The Path of Discipleship - Worship Together and Worship Alone

Most of the time when we are talking about worship in the church, we are talking about communal worship, especially the gathering on Sunday morning.  In my Lutheran tradition this gathering will be a service that includes scripture, song, preaching (or some form of interpretation of the Word) and Holy Communion.  This is a pattern of worship around which people have gathered for centuries.

                There are many other forms of communal worship, some more focused on preaching, some more focused on silence, some more focused on prayer.  Whatever the format of group worship, there is something different about worshiping in a group than worshiping alone.  There is something important about gathering together and turning as a body to pay attention to God, pray to God and praise God.  Over the years, I have had many people tell that they don’t need to go to church because they can worship God on their own.  I am sometimes skeptical that this individual worship life is actually happening, but more than that, I am sad because they are missing the gift that is worship in community.

                As a pastor, one of the greatest gifts I receive is the opportunity to serve communion to the community; to place bread that is Jesus in outstretched hands; to say to each person, “The body of Christ, given for you.”  I get to bless each individual in that gathering.  It is a powerful moment of individual connection that happens in the context of the community.  In the background there is the motion of people coming forward or going back to their seats.  Some sit in silent prayer as they wait to come forward or reflect on what happened.  Some support the moment with song.  Then we stand together for the final words of blessing, “The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen you and keep you in his grace.”

                To say that communal worship is different is not to say that individual worship is wrong or unimportant.  There is nothing wrong with encountering God in nature and being moved to praise.  The next time you go to watch a sunset or stargaze, take a copy of Psalm 19 and read it out loud, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims its maker’s handiwork.”  Try different physical positions of prayer.  Stand up and say the Lord’s Prayer with your arms to the side and palms up in the ancient orans position.  If you have a yoga mat (and some flexibility) try praying in a kneeling position of supplication.  If you have a favorite hymn, sing it as you go for a walk.  Simply to walk and observe all the little things that are happening around you is a brilliant form of worship.  All of these practices can help draw the worshiper closer to the presence of God.

                Both communal worship and personal worship deepen your relationship with God.  Any time that you allow yourself to be open and honest before God; any time you are moved to praise in awe and wonder; any time you pay attention to the story of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection, you are at worship and you are participating in the depth that is God at work.  Such encounters should not be relegated to single hour on Sunday morning.  At the same time, in a culture that celebrates individuality, we need the gift of community, being together in worship, reminded that all are welcome and all are equal in the eyes of God.  May all your worship strengthen your faith and deepen your life.

The Path of Discipleship - Worship as a Centering Moment

Those who know me know that I have found great comfort and depth in silent contemplation as a way of worship.  In addition to daily times of meditation, I also try to take part in meditation with a local Soto Zen Buddhist community.  In Zen practice, the focus is about learning to be present right here and now.  We learn to sit silently and observe what is happening in our own minds without getting swept away, pulled down the current of consciousness by an especially important or interesting or disturbing thought.  Instead we watch the important thought arise and subside, always followed by another thought and another.  Unlike what I understood about meditation before practicing, Zen meditation is not the practice of clearing the mind, but observing and recognizing that you are not your thoughts, that your thoughts are one of many things that are arising in this present moment.

                My understanding of Christian worship and theology has been affected by my experience of contemplation and meditation.  In contemplative Christianity, the point of prayer is to step outside of day to day reality and recognize the abiding presence of God that is constant, that supports and surrounds your day to day life.  As we wait in silence, we become aware that the search for God need not take us far, for God is immediately with us.  The distractions of the day, the important thoughts and tasks and errands, keep us from full awareness of that divine presence.  The more we spend time intentionally slowing things down and paying attention, the easier it becomes over time to rediscover and connect to our God who is always near.

                Part of Jesus’ ministry and his many calls to “Keep awake!” is pointing to God.  He points to lilies in the field and birds of the air and says, “God is there.”  He points to himself and says, “God is here.”  He points to the cross and says, “God is here.”  He point to the church, alive in the Holy Spirit, and says, “God is there.”

