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

|  Pumpkins, Grills, and Worship Being More Than Music

The first time we see the word "worship" in the book of Genesis is during this story of a man named Abraham:

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two

of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for 

the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God

had shown him. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.

Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy

and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."

Now, first of all, the context of this whole thing is that their worship is a burnt offering. They are going to take something and light it on fire.

And they call it worship. 

But even more raw to the story is the word itself - a word we often have a lot of assumptions and pre-conceived notions of what it is. Which makes it sometimes necessary to go beyond the word to the more raw essence that the word itself is a symbol of. Sometimes we need to step back and reorient our language to cause us to stumble over words that have become so familiar. It helps us reactivate the meaning that may have become obscure somewhere in the word's evolution. 

And, basically, if we wanted to translate this verse with this in mind, we could say it this way:

Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; 

the boy and I will go over there; we will bow down, and then we will come back to you."

The word here is the word chavah.

And literally it means "to bow down". You come in contact with something and you stoop down or prostrate yourself and it is called chavah. There is this sense of awe and lowness. It is the posture of humility and submissiveness.

This is the substance of what the word "worship" means.

To be in the presence of something where the only thing left to do is place yourself below it. To acknowledge the proper place that you belong in relation to this.

It is an expression of how you view the universe.

Of the experience of the presence of the divine.

Worship.

Chavah.




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Notice there are no references to music here - a major contradiction to the current perspectives and assumptions of the word.

Evidently, what we hold to be so tightly bound up with the word worship just isn't that central to the picture the Bible gives us. For example, Noah goes through his whole flood thing and it is over and he is finally on the dry land and his first experience isn't to sing a chorus on repeat. Instead, he builds a fire. The same thing we see Abraham do. It is almost like the best way to chavah God is to take something valuable to your survival and light it on fire. To mark with a picture what is happening in your midst.

Or there is this story about one of Abraham's later descendants named Jacob and he is running for his life out in the desert in a place that is so common and ordinary that we are told that it doesn't even have a name, it is just "a certain place". And he is sleeping with a rock for a pillow and he has this monumental dream of God and, typically, you would go to a famous or well known temple to incite a dream from the gods, but here is Jacob out in the middle nowhere and he has this experience. He encounters the divine.

And how does he respond? What is Jacob's process of chavah?

He takes the stone that was his pillow and builds a pile of rocks.

This is worship. Again and again we see all of these people and groups and societies doing this whole worship thing in kind of strange ways.

Something happens and these people have this innate need to mark it and experience it and acknowledge God's presence in this place.

This is worship.

It is the process of entering into the divine and putting themselves in their proper place.

Yet somehow this has become interchangeable with a style of music.

Because for many, if you were to talk about worship, it would typically have something to do with a band and music and if it is contemporary or traditional. You can even go on iTunes and there is a category called "Praise and Worship". This is the sort of perspective we have developed. We even talk of worship leaders as if they are band leaders. Leading worship is more about strumming a guitar and singing than about guiding a gathered community through an experience with the divine.

We've associated music with worship.

And it is a fair association.

Because there is a reason why there is no text from Noah or Jacob that explains the biological and physiological experience that leads to a response of chavah. Instead, it always deals with people bowing down, lighting fires, and building piles of rocks. They don't seek to analytically explain what is happening, they use something tangible to express the abstract.

And eventually, people enter into this and began exploring the countless ways of expressing this experience. They start building things and telling stories and writing poetry and, at some point, they even started singing. There has always been this realization that the last thing you can do is explain what is happening. The simplicity of words can't capture what is happening - you need pictures and images and imagination.

It is the human understanding that art always captures the world better.

So although worship itself is not art, art seems to be a pretty useful way to chavah.

There is a reason why in the most ancient of cultures we find poetry and verses sung to the gods. There is a reason why for thousands of years Jews and Christians have sang together in order to pull of this experience. There is something transcendent about a community engaging with the God of the universe to collectively express the movement of the world.

We sing because it is powerful.

We sing because it works.



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But this is the problem with something working so well.

Eventually it becomes confused with the thing itself.

A way develops that becomes a pattern that then begins to dominate, leaving an indentation that is eventually assumed to be the only way. And this isn't just with worship. We see this everywhere, especially with the Church.

This idea I'm talking about, though, is nothing new. We hear it all the time; that worship is more than music. What I've found, though, is that we just tend not do anything about it.

We could just start by talking about the realm of art. If we think art is able to do something bigger than us, then why are we only using one form of art called music. Richard Rohr put it this way, "The greatest obstacle to the next experience of God is the last experience of God."

We look at the ancient world and their expressions and we find them able to use an infinite spectrum with which to chavah. They understood that art could be discovered in all sorts of ways and that every single one of them was capable of capturing something that was unique to that form. Poetry can do things that music can't. Stories can do things that lighting a fire can't. Installation art and painting and literature. All of these things brought their own medium to chavah.

But even in the "worship as music" scene we don't cultivate the diversity that we need to gain the breadth and depth necessary to such a monumental human event. Because we've created worship, not only as  the equivalent of music, but as the equivalent to one genre of music. One particular style, most visibly noted by the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) genre, has become the only acceptable means of chavah. What about the other musical expressions? If some artist who created that thing thought it beautiful and meaningful enough to express themselves with, is there not good and truth in that? Don't all of these various modes offer a unique way to engage with the art form, an expression of the world that could be used to worship God? Even country music may have something to offer that we could use.

Yet, somehow, people go to play worship music or go to play a song in a church and it has to come from this particular genre that has developed called "worship music"; which is just a bright chord progression put to a verse / chorus / bridge format. But these songs are just one style! What about the other songs? We deem them secular or "not church appropriate", whatever that means, but is not God in those songs, too? Some of the darkest and must painful lyrics you can find are in the Psalms. And some of the most "secular" music I've heard is also some of the most beautiful chavah I've ever heard. If it is good it is God's. Which means we have to also keep in mind that there is a lot of worship music that isn't good and beautiful music.

We need to be able to cultivate all expressions of the human experience because music itself isn't worship, it is just one form. And while sometimes in that moment it is the only thing capable of grasping what is happening in the community, we have to be immersing ourselves in every form possible.

Because they all have something we could use.

What we see is that the depth and breadth of chavah has been ignored and we've settled for one form and interpretation of what this whole thing is about.




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Maybe we could say that it is kind of like pumpkins.

Carving pumpkins is not new. People have decorated the fruits of the harvest as long as harvest festivals have been celebrated. But at one point, the carving and decorating of the most abundant and routine fall harvest fruit became a much more narrower thