian truth as superior to all others, cannot be a ceremony that adds to the world’s divisions in the name of faith, but that takes us to another place from which the divisions of the Christian church seem a small matter compared to the divisions present in God’s world. In that sense every communion service is world communion, for it is based not in a remembered past but in a prayed for future. May communion remind us of the journey we are on toward a world made whole, and may we receive bread for that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 7, 2007