                Our worship is an opportunity to pay attention to God.  God doesn’t need our praise and will continue to be great if another “Alleluia!” is never spoken.  God doesn’t need our offerings, as God is already infinite, already owning what we are offering.  God doesn’t need our prayers, as God already knows the depths of our hearts and minds.  We praise, we make offerings and we pray as ways to turn ourselves toward God, to reconnect to God’s divine and loving presence.

                Worship is a moment to center ourselves.  If life is a stream flowing around us, sometimes raging around us, God is the solid bottom of that stream.  God is the place where we can stand even when raging waters threaten to pull us away.  Worship is a time to center ourselves on that solid ground, to plant our feet, to put our weight over our heels and settle into that solid ground. 

               

                Then we will go out and the waters of life will continue to flow by, sometime babbling sweetly; sometimes roaring dangerously; sometimes strong enough to knock us off balance.  And again we can turn toward God in prayer and turn toward God in worship and rediscover the solid place to stand.  When we worship we can be centered on God who gives us the stability and strength to continue.

The Path of Discipleship - Worship as Protest

                In 1999, the Christian theologian and author, Marva Dawn published a book entitled A Royal Waste of Time.  It was book that looked at emerging trends in worship as well as providing social commentary on worship and the Church.  Her title came from a common critique of worship given by folks who are not part of worshiping communities.  Worship is a waste of time.  Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

                Dawn’s response was not to argue.  To the rest of the world, worship is a waste of time.  We gather together and accomplish nothing much.  Yet by adding the adjective, “royal” she was pointing out that worship is a different kind of losing time than watching funny YouTube videos.  From a Christian perspective we are not losing time so much as offering it back to God.  God has given us every second, every breath, and we choose to gather together to offer some of those seconds and breaths back to God in love, in hope and in celebration.

                Building on ideas previously written about the nature of Sabbath practice, we do not worship because it gets something done, but because, like God, it is good and beautiful.  In worship, we intentionally center ourselves in the divine, taking time to notice the One whose presence is constant and whose love is eternal. 

                In this way, worship becomes a form of protest.  As we go about our regular days, we receive messages that tell of our inadequacies, that our bodies are too flabby, that our teeth are too yellow, that our lives are not enough.  We hear messages of the need for productivity and making things happen.  We hear all sorts of messages that call us to be acquisitive, being more by getting more:  more stuff or more likes or more sex.  In worship we turn away, if only for an hour.  We say, “No” to productivity and waste time in the love of God.  We say, “No” to acquisition, and give of our resources and our time.  Most importantly, we say “No” to our imagined inadequacies and celebrate a God who receives us and loves us as we are.

                In the Gospel of Mark, the idea of repentance is not so much about changing your ways but changing how you look at the world.  Good worship is an opportunity to see how things could be and, at the end of things, will be.  We talk of the Eucharist as “a foretaste of the feast to come.”  We are sampling eternity together, an eternity shaped by compassion, abundance and kindness.

                Then we turn around and go out the door back into the world that tries to shame us as not good enough.   Hopefully we go out a little stronger and a little more convinced that the eternity we have sampled in worship is the real world, the real vision, the real place for hope.  Hopefully we go out a little more empowered to share that vision of compassion and kindness, love and abundance, with the world around us through our words and actions.  Hopefully we go out a little more prepared to stand in loving protest of messages of hate, division and greed.

                Sometimes we will stumble and forget the reality revealed in worship.  We will rediscover those inadequacies and pick them up (after all, we have carried them for such a long time).  Yet there will be another Sunday; another sample of eternity; another royal waste of time to lay such burdens down.  We will stand before God in praise and thanks and adoration, and once again God will nourish us with teaching and peace and nourishment.  God will send us once again with renewed vision and good news to share.

