Let’s Do Worship

       Neil Marten, a member of the British Parliament was giving a group of his constituents a guided tour of the Houses of Parliament.  As the group entered one imposing hall they encountered Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom wearing all the robes and regalia of his office.

       Lord Hailsham recognized his good friend Neil Marten among the group and cried, "Neil!"

        Not daring to question or disobey the "command," the entire group of visitors promptly fell to their knees! 

        That wasn’t what the Lord Chancellor was looking for.  I’m sure there was embarrassment followed by a good laugh.

       God, however, really wants us to kneel.  He wants our worship. 

       When I was a teenager, I frankly had a hard time with God wanting our worship. I copped a low key attitude at church. It seemed to me to be sickly egotistical for God to want people to be constantly telling Him how great He is -- like an aging movie star or athlete who constantly needs to be assured that He still has what it takes. I resented worship. It seemed to me that God should have a better self-image than to need constant ego boosting from us and millions of other people around the world.

         But that was before I came to a more mature understanding of who I am and who God is. People who require constant ego support demand it because they aren't really sure of their own worth. They have something to prove. That is the basis of all our braggarts, gossips, loud-mouths, Don Juans and femme fatales.

       But God does not desire worship because He is unsure of Himself. He desires worship because He is absolutely sure of Himself. He is aware that He Is absolute perfection which is awareness that we can neither have nor imagine having.

       When we worship God we demonstrate our own awareness of all that is right in life. Worship benefits us by keeping our eyes fixed on He who is higher, greater and lovelier than ourselves. God's awareness of His own perfection is not at all like our egotism because it doesn't get in the way of love. It is the very foundation for all love.

       The English word, "worship", is used to translate two New Testament Greek words: proskuveo which means to "fall down before or show homage," and latreno which means "to serve."

       But what the word "worship" literally means is "to show worth to."  Our English word worship comes from “worth-ship.”  Worship is the recognition of merit.  Worship is glad appreciation.  It is the awed, spontaneous response of people confronted by the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ -- the God of creation and redemption.  Worship is what we rightly do when we see who God is.

        In our New Testament passage from John, Mary of Bethany takes a pound of ointment, anoints the feet of Jesus and wipes His feet with her hair. That ointment is worth the equivalent of eleven months wages.

       Judas Iscariot calls Mary on the carpet: "Why did you waste that ointment when it could have been sold and the money given to the poor?" -- even though that was not his intention. But Jesus says to Judas: "Leave her alone. She has done a good deed to Me. For the poor you always have with you; but you do not always have Me."

       Jesus says that something is so important about Mary's act of worship that it supersedes even her sacred duty to the poor. This is significant because it is very clear throughout scripture that there is very little in the mind of God that comes before our duty to the poor.

        In fact, worship is the first responsibility of every person.  The first question in the Shorter Catechism of our Westminster Confession of Faith is, "What is the chief end of man?" Or "what is the purpose for which you were created?" The response to this question is that the purpose of human life is to "glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."

       That’s our purpose.  But that doesn’t mean that we worship well. 

       C.S. Lewis speaks to this in Reflections on the Psalms where he writes: “our [church] services both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 percent failures, sometimes total failures. We are not riders, but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster.”

        We are here this morning to better learn how to do what we will be doing for eternity –worship. That’s why I want to take the next four Sundays I preach to look at our worship.

       This morning I want to look at the elements that make up our worship service – why we do what we do.  We will then look at the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper and conclude with a focus on the preaching and hearing of the word of God.  The goal of this series is to move our worship from Lewis’ ratio of 99.9 percent failures to maybe only 97 percent failures.  Then, maybe as we pay attention to what we are doing and why we do it, we can gallop a little farther without terror and disaster a bit more and fall off at least a bit less. 

       Worship starts with remembering who God is and remembering who we are to God and to one another.  God has called us as a family.  So it is very appropriate that we greet each other as we come to worship. One thing that characterizes our congregation is the abundance of “happy chatter” before worship. One visitor to MPC compared our coffee fellowship after services to a party. That’s great!

      But also take time to prepare yourself -- and to allow others to prepare themselves. That preparation starts before you get here.  It means being here early enough that you aren’t coming in stressed by the morning’s rush.  Worship preparation involves being open to those about us and also being open to God in private prayer. Allow time for both.

      Our worship continues as we come into God’s presence.  Here at MPC that starts with praise and prayer. 

      The praise set, including the scripture, is carefully designed to help us come into the presence of God.  Our praise set is modeled after the Tabernacle that was the center of worship for the people of Israel were in the wilderness.  Like the Tabernacle, the praise starts out with us at a distance.   We remind ourselves who God is and who we are going to meet in a somewhat objective way – like the experience of Isaiah recorded in Isaiah 6.: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of Hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory."  We start by saying, “God is this.”

       The praise music then moves to greater and greater intimacy as we move farther into the Tabernacle.  Finally we see ourselves standing in the presence of God Himself.  Like Isaiah in Isaiah 6, this involves recognition of who we are -- "I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips."   It also brings us to celebrate our forgiveness and oneness with this holy God and to a readiness to hear and respond to His voice.  In the words of Isaiah 6:8, “Who shall I send and who shall go for us?”  I said, “Here I am, send me!” 

      All of that in about ten minutes. 

      As we stand in the presence of God we then go to a time of sharing and prayer. This culminates with the Lord’s Prayer – the prayer to “Our Father” Jesus gave to His whole church.  As we share prayer requests and pray we are reminded that we are not alone. 

