Worship as response

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

And you thought you were just coming to church!

So here we are, embarking again on explanations of this ancient yet modern thing we do in church on Sundays – come together to worship. We’re in the midst of talking through the first half of the service, what we call the Liturgy of the Word – the part where we gather, listen to God’s word in scripture, and respond with prayer. I’ve talked about these two Sundays as being about Why We Worship. So – why do we worship? what is worship for?

We might say any number of things in response to those questions. We worship in community because we need other people. We worship because it fuels us up for the week ahead or brings us peace when we need it. We worship because it’s part of our tradition. We worship because it’s what we’ve always done.

All of those are good reasons. They’re also all of them reasons that have something to do with us: what we need, what we’re used to, what makes us feel a certain way. And that’s ok, we’re part of the equation.

But there’s another side to the relationship, of course. The word ‘worship’ comes down in English from ‘worth-ship’: assigning worth to what we deem worthy, what we value. The word first meant something offered to anyone worthy, including people. But gradually it came to exclusively mean religious worship. We worship what we value in an ultimate way, what we value the very most, what we recognize as ultimate and absolute. Not what we decided was best out of all the options – but the ultimate, the absolute. We respond to what is true, what we call God. That instinct is there in human beings, I believe, the way we respond to a beautiful sunset, or a child’s smile, or anything else that takes our breath away for a moment. (I owe some of this to Louis Weil and Charles Price’s classic Liturgy for Living.)

But we choose how to respond. We might choose to offer certain acts and behaviors that have been part of tradition for centuries or more; we might choose other traditions from other places, or other ways that are more unique to us. We choose whether to show up to corporate worship or whether to come at all. But the initiative is with God, not us, in this relationship. We’re just responding. So our Sunday worship is the way we respond to God, responding in a particular way, body and soul, in community together – in the way of the Episcopal traditions we are part of.

It’s a bit like the dialogue in the gospel we just heard. Jesus asks his disciples – who do others say that I am? Who do you say that I am? Here I am – how do you respond to me?

The disciples seem a bit at a loss at first. Their answers come from their knowledge of tradition and the community: well, some think you’re John the Baptist, others think you’re Elijah, others think you’re Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Reaching back to ideas and forms and templates from tradition to try to make sense of what is there in front of them. And then Peter hazards his own response, an answer that also comes from tradition and the theology of the elders, everything that has been said and expected of a Messiah – but is also his own take on who Jesus is. Bingo! Jesus replies. Ok, not Bingo, but Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. Your answer comes straight from God’s revelation to your heart. And later you will begin to understand just what your answer means.

This whole exchange happens at a place called Caesarea Philippi. In that Roman city in northern Israel there was a great temple of Pan carved directly into the cliff face, all around a huge limestone cave with a subterranean spring. Long before the Romans it had been a place of worship. The cave was known as the Gates of Hades – a gateway where the gods of the underworld entered and exited Hades. Sacrificial offerings were made there into the water, animals thrown into the deep cave. So when Jesus says, On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it – he’s using real, physical things to declare this truth. Real, physical things and places with an ancient overlay of symbolism and mystery. A place that had long inspired worship, human response to the Absolute.

In the same way the symbolism of our worship is built on real, ancient stuff – water, bread, wine, physical actions of devotion, prayer rituals. Things of our physical nature, overlaid with deeper meaning. This is what we have to make our response out of, after all, we physical people. We respond with our real selves, standing and sitting and kneeling and eating and drinking and bowing and lifting our hands, as our ancestors did. Maybe with different music and different dress and different kinds of movement than they used, but with the same raw materials to work with, responding to God and how God is acting with us today.

But to claim and remember our worship as response – to recognize that first of all there is God, and then there is us responding to God – that frees us up a little from worrying over the particulars. We don’t have to get every bit of our worship right; we don’t have to find every bit of it personally just so; we don’t have to focus nearly as much on what we’re getting out of the bargain. We’re here to honor God – to value and deem worthy the God who is our rock, the center around which we turn. When we take that view, it’s amazing how almost anything can be our worship. A friend of mine likes to say that the prayer posture we do at Eucharist – holding our hands up like this – is a natural response of delight and amazement to God. We do it formally at certain points in the service, but it can be a response for any of us at any time, feeling the Spirit in a particular song we’re singing, gazing out at a spectacular sunset, looking into the eyes of someone we love. Ah! Yes! Thank you!

God asks us, who do you say that I am? How do you respond to my love? And so we worship – and offer ourselves in return, a living sacrifice to the one we love. Amen.