The Path of Discipleship - On Worship

You wake up on Sunday and you come to a community of faith.  Maybe it is a traditional church building with a steeple on top designed for the specific purpose of worship and ministry.  Maybe it is a more modern worship space with stage lights and projection screens; a storefront in the city, just a large room with chairs and an overhead projector; a park or camp, where the outdoor space becomes worship space; in someone’s living room, where a small community gathers in simple worship.

                What happens in worship?  In many communities you might be handed a bulletin that serves as an instruction manual for the time.  You could point at the list of events from prelude to postlude and say, “Here is what happens.”  Yet I have been to communities where the order is less formal.  Songs are sung until it feels right to stop.  Preaching is a shared action, a discussion with a smaller group.  That is also worship.

                At a basic level, communal worship is an intentional turning toward God.  We carve out a time and place to be together and agree to dedicate that time and place to the living God.  Note that at this base level, I am not talking about praise or thanks because, while these are elements of most worship services, they may not be elements of all.  A funeral service for a child is a worship service but one that might ask for songs of lament rather than songs of praise.  Worship in the context of protest may call for songs and prayers of justice. 

                In many and various ways and styles and moods, we are turned toward God.  We listen to God speaking in scripture, preaching and discussion.  We speak to God in prayer.  We sing to God, often in praise, thanks and adoration.  We stand before the table and are fed, receiving Christ in bread and wine.  Through these actions we are reminded of the constant nature of God’s presence.  We are reminded that although we may pick and choose the times when we pay attention to God, God is constantly and lovingly aware of us.

                This is the grace of worship.  We may come to worship with the attitude that we are doing this action to please God only to discover that God is already pleased.  We may come to worship wanting to show our love for Jesus only to encounter the overwhelming love of Christ that is already present.  We come to do something for God and we encounter what God is doing for us, implanting us in the story of the good news.

                 Worship becomes an act of faithfulness, both a sign of our faith in God, but a reminder of God’s faithfulness toward us.  Worship is the opportunity to connect to this reality before we go out into a world where God’s presence is not always clear and God’s love in not always celebrated.  We are surrounded by the love of God in worship, and we respond with love, both in the act of worship itself and the acts of service that follow in our daily lives, sharing love with the world. 

                The measurement of true, faithful and good worship is not a matter of style or the feelings evoked as much as we like to talk about such things.  The measurement of faithful worship is how we meet God once we have entered and what sort of people we are when we leave.  It is fine if worship makes you feel happy or feel good about yourself for having done it.  It is faithful if worship sends you to live and share the good news in word and action.  

The Path of Discipleship - Sabbath Practices

What is Sabbath? 

                The Sabbath tradition connects people who observe it to God’s gift of rest, as illustrated at the end of the seven-day creation cycle in Genesis 1.  It also serves as a reminder of God’s liberation.  Israel had the opportunity to rest because God had set them free from slavery in Egypt.  We rest because human beings need to rest.  We rest because it honors God who created time and space.  We rest because it is a gift to be able to rest.

How can I observe the Sabbath?

                Traditionally, the Sabbath was a day set apart each week.  For Israel, the Sabbath lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday.  This was a day for worship, study and rest.  Emergencies should be handled.  Livestock should be fed.  No one else should be made to work so you can rest.  As Christians transitioned to worship on Sunday, the Sabbath day for most Christians became Sunday.

                If you have never observed a full-day Sabbath, recognize that it takes work and preparation.  Household chores that might have been done over the course of a weekend are done on a single day.  Work-related emails and texts should be handled ahead of time.  These days, for a real Sabbath, you probably need to turn off your phone and shutdown your computer.  You might also consider simply taking a Sabbath from particular activities.  Perhaps you need to spend a day without screens, or a day without commerce, or a day without chores.  This is not supposed to be the kind of fasting that some people do in Lent, giving up something as a discipline.  Sabbath is giving up work to create space for something else, something new; the God who dwells in peace and silence.      

