What is Worship?

Julia and I had a great conversation about the worship my group planned for last week in chapel. At LTS, the model goes "Students preach Tuesday, Faculty and Staff on Wednesday." The worship services can contain anything that the particular group of students plans it to be. Our group was a fab. gathering of really creative people and we really risked and went off the deep end in a lot of ways.

Our fundamental premise was to treat the worship as directed at the gathered community of LTS, not some hypothetical church. The two worships planned could not be transplanted anywhere else, but directed and speaking specifically to those who fill our pews in Santee Chapel.

Tuesday was built to be really uncomfortable... I wanted people so uncomfortable that they were puking in the pews. This didn't quite happen, but it did generate a lot of conversation. Namely "What is Worship?"  The problem with this approach, as Julia rightly pointed out, is that it wasn't very careful in drawing people in. We just hit people over the head right away and defenses went right up. She then asked "What is the difference between Worship and a performance?"

Great question!

To show my modernist leanings, let's take a look at the given definitions thanks to Merriam-Webster.com.

Main Entry: per·for·mance

Pronunciation: \pə(r)-ˈfȯr-mən(t)s\
Function: noun
Date: 15th century

1 a : the execution of an action b : something accomplished : deed, feat

2 : the fulfillment of a claim, promise, or request : implementation

3 a : the action of representing a character in a play b : a public presentation or exhibition

4 a : the ability to perform : efficiency b : the manner in which a mechanism performs

5 : the manner of reacting to stimuli : behavior

6 : the linguistic behavior of an individual : parole; also : the ability to speak a certain language — compare

Main Entry: wor·ship

Pronunciation: \ˈwər-shəp also ˈwȯr-\

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English worshipe worthiness, respect, reverence paid to a divine being, from Old English weorthscipe worthiness, respect, from weorth worthy, worth + -scipe -ship
Date: before 12th century

1 chiefly British : a person of importance —used as a title for various officials (as magistrates and some mayors)

2 : reverence offered a divine being or supernatural power; also : an act of expressing such reverence

3 : a form of religious practice with its creed and ritual

4 : extravagant respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem

After looking at these two definition my question is "Is there a difference?" At first glance, I don't think there is. There is some nuance to it, but a worship ceremony is a performance that is meant to teach, inform, and generate feeling within the worshiper. How is this different from a play, concert, or another live-action event? I don't think that this is a bad thing. Worship becomes an idol if we think it does anything to God as it is my view that worship services is for the people and is meant to change us, not the divine.

My worship teacher Donna Allen stated that worship is "an intentional encounter with the divine." i like that idea, and i'll build off of it.

My definition of worship is "A Social Articulation that is Horizontal and Vertical."

The rationale behind this is the idea of a structured performance bent on generating both thought and feelings. I could do more with this definition like adding a particular structure, but that doesn’t work as there are a varty of worship styles. I could add in a phrase like “A planned Divine/human encounter” which is a really great worship definition, but sometimes worship can be longing for the divine... like in the season of Advent or Lent. Plus it is my assumption about life is to “pray without ceasing” and be in constant conversation with God, and not all of that is planned. I was going to add about people being gathered, but I’ve found that the most profound things happen when I stop and pray on purpose. ‘Two or Three are gathered’ almost guarantees worship, but some of the most profound things happened in private worship.

What I did find was that my definition works for me. It fits with my idea of God. I think that rarely do we see God operating in the present, we usually see God in hindsight. Like Jacob’s words, “God was in this place and I wasn’t aware of it.” Like Exodus 33:23, “…you will see where I just was.” We need to stop and recognize that God was in our midst and is still in our midst. Worship gives us that stop, that articulation, not only to find out what’s going on in our lives, but where God is active and working.

then i see this video by Brian McLaren:
 

 
so maybe it's not a performance... per se.. but a "corporate reaching for truth." where a gathered community (Ekklēsía if you will) tries to name a part of their reality. it utilizes elements of performance to try to name what is happening "on the ground" and yet name the transcendent reality.. the meaning as well. Christians try to use the framework of what was presented through the gospels, namely the framework and view of God as presented by Jesus of Nazareth. Like Paul stated in Romans 12:2 "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." Maybe worship could best be defined like this, a testing? Or maybe as Eric Elnes puts it "I regularly meet my God, my neighbor, and myself through “the Jesus of history” or “the Christ of faith”" Check out his post "Who is Jesus For Me?" Could that be a definition?
 
I am no longer certain of where the line is between worship and performance? Is there one? What are your thoughts?

