Heretical Challenges to the Well Trodden Paths of Worship - [Guide]

|  A Couple Frameworks to Reactivate Worship

The problem with the word "worship" is the familiarity it breeds in our language. 

There is a sort of assumption of what it is and what it means. Which means we've taken something that is profoundly deep and mysterious made it rather two dimensional; it simply becomes a title that it is then defined by. So we've seen that the worship experience has been trapped in a sort of cage and we've attempted to unleash it, but now we have to start asking what exactly this creature is that we've unleashed. As we wrestle with how to interact with it and navigate it and engage in the act of worship, we have to begin re-instilling the meaning that may have become obscured by our familiarity. 

So I want to offer a couple pictures of this concept of chavah, some frameworks that may help us process how to take this into our contexts and cultures and communities. Because it would be easy to just confront something and then leave the conversation with an aroma of skepticism. It is easy to just negatively challenge what you find yourself if. It is another thing to take some responsibility and try to do something with it. My goal with this whole writing is not to do away with "worship", but to embrace it with such wholeness and beauty and power that we pull it forward to an even bigger understanding, maybe even a more rooted understanding, of what we are handling.

That being said, there is no one idea that is worship. It can't be confined to a single definition or interpretation. Doing so would create just another cage to lock this beautiful experience up in. Rather, it is more like looking at a piece of art. Where you don't look for an answer or a single, overarching principle that narrowly captures it, but you just sift through the endless possibilities that help you interpret what stands before you. This is the beauty of taking worship out of its cage, of understanding the word beyond the familiar surface we are so used to assuming. All of the sudden, worship doesn't have certain boxes to fit and can expand and take shape in an infinite number of ways. 

We will never fully understand worship.
We can only offer pictures that help encompass what we are after. 

These are just my attempts to do that. To wrestle with the raw essence of what we are trying to engage in with the idea of worship. Some are more applicable to official settings or communal gatherings, but some are simply things to be engrained as a way of life.

But still yet, they are only frameworks, not technical formulas.

Which leaves the work to be done of interpreting what they look like wherever we may find ourselves. 

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|  Connecting With God

Worship is simply getting caught up with what God is doing. It is aligning with the Creator of all things, allowing the divine to flow through us and shape us into the kind of people we are created to be. 

The question then becomes, in the gathering of our communities, in our services, in the way we carry ourselves every single day, how do we do that? How do we connect with God in whatever space we find ourselves in?

That would be worship. 

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|  A Reminder of Who Owns the House

In the book of Revelation there is this picture of a chair. And surrounding the chair are layers and layers of all sorts of people worshipping that which is in the chair. So the author gives us this sort of tour of these centripetal groups of people all focused in on this one chair in the middle of the whole thing. 

And we usually think we are in the chair.

But then we find out God is in the chair. 

And what are the people centered in on the chair doing?

Worshipping. 

It is this picture of worship that puts God and the world in its proper place. 

This gets at what chavah, the word that translates as worship, is all about. It is the bowing down, the humility, the submitting of us towards something. And when we do this, we are claiming where we belong in this whole thing. We are joining the eternal world in recognizing that God is in the chair, not us.  

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|  Forming a Collective Identity

Through worship, the community is shaped. 

Together, we collectively acknowledge what we are handling. We proclaim as a single entity what we are a part of. This is why liturgy has always been so central to so many communities. 

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|  God's Presence and Marking the Event

Worship is the experience of expressing God's presence. 

We encounter and engage and then display what we have found ourselves in by marking the event. When we see Noah building a fire for an offering or Jacob taking stones and piling them up, this is what they are doing. It is the human instinct to acknowledge (for more on this...) and, if we are honest, this can be with anything. Part of a worship service could simply be putting on display how the community has encountered the divine.

And one of the important elements to point out that we see when Jacob marks the event with the pile of rocks is that he is recognizing God in this place. He is in the middle of nowhere, so non-descriptive that it is called "a certain place", not in the temples and the mighty palaces of the elite, and it is there that he realizes God is present. 

Worship is waking up to the sacred in our midst. 

It is realizing that God is in everything, even in the common. Meaning God is here, but also meaning that God is in all the places God isn't supposed to be. There are tons of places we have neglected to see God present and at work. So worship is simply taking notice of it. 

Worship is the awareness of God's presence in all of life; that God is everywhere waiting to be discovered. It is becoming holy people by coming into contact with the holy that is all around us. Our senses get shaped and we become people who truly see.

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Note: This is part of a series on worship.




Read Part 1



Read Part 3