   

                Although it has a different feel, you might explore the Sabbath idea by creating Sabbath spaces in your day.  Can you create a hour of Sabbath, a time that might be marked by the lighting of a candle in acknowledgement of the presence of God?  A deliberate time of prayer and study or, if the body needs it, a simple rest.  Can you get outside for a 10-minute Sabbath walk, just taking all creation in?

                My favorite personal Sabbath practice is three, deep and prayerful breaths.  Sometimes when too many ideas are flying around or too many priorities are calling, it is helpful to stop where I am and take three deep breaths to remind me that I am alive, that I am in God’s love, that peace is already near. 

                Remember that Sabbath is a gift.  It is not intended as a punishment but as a celebration of the God in whom we find peace, rest and life itself.

The Path of Discipleship - Sabbath, Loyalty and Faithfulness

One of the places where Jesus runs into conflict with the religious experts of his time is the observance of the Sabbath.  For one thing, he heals on the Sabbath.  It was acceptable to heal someone on the Sabbath if it would save a life.  In our day, it would be acceptable to perform CPR on someone even though it is a great deal of work, because the work is saving someone from death.  But Jesus was healing people who were not at death’s door, who suffered from chronic conditions that would still be there the next day.  He also allowed his disciples to gather grain on the Sabbath when they were hungry.  Facing criticism over these actions he declares himself “the Lord of the Sabbath” but also makes another important declaration, “The Sabbath was made for humanity and not humanity for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

                In thinking about Sabbath observance it is important to think about the origins of the Sabbath.  We can look at the beginning of Genesis, where a day of rest is built into the order of creation.  “And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.”(Genesis 2:2-3).  We can look at the 10 Commandments where the third commandment on the Sabbath is given as a reminder of Israel’s life of slavery in Egypt.  Everyone rests (including animals, slaves, and foreigners) in honor of the freedom that God had given Israel in the Passover story.

                And yet a common theme in most religions is that a practice that is given as a gift is turned into a law.  Over time, the freedom which the Sabbath was supposed to celebrate was replaced with a sense of obligation.  The rest that the Sabbath was supposed to offer was turned into duty.

                To be fair, the Sabbath was a practice that was also a sign of Jewish loyalty.  Not every culture in the ancient world took a weekly day of rest, especially a day of rest for servants and slaves and a day free from commercial activity.  The wealthy might rest but only because they had people below them to do the work.  In Israel, everything and everyone, as much as possible, was supposed to stop.  Doing so was a sign of loyalty toward God, honoring God’s work of creation and salvation for Israel.

                Jesus does not renounce the Sabbath.  Observing the Sabbath is still a sign of loyalty and devotion.  Instead, Jesus reestablishes the Sabbath as a gift, a practice that is not only faithful but is also wise.  Human beings need to rest for health and well-being.  Human beings need a pause from all the noise and commotion of life, the buying and selling, the constant call to do more and to obtain more.  From the beginning, God proclaims the value of simply being, resting in divine love.

                For me, the idea of Sabbath is a great comfort.  It implies that beneath all the noise, the confusion and the stress of life, there is peace and rest inherent in the universe.  God offers it, free for the taking.  Jesus points to it.  “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)   We are invited to step into it.  We honor God by stepping into Sabbath.

                Importantly, we show loyalty to God’s vision by stepping into Sabbath.  Turning toward the Sabbath means turning away from other visions, visions that define our worth by productivity or accumulation.  The Sabbath is the good news that we do not have to do more, be more or get more to be loved by God.  The peace of God is already here and we are already worthy of it.

                In my next article, I will suggest that how one observes the Sabbath can have a measure of freedom.  Certainly the tradition is a Sabbath day, but I believe that the way that Jesus frames the Sabbath opens the possibility for other ways of observance: Sabbath hours and Sabbath moments sprinkled throughout our days.  In our modern context, we might consider taking a Sabbath from screens (for the sake of our sanity) or a Sabbath from constant availability (for the sake of our humility).  The Sabbath is God’s gift to humanity.  May we use that gift to honor and rest in the One who is peace itself.