The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived?

in my facebook COEXIST forum, this question was asked and i responded:

i think the guys from Weezer are. after all, they have the song with the title of this thread. however, it's on their red album and it sucked and that discounts that.

I'd go with Jesus.

and what about women? who is the great woman who ever lived? my money is on Catherine of Sienna or Gloria Steinem.

which a response came that:

I hate to vote against Jesus (I do not wish to be insulting to those who hold him in high regard), but as a man I would say he accomplished nothing, and as a god, the term underachiever comes to mind.


Paul was much more influential than Jesus. His writings and those of his followers Mark and Luke comprise a great part, perhaps the majority of the New Testement and transform the biblically recorded works of Jesus from insignificant to not only miraculous but the path to eternal life.

I don't know about the greatest but given Christianity's affects on western civilization, Paul certainly has to be nominated as the most influential person ever.

aside from the fact that this person views Christ as a failure (aren't there scriptures that speak to this? ;-)) there is a good point in the fact that Paul is oft quoted more than Christ in many of our churches. It is my opinion that the more conservative the church, the more you hear Paul. this has been my experience and i could be way off here...

i've been thinking about this question for a while and wonder at the rubric we're using. and since Jason got me reading a certain philosopher again, i had to ask "are we using what Nietzsche called "The master morality" or the "slave morality"?"

Slave morality: the morality created by oppressed people in order to overturn the prevailing values of those in power. Nietzche raises up the example of the early Christians and their new way of thinking that opposed the morality of their Roman masters.

According to Nietzche, morality has never been created through reason, or appeals to civility, or practicality or any other traditional method described by philosophers. instead those in power decide what's good. this is esp. true in the earlies moralities where aristocrats and kings held all the real power in society and dictated what was important in life.

"It was 'the good' themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and est. themselves and their actions as good, that is of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common, and plebeian."

Master Morality: include power, beauty, strength, and fame, in other words WORLDLY attributes and partly because the attributes enabled them to stay in power. like Homer's Iliad claims Achilles is the best because he's the most powerful and strongest. In Greek Society, it was the heroes that were the best.

so for me then, the greatest men and women who live are those who resist and follow a slave morality. Gandhi, MLK Jr, Jesus, Paul, St Teresa, Rosa Parks, and many others. those are who we need to hold up as ppl to follow vs. what advertising, government, and yes, even some religious leaders tell us.

to all those in the resistence: inform, infect, do what is unexpected: we are winning:

Thinking about Christian History In America

Corporate or Colonial

The Movement is unstoppable…
Future Markets, Holy Wars
Been tried ten thousand times before
If you think that God is keeping score, Hooray!
–Clairaudients (kill or be killed) by Bright Eyes

It’s hard for me to find a whole lot to affirm in the Christian History in America. While there are small pockets of Christian behavior, the lot of it is a story of genocide, greed, and colonial expansion. But such is the history of man. When wasn’t this the case?

With the decimation of the Native Americans and the history of slavery, I struggle to see the good. I take some comfort that Noll is aware of this. He writes that American was a place “where Christian heroism, Christian exploitation, and the quite realities of day-to-day Christian life were all defined by the experiences, the assumptions, and the values of the European Churches” (Noll 8). I am still unsure how to hold this with integrity.

Olaudah Equiano asks the “polished and haughty European recollect, that his ancestors were once… uncivilized and even barbarous?” When I read this question, I was hit by a ton of bricks. This question is directed at me! Here I am feeling polished and so much more enlightened than those Christians who were first exploring this land. Don’t I fail to see that I too am just as limited by my own cultural and individual biases? Maybe ten, twenty years from now I’ll read my own writing and be appalled? And even my children or grandchildren could be embarrassed by the assumptions I make here and now. Just like my Christian ancestors who came to this land, I am living out my faith in the best way I know how, with the interpretation I have, and in the context I find myself in. My intention is to do good and be light to the world, but my actions have unintended consequences.

I recently heard a seminarian state that they are tired of politics. Well, they had better drop out of seminary now, because there is politics everywhere! Especially in church! Most of the time, we get it wrong. Take the English Reformation, it was spawned by the King’s motivation to produce a male heir. In the process, the crown was able to seize the funds of the Catholic churches and monasteries and expand its own corporate wealth. The human need of security and profit oft times lead to sin. The English crown saw a market and went for it in the name of Christ; future market and a holy war in tandem, like the Bright Eyes song quoted above. Seeing this, the Puritans headed for a new land away from the politics of England. Their intention was noble, but it ultimately failed as they still couldn’t fully escape the influence of England. I do find the Puritans noble in the suffering they went through to pursue their beliefs. I felt relieved when I read about spiritually sensitive Christians like Jean de Brebeuf and his Jesuit colleagues. The majority, however; were not like the Jesuits and Christian history in the Americas is awash in the blood of the innocent.

