Why Do We Worship?

Why do we worship?

·      Sunday:  day of resurrection – 1st day of the week, after the Sabbath (Saturday)

·      We come together to share the Lord’s Supper – because Jesus told us to

·      Being Christian is a community thing – you can’t be a Christian all by yourself at home

·      We show up to nourish ourselves for ministry

·      We show up for other people

·      The idea is that we pray all the time; we have prayer practices of our own; this day is for public worship together, which is different than private prayer (this may or may not be true, but it is the ideal of public worship! The reality is many find little quiet time elsewhere, or take the time to pray, and so depend on the church service to do it all for them.)

 Elements of our service:

·      Gathering

·      Hearing & reflecting on scripture

·      Responding with affirming our faith, prayer

·      Sharing the bread & wine

·      Sending us out to do our ministry in the world

That’s the basics.  Everything else is frosting, and tradition.

Our worship tradition mirrors what we know of the early church, with customs and practices layered on from the church in Europe and particularly in England. 

It looks kind of like the liturgical materials we have from the early church – the earliest Eucharistic prayer we have is from the 3rd or 4th century, and it’s like ours – and it looks like what other liturgical churches do (Roman Catholics, Lutherans, etc.). 

And it has taken on elements and customs of this particular community of St Francis and our history as well.

But one good principle of worship is that if we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, then we shouldn’t do it.  So here we go, learning.

 Worship should energize and inspire us.  To do this, there are a number of things we hold in balance:

·      It should be familiar enough that we aren’t constantly wondering what’s coming next, and different and fresh enough that we come away with new understandings of God in the world, and so we don’t settle into a meaningless rut.  So we have a set liturgical form, but it changes by season, with different prayers and words, different music, to reflect the theme of the liturgical season:  penitential for Lent, joyful for Eastertide, growing and learning in the season after Pentecost, waiting and preparing in Advent, and joyful again in Christmas. 

·      Worship should have time for quiet and contemplation balanced with joyful praise and song.  It’s public worship, yes, but that means also being quiet together.  Some of the most astounding worship I’ve experienced happened at Taizé in France:  a church with 5000 people sitting on the floor, sitting in silence for 10 minutes together before breaking into chant and song.  It made me realize how wordy our worship usually is, and how powerful it is with few words.  We need to recapture some of that quiet together in our worship – one way I’d suggest is that we refrain from chatting during the time before the service begins, saving that conversation for outside the church. We also might incorporate periods of actual silence from time to time. And then when we sing, let’s sing out, robustly. Who cares if you’re on the right note? Better to just let it rip! (Shapenote and other traditional Appalachian music)

·      Our learning should be balanced with our worshiping.  We’ve started using the word formation in the church instead of education, realizing that everything we do in church is forming us as Christians.  Not just classes and Bible study, but worship and song and fellowship and service, all form us and shape us, shape our faith and how we show our faith to others. And we learn not just with our heads, but in our hearts and lives. We learn something with our heads as we hear the scriptures and maybe the sermon, but we learn something in our hearts and in our bodies with the movement and music. And that’s also why we keep changing posture – it’s not like sitting in a lecture hall, it’s more participating, moving and changing our bodies in response to what we’re doing with our minds and hearts.  That’s also why some folks choose to make the sign of the cross or bow at certain points during the service – they’re ways to bring home physically (and we are incarnate people) what we’re hearing and thinking.

·      Our worship should suit and reflect our community while also welcoming the newcomer.  When we’ve been part of a church for a while, we can forget how strange worship looks to someone who’s not in a church.  Rituals are less familiar in our culture today – I’ve become very aware of that in working with people to plan their weddings over the years, certainly.  People don’t have experience of what makes good ritual or why to do it.  But even if we do ritual regularly, we can lack understanding about what it means – which is why we’re doing this instruction. 

o   My liturgy professor in seminary taught us by way of stories and anecdotes.  One story he told was on himself, that as he took from the chalice of wine, he held it up in front of him in what felt to him like a reverent way.  Finally one of his parishioners told him, “When you do that, it looks like you’re saying, ‘cheers!’”  His point in doing it was not getting across.

o   So sometimes what we do lacks a point, and is completely opaque to a newcomer – so it’s a balance of instructing as we go, and of just joining in, of printing every word in the bulletin or just encouraging people to listen.  

All of this is like what Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew – “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."  To keep telling the story of God means we are constantly bringing together elements from what is old to meet what is new – bringing our tradition and our history to meet the new ways God is speaking in our world today, and the new voices we hear God in.  We don’t discard what is old altogether, for there is so much wisdom in our traditions.  But we also don’t blindly hold to them when their use and meaning has become lost.  Our worship is to root us, energize us, strengthen us, equip us to live our lives as Christians in the world, as people who live centered in God and who seek always to love others. As today’s psalm #1 says, so we can be like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit. So that we stay focused on God’s work in our lives, God’s call for how we should live, God’s intentions for this church and our future together.