The Path of Discipleship - Faithfulness and Loyalty

At the beginning of this series I described the path of discipleship as one that seeks to develop a number of virtues and ideals.  For the past few weeks I have been writing about compassion and the works of justice and mercy that flow from compassion.  This week I want to start by talking about the virtue of loyalty and faithfulness.

                Earlier in this series, I wrote several posts about the virtue of love; how the love of God, especially for Christians the love of God as seen in Jesus, can inspire love within us, a love that extends from us back to God and to the world around us.  The important realization is that this love begins with God.  A common image is the Christian life as akin to the moon, shining with a light that is not of our origin, but a reflection of the love of God. “We love God because God first loved us.” (1 John 4:19).

                For many decades we have used the language of love as the primary description of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us.  However, for much of the Hebrew Scriptures, the primary description of our relationship with God is not about love but about loyalty and faithfulness. 

                There is a phrase that is used several times in the Hebrew Scriptures as a formulaic description of God.  For instance, in my congregation, during Lent, we prepare to hear the gospel text with a quotation from the prophet Joel:

                “Return to the Lord your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  (Joel 2:13)

                When I was in seminary I had a Hebrew professor who strongly disagreed with the translation, “steadfast love.”  He told us that the Hebrew word (chesed) is related to loyalty and faithfulness.  He translated it with the fancy phrase, “covenant fidelity”.  Chesed is more about the nature of God keeping God’s promises than it is the warm, fuzzy feeling that sometimes gets associated with love.  Joel presents a God who will be faithful to Israel, not because Israel is great or perfect or loving, but because God is a God who makes and keeps promises.  This is a significant idea because the covenants that God makes with Israel are often one-sided and unconditional.  God does not say to Abram, “If you are good, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.”  God simply says, “I will make of you a great nation.”(Genesis 12:2)  God is and remains loyal and faithful.

                In his letter to the Galatians, Paul lists faithfulness as one of the fruits of the spirit.  It is more than simply holding a set of beliefs.  Faithfulness is an attitude of being invested in those beliefs.  This is not an argument for blind faith, accepting things without question.  My understanding of faithfulness is the ability to stand in faith despite questions and struggles.  For me, the image of faithfulness is the image of Jacob wrestling with the divine and refusing to let go. (Genesis 32:22-32)

                Faithfulness in practice is also well-described by many of the Christian mystics.  The 16^th century Spanish nun, Teresa of Avila speaks of periods of dryness in prayer.  At the beginning of the new practice, the disciple is thrilled and comforted by the action of contemplative prayer, but one day she sits in prayer and discovers nothing: no feeling of warmth, no sense of nearness to God.  Faithfulness is what continues the practice through such dry spells.  For John of the Cross, a dear friend of Teresa, faithfulness is what allows Christians to endure the “dark night of the soul,” a period when all the trappings of faith lose their meaning.  It is the virtue of faithfulness that turns the dark night into a transition period to a deeper relationship with God.

                Unfortunately, the church moved from a message of faithfulness to a message of guilt.  Rather than saying that we take part in the practices of discipleship out of a sense of loyalty to God, the church taught that we observe these practices out of a sense of guilt or fear, avoiding an angry God.  In some ways I think we overcorrected when we then put all of our focus on love, often arriving at a place of saying, “Take part or don’t; God loves you anyway.”

                I hope that we can find a way to hold loyalty and love in balance.  Growing in loyalty and faithfulness can be a powerful way to deepen our relationship, helping us grow in disciplines which in turn help us spend more time paying attention to God.  I believe that an emphasis on faithfulness can also help create a realistic faith practice, one that does not assume that we should always feel great or we should never have doubts or things will just get better and better.  Faithfulness and loyalty are what can carry us through the troubling times.

                But love is also constantly present when we do slip up or slip away.  God’s love is always there to sustain us, comfort us and welcome us.  Like love, our faithfulness is not our own, but a reflection of the faithfulness of God, who stands waiting to receive us when we turn away and to welcome us when we rediscover the beautiful relationship that is faith.