At our church here in Chicago, we have been talking about the nature and purpose of worship. I was asked to respond to the question that is the focus of this essay: "What is worship?" Here are my thoughts. I hope they are helpful to someone! -Troy
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What is Worship?
reflections by Rev. Troy B. Cady
Intro
& Thesis
What is worship? There is no easy
answer to this question; however, we could start by acknowledging that to
worship God is to glorify God.
But that begs the question: what does
it mean to glorify God and how do we glorify God?
I suggest that, at its core, worship is
devotion; whatever captivates your greatest devotion is what you worship. To
worship is to love; a life lived in love for God and others is what brings God
glory. To live in love is to worship God.
In this essay, I look at what the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles of the New Testament have to say about worship as I describe various forms of false and pseudo-worship in hopes of helping us understand worship in terms of devotion to God, love for God and love for others.
The nature and forms of idolatry
To see how worship and devotion go hand-in-hand, let’s take
a step back from the question of God-worship. It is possible to worship
something that is not God or someone other than God. The Bible identifies this
as idolatry.
Whatever
you are devoted to the most in life…that is what you worship. The fact is: many
Christians in America today are more devoted to their political philosophy than
they are to God. It is easy to make an idol of politics.
Still
others are most devoted to upholding a certain vision of family life. Though
God desires us to be nurtured in the context of loving community, when we
insist that such a community must look a certain way, we have made our ideal of
family into an idol.
In a similar way, if you devote your life to the accumulation of wealth, you worship riches. If you are most devoted to achieving society’s standards of success or popularity, you are really worshipping some arbitrary ideal of accomplishment or the ever-elusive high of gaining fame and human esteem. The sobering truth about worship in our society today is that humans have perfected the art of finding almost anything else to worship if it means they can avoid devoting their entire selves to God.
Some common Christian idols
Ironically, a common object of worship for many Christians
is the Bible. Let’s face it: when we would rather just talk about what the
Bible says than to devote ourselves to God and practice God’s way of love for
others, we are really worshipping the Bible…not God.
In the same
vein, Christians are even capable of worshipping the idea of worship. We do
this most commonly by defining worship in reduced terms, equating it to the act
of singing “worship” songs with other believers once a week (typically on a
Sunday morning for about an hour). Many Christians have come to worship worship
by insisting their worship be offered in a certain way and with a certain
style. If it is not in our preferred form (usually singing) and style (usually
a particular genre of music), it doesn’t feel very worshipful to us. This is
not to diminish the value of singing our devotion to God; it is simply to
remind us that worship is so much more than singing.
I think one of the saddest expressions I have ever heard in my life is when Christians talk about the “worship wars” that take place in the church today, as if worship is something to fight about. When we start fighting about worship, we could well wonder whether we have, in fact, stopped worshipping God.
What Jesus says about true worship
In John 4, Jesus addressed our propensity to substitute
God-worship with the worship of the trappings of religion itself. In this text,
a Samaritan woman asks Jesus where (and, consequently, how) the true
God-worshipper should worship. Jesus’ reply is telling. He says that true
worship is not about where you go to worship (“neither on this mountain [in
Samaria] nor in Jerusalem”), but true worship is about the spirit.
In other words, the real place of worship is in your heart. Worship is simply the act of devoting our hearts (the entirety of our being) to God.
To worship is to love God
This picture of true worship coincides with what is perhaps the greatest confession of all time. Significantly, it is a confession that has been used for millennia in communal worship settings:
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the
Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your strength.”
(Dt. 6:4-5)
Perhaps the best way to define worship, then, is to define it in terms of loving God. After all, to love God is to cultivate our devotion to God. As such, this confession to love God with all of our everything represents the height and depth, the breadth and length of our worship to God. To the extent that we love God in everything and with everything—to that extent—we worship God.
Where and when to worship
It is no mere accident that the text in Deuteronomy 6 goes
on to describe where we are to practice loving God with our everything.
Not surprisingly, the location of this kind of devotion is…everywhere. And the
time is…all the time: “…when you sit at home…when you walk along the road…when
you lie down…and when you get up.” More than the tabernacle, the temple, the
synagogue, or the church building, the text tells us that the true place of
worship is in “your hearts.” In other words, every place and every time is a
place and time to worship. As the poet Wendell Berry says, “There are no
unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
How (not) to worship
But how do we show our love for God? There are many ways to
do this but the Bible is clear that one can do many religious things to express
one’s devotion to God while still missing the very heart of worship.