       In praise our eyes are directed from ourselves to God. But God then redirects our eyes to the need of our Christian brothers and sisters and our non-Christian neighbors. Worship is not fellowship but it is the basis for fellowship – not just here but with the whole church.

       We are joined to brothers and sisters in faith in other places and at other times.  That’s one reason we sing hymns as well as praise songs.  The hymns we sing are the hymns that have lasted.  They have lasted because they are authentic records of our shared encounter with the Almighty God and His amazing grace.

       I personally am not interested in helping raise a generation that doesn’t know the great hymns of the church.  They are a key part of what connects us to the witness of the people of God in different times and places. 

       I don’t care what the tune is.  If “Be Thou My Vision” can be effectively set to a Reggae beat I’m all for it – just as long as the message stays intact.  The word hymn refers to the message – not the tune. 

       The message is the key thing – whether it’s in the drama, the ministry of music or anything else.  If we have a drama that people enjoy but that doesn’t make the point, that drama is a failure.  If we have a ministry of music that is artistically wonderful but which tells us nothing about God and ourselves, then it doesn’t belong.  It’s fine for a concert but not for worship.

       One question we are often asked is about children in worship.  We structure our Sunday morning schedule in such a way that children are in worship with their parents – at least part of the time – and parents are encouraged to be in church school while their kids are also in church school.

       Why? 

       I’m sure that more people would come to MPC if we adopted what I call a MacDonalds approach where everyone can get their ticket punched and we’re all out in an hour or an hour and a half if you stop to talk and drink coffee.  But we are more interested in doing a lot more in the maturing of those who do come than in having more people come for less.  This means having adults in Christian Education on Sunday morning and having the pastors available to teach.  It also means having our kids with us in worship and speaking to them – not just to the adults – in the children’s sermon. 

        I know it’s not always easy to have kids in worship with you. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important.  I have seen too many kids who were nurtured only in church school and youth groups who were never able to make the transition to being part of the worshipping community as an adult.  It was foreign territory to them.  The result is that they drop out of church altogether or take longer to reconnect as adults. 

        Laurie Loring does a great job of helping kids understand what is happening in worship in the Celebration Time.  The children of the church are a key part of the people of God in this place.  Worship is the one thing families can do together in society where the parents aren’t in charge.  That’s not true in sports or school or anywhere else.  In worship, we and our children sit side by side before God.  It’s true that some children aren’t that good at worship.  But as C.S. Lewis points out, we aren’t either.  We are all learners. And the only way to learn is by doing.

       We believe that faith is ultimately "caught" not "taught.”  If Sunday morning is the time that is important to us as a worshiping community, then adults and children need to be together at this time. Worship is one of the basic ways people learn what it means to be Christian. Children learn worship by worshiping with the congregation. They learn they belong to Christ and are welcome in His church. They participate in the drama of baptism and communion as signs of God's kindness and favor, of God's love and forgiveness. Children need to take part in worship regularly, and from time to time take leadership roles. Gradually children learn to run and jump after the ideas – and that is often a lot earlier than we think.

       But what about the announcements?  Don’t they break the flow of worship?

       Yes they do.  And we would put them at the very beginning if everyone was here to hear them.  But they have a point.  They are opportunities for fellowship, growth and service that you need to know about.  We do believe that God calls us to be a family and so we share the news of the family. 

        The same thing is true of the offering.  Why do we take time in worship to pass the plate?  Why not have a box out in the narthex for you to drop your envelopes into as you enter or leave?        

        It’s because the essence of worship is to show worth to God.  In the offering we show worth to God by our giving -- by demonstrating that God is worth the fruits of our work – and that giving is key to what we do.  We used to have the offering after the sermon but that didn’t work for two reasons.  One, it felt too much like the offering was the Nielsen ratings on the quality of the sermon people just heard.  Second, it got in the way of people having time to wrestle with the message. 

        Here at MPC we try to accomplish the hardest kind of worship to do well – blended worship where everything can show up from Bach to Rock and drama to Doxology.  Like the Three Bears beds, some people come in and think that our worship is incredibly loose – too soft.  Others come in and think it’s the most structured and liturgical thing they’ve ever seen – too hard.  After all, we not only sing the Doxology but pray the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday which, to them, is just a step away from incense and bells.  Others come in and feel like it’s just right – or at least something they’re willing to grow into.

         All that’s okay.  It is interesting from John 12 and other passages that Jesus consistently refuses to allow one disciple to disqualify the way another disciple expresses his or her worship.

        And did you note what Jesus says about Mary's act of pouring the ointment? He says that Mary is anointing His body for burial. Now the interesting thing is that Mary doesn't know that she is doing that. Jesus knows it but Mary doesn't know it. And this suggests that when we worship, we may well be doing more than we know we are doing -- and that God has the kindness to take our actions -- including worship -- better than we intend.  C.S. Lewis refers to this as the "courtesy of heaven."

       There is only one thing that worship must be in order to be worship. It must be centered on God. We don't worship what we believe God to be. We worship what He knows Himself to be. We don't worship a God who is a comfortable extension of our own minds with our own likes and dislikes. We worship the God who knows Himself to be perfect love. In worship we are not just telling God who He is -- like He needs a reminder. We are also clarifying our own focus on who God is -- so that we are truly worshiping God and not just adoring our own ideas about God.

       When we come to worship, we speak to God through our prayers, our praise and our music  

       But the most important part of showing worth is to respond in faith -- to echo the words of Isaiah at that wonderful worshipful moment in heaven. "Whom shall I send?" God asks, "and who shall go for us?'" and Isaiah replies, "Here am I! Send me!"

        That kind of heartfelt response from you is what God wants from your life. And that is worship!