If
you were to ask people what it means to be a Christian, you’d probably have a
lot of people who respond with some sort of comment about “worshipping God.”
And, indeed, worship is central to what it means to be a follower of Christ.
But what is worship?
If
worship is saying prayers, singing songs, and having liturgies then we miss out
on the fullness of what worship is all about. As we heard in the reading from
Isaiah two Sundays ago, God does not require nor is God impressed by our
rituals. As we all know, it’s not difficult to talk out of both sides of our
mouths. We can say nice things about God on Sunday and trash God’s creation and
abuse God’s children on Monday. If we understand worship as simply
participating in rituals, then worship is pretty much worthless. Of course, the
Holy Spirit can always swoop in and convert someone through their experiences
in worship, but history is littered with people who attended church regularly
but really were scoundrels when it came to how they lived. If worship is
nothing more than incantations, sentimental nostalgia, and therapeutic words
that reassure that we are right and that the problems of the world are with
other people, then worship really ought to be abandoned.
Instead
of worship being what we do for a designated period of time and through
specific actions, worship in the Kingdom of God is about the posture of our
lives. As we continue to think about what the Kingdom of God is all about and
how we participate in it, today our readings would have us consider what
worship in the Kingdom is all about. Over the past several Sundays, I’ve been
saying that the Kingdom is not a place that we go when we die, in fact, the
Kingdom is not a place at all. Instead, the Kingdom is a situation, a reality,
an event. The Kingdom of God happens every time that love, kindness,
forgiveness, generosity, and humility are shown. And what this means for
worship is that worship is not something that happens only around the throne of
God, rather it is about the posture of our lives, about how we align ourselves
with the priorities of the King. So instead of worship being a verb, something
that we do, worship really is more of an adjective that describes how we do
everything.
One
look at the world and it’s easy to see that we don’t have the best posture. We
do not stand up straightly. Our morals are crooked and bent. We are curved in
on ourselves so that we see inward more than we do outward. So it’s no surprise
that crooked people make crooked laws, have created a crooked economy, and act
like crooks.
In
today’s Gospel text from Luke, there is a woman who suffers under the weight of
this contortion. To be clear, I’m reading this woman’s encounter with Jesus as
a parable. That’s not to say that the event didn’t really happen, but it is to
say that the meaning of Jesus healing this woman is far greater than it being
only a historical event. This healing story is a metaphor for what the
salvation of God is all about.
Notice
that this healing is a gift of pure grace – no one has asked Jesus to cure this
woman, he just does it. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “God shows
his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” This
woman who was bent over did not ask for or do anything to deserve her healing,
and we, who are bent over in Sin, did not ask for or deserve to be set free
from Sin and Death which hold us captive – but God graciously liberates us. In
thinking about what it means to worship, we must always begin here, with grace.
Worship
always begins with God’s act of loving and liberating us, and then we respond.
This response is often called “praise.” What makes praise so important to
worship in the Kingdom is that it is rooted in humility, which is a doorway
into the Kingdom. Praising God means that we have to acknowledge that God is
God and we are not. Praise puts our attention on the fact that we have received
the gift of abundant grace from God. Praise reminds us that we are not
self-reliant, we are not self-made, we are not self-redeemed. Instead, we
depend on God to give us life, meaning, and purpose.
Now,
if we treat praise the way that we do worship, then it gets us nowhere. If we
think that praise is just about saying “Thank you, God” or singing a few hymns,
then we’ll miss it. Just like worship, praise is a posture, not a set of words.
And so we praise God by how we treat others, and in particular how we treat the
poor. Sadly, our society does not praise God by how we treat the poor.
Childhood hunger does not praise God, institutional racism does not praise God,
an economy that has people working two minimum-wage jobs that still can’t
afford decent housing does not praise God, burning fossils fuels like there’s
no tomorrow does not praise God. You can also praise God by how you speak to
other people – demeaning the intelligence of people who don’t agree with you
does not praise God and lying does not praise God. Your wallet can praise God –
giving to the church and to those in need to the point where you have to
actually change your budget is a way of praising God.
And same goes for your
calendar – and here’s where attending worship services is actually a good and
holy thing: when you come to church it means that you’re not doing something
else. Many of us have some housework that needs to be done, a yard that needs
to be mowed, or just want a little downtime to relax. But when we claim the
time on Sunday morning to come to church and time throughout the week to come
to Morning or Evening Prayer or read the Bible and say prayers on our own, we
are actually praising God by the way we are using our time.
Coming to church is about
saying “God, even though I could find many things to do for two hours, I am giving
this time to you as a response of thanksgiving to your saving grace.” And it’s
not that God needs us to come to worship, rather it’s that we need it. As Jesus
says, “Humanity was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for humanity.” If
we do not set aside time to be thankful and responsive to God’s grace, we will
not be grateful people. There’s a monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast who has done
a lot of research and writing about gratefulness and he says that being
grateful is the key to being happy. And so God has given us liturgy not because
God needs our praise, but because in offering our praise in a spirit of
gratitude, we actually encounter the happiness of abundant life that God
desires for us.
In Christ, God has set us
free and made us to stand upright. No longer do we need to worry about making
ourselves worthy, as God has definitively and unequivocally declared that our
standing before God is upright. Praising God is a further gift that we are
given, it is not a requirement. We are not lab rats in a divine experiment to
see how we will react to grace. It’s not that if you praise God you get to go
to Heaven and if you don’t then you go to Hell. Life is not an exam. Instead,
it is a gift. The love out of which we were created is something that can be
enjoyed here and now. My brothers and sisters, God loves us so much that we
have been given life to know and participate in this love. All the things that
I’ve mentioned in this sermon, things like almsgiving, serving the poor,
reading Scripture, coming to church – these are not things that we have to do.
Instead, these are time-tested ways to enter more fully into the Kingdom of
God. These are practices that help us to align the posture of our lives with
the Kingdom of God so that we might experience the abundant life that Jesus
came to give us. That is what worship is about.
There
are many people who chase happiness by pursuing money, power, popularity, and
fame. And if we’re honest, we all have at least a little bit of that in us. But
we know that these things won’t fill us with meaning, purpose, or joy; they
won’t bring us to abundant life. Because the truth of the matter is that we
will all die and that fact looms over our lives like a shadow. The author and
researcher Brené Brown has noted that this current American generation is the
most in-debt, obese, addicted, medicated, depressed, and lonely of all time.
Clearly, all of those things like career, wealth, and prestige aren’t working
for us.
Instead,
God has given us the chance to stand up straight and flourish in joy and love. God
wants us to know just how much we are loved. God wants us to trust that all
shall be well. This isn’t about moralism, about doing the right thing or
earning rewards; it’s about participating in the Kingdom of God; it’s about
encountering abundant life. Worship, or praise, is the means by which we do
this. We begin with recognizing the gift that God has given us. Spend some time
later today and throughout this week thinking about the gift that God has given
you in life. Then give yourself the permission, the time, the space, the money
to respond in gratefulness and praise, not because that is required, but
because it will bring you more fully into the grace of the gift. And in
praising God with our whole lives, we invite others to come and see the glory
of God.
You
are loved, you are enough, you are redeemed. This is what worship in the
Kingdom is about – it is the posture of our lives in response to the standing that
we have been given by God. So stand tall, brothers and sisters, for, by the
love of Christ, we have been set free.