God addressed this with these words spoken by the prophet Isaiah:
“These people come near to me with
their mouth
and honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” (Is. 29:13)
In light of
God’s never-failing love from one generation to the next, it stands to reason
that really all God ever wants from us is to show our worship of him by simply
loving him in return. More than our songs, more than our tithes, and more than
our study of the Bible…God just wants us to love him in return. If those
religious activities help us to love God, great; but church history has shown
that Christians can be very good at practicing their religion while at the same
time failing to love. While it is true that love for God is often expressed
through musical praise, generous giving, and listening for God’s voice by
meditating on Scripture, it does not follow that these activities are
inherently acts of true worship. True worship is a matter of the heart, not a
matter of mere ritual performance.
This is why
Jesus echoed the refrain from Isaiah 29 when he addressed the Pharisees of his
day. His words to them were bold because the Pharisees were the ones who were
regarded as the most devoted to God, the true God-worshippers. But Jesus
exposed their hypocrisy by appealing to the heart of worship in their own
tradition. In short, Jesus wanted them to see how they were very good at doing
all kinds of religious things for love of God, but had, in fact, neglected love
for their neighbor.
In Matthew
15, Jesus identifies how the Pharisees even used their own devout religious
observance as an excuse to mistreat their own parents in old age. In Matthew
23, he describes how the Pharisees faithfully tithed as an act of worship but
“neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and
faithfulness.” He admonishes them: “You should have practiced the latter,
without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but
swallow a camel.”
Jesus’ critique, then, gives us a clear answer as to the best way to show your love for God: it is to love your neighbor.
How the apostles describe worship as love
The apostle Paul describes this very dynamic when he says
that the entire law is summed up in one command: “Love your neighbor as
yourself.” (Galatians 5:14)
That is
quite a striking statement. In essence, he is telling us that if we can only
keep that one command, we will also be keeping the command to love God.
But…how could this be? Could it really be that simple? All we need to do to
love God is to love our neighbor?
The apostle John explains (in refreshingly simple terms) how this could be so:
“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. We love because God first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (I John 4:16, 19-21; italics added)
For this
reason, any act of service you render to your neighbor is an act of service to
God himself. To put it another way: to serve another is to render worship to
God. That means…when we share food with the hungry, we are really
worshipping God; when we companion the lonely, we are really worshipping God;
and when we help heal the infirm, we are really worshipping God. Anything you
do to love your neighbor…you are doing as an act of love for God.
Worship: living for God’s glory and neighbor’s good
In the local church where I serve, we often like to say that
the church exists “for God’s glory and neighbor’s good.” It’s a lovely
sentiment, but Jesus, and Paul, and John take this idea a step further. They
tell us that when we live for neighbor’s good, we are really living for
God’s glory.
Again, the prophet Isaiah speaks to this:
“‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’
“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do
as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and
strife…
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a
reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have
chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with
the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe
them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like
the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before
you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.”
(Isaiah 58:3-8; italics added)
It is
important to notice that this text about the true worship that happens when we
love our neighbor concludes with an image of God’s glory breaking forth like
the dawn. If worshipping God means glorifying God, this text helps us make the
connection that the glory of God breaks forth when (and only when) we worship
God truly by loving our neighbor.
I was saddened the other day when a friend told me an experience she had one Sunday at a church she attended. After the service, all kinds of people were trying to get out of the parking lot when a man in a large luxury car became upset at her for getting in his way. He was so upset he told her to f*** off with his middle finger raised at her. And this is just one example. As a pastor, I have seen firsthand how church people can enjoy a lovely worship service one hour and the next treat their fellow congregants or pastoral leaders like dirt without so much as an apology ever being offered. What a sham we have made of the idea of worship! How we have cheapened it. When churches have lovely worship services but church members do not even share God’s love with each other, what is happening in the church service cannot really be called worship. Our true worship is displayed in learning to love one another and extending that love to all.
In conclusion: God’s glory and the common good
In contrast, I want to conclude now by sharing with you a story
that illustrates just one of many ways God’s glory breaks forth when we simply
serve the common good. It was a conversation I had just this week with a small
group of people I know. One of the group members happens to be a teenage girl
who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, advocating for
sane measures in school policies in hopes of protecting the vulnerable in the
midst of the pandemic.
As we
shared our elation with her on being published in such a prestigious newspaper,
we returned to the theme of worship that we have been learning about for some
weeks now. And I mentioned to her that advocating as she did for the sake of
others was really an act of devotion to God, a way of worshipping God. She said
that hadn’t occurred to her but, as she thought about it more, she became
animated and excited. I wish you could have seen the glow on her face as she
took in the good news of that truth—that anything we do can be done as worship
unto the Lord.
This young
woman really knows what it means to worship. She knows firsthand that we really
can worship God with our everything at all times and in all places and in all
kinds of ways. All we need to do…is love.
Since God
himself is love, may we always remember that the very glory of God is the life
lived in love. Let us worship God, then, in spirit and in truth. Let us live in
love.