I could despair at this fact if it weren’t for my view of history. To put it simply, when we know better, we do better. Meaning when we see the evil committed and the human toll it takes, we work to correct. We end slavery, we stop the genocide. However, this also works in the opposite way. We are incredibly good at war and killing large amounts people efficiently. My view though is that things are getting better, not worse. For Christians such as myself looking at history, we see the effects of the past and we work not to repeat them in the future. We acknowledge the mistakes and we don’t get apologetic about it. We ask forgiveness and work to end our own versions of slavery (i.e. sex slavery, sweat shops, racial tensions, etc), genocides, and war. We are working to get post-race/colonial/sexist/heterosexist/anti-semetic etc. towards a peaceful coexistence were oppression is minimized and justice prevails.

I, like my Puritan ancestors, hope to create a new society based on God’s kingdom as envisioned by Jesus Christ. At the same time, I seek to be as spiritually sensitive as Brebeuf in my interactions with those of other faiths and cultures.

Works Cited

Equiano, Olaudah. “Traditional Ibo Religion and Culture.” Pages 13-19. African American Religious History; A Documentary Witness. Second Edition. Ed. Milton C. Sernett. Duke University Press: 1999.

Noll, Mark A. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishers, Grand Rapids, MI: 1992.

A Fallen Letter

Dear Fellow Christians,

okay... once and for all! there was never an GARDEN OF EDEN! there were never just two ppl, an adam or an eve. scientifically the earth is billions of years old. God is very old. so quit acting like we'll return to a perfect state.

if you want a fall, it'd be when the first multi-celled organism ate another multi-cellular organism. it may have been when the single-celled organism ate another one to become a multi-cellular organism! hell! i dunno! what i do know is we can't keep believing in a fall or original sin or baptism washing away.

i heard a devout Christian say that they really don't like how their baby is filled with original sin because it cries all the time. WTF?! why not just get it baptised? then the original sin would wash off and you'd have no more crying.. that didn't work?! baby is still crying? prolly cause it's not a sin! it's the only way the baby can tell you what it needs. this type of moronic thought is what is driving ppl away from Christianity.

also... let's rearrange our thought on the fall.. cause apparently ppl like this idea. so how about we start out as a little baby, we're selfish because we have no concept of other ppl... much like Adam and Eve. only thinking of themselves, unaware that their actions could have consquences. we make mistakes, we do what is forbidden, and sure.. we sin.. but we LEARN! we GO AND SIN NO MORE!

we fall UPWARDS. we go from a place of selfish innocence to a place of spiritual maturity. in our spiritual maturity we see the bigger picture (albeit not the whole one) and we trust that we are guided, loved, and sustained by God. so much so that we are able to forgive and love our enemies.

what do we think about that? is that something we can do with?

respectfully,

-L

A Parable and Rant

Parable: an old lady is in the grocery store shopping. she has a walker, so her progress is very slow. she creeps around and gets the things she needs and puts them into her small basket which hangs from her walker. she heads to the checkout and is greeted by a young mother who is ahead of her in the check out line.

"Ohh..." says the young woman. "I see you have a walker. Can I pray for you?"

The old lady agrees and the young woman launches into a prayer that asks Jesus to help the old lady's ailments fade and restore her youth and help her walk again making sure to command the body cells to get their act together "in Jesus' name."

The young woman then turns, pays for her groceries, and goes home. The old woman then struggles to check out, lugs her bags to the bus stop, and heads back home alone.

What good was done in Jesus' name?

Rant: it seems as though we Christians have a choice. we can either be Dogmatic or Doctrinal. either Catholic and embrace sexism, patriarchy, and oral-tradition or Protestant and be narrow-minded, rigid, and literal. both are topped with ego, racism, homophobia, and a colonialist mindset. this seems to be the perception others outside the faith have. i call this the American Pop-Christianity.

these are two options, but simplistic and flawed ones. so what are we to do about it?

KNOW YOUR HISTORY. take what is good, leave the bad. Luther had a good thing going with the emphasis on grace, and Table Talk is just straight funny! But leave the stubbornness and esp. the Tract on the Jews and their Lies. view it, see it, and learn from it.

Being a Christian is not about wishing someone well. It's about love and service to all people at all times. Let's live like it.

i don't care about your view of the afterlife. i don't care about your politics. i don't care about your view of the bible. none of these things matter in this instance. it is simply, if you say you're a Christian, stop being a jerk and start spreading the Good News (and if necessary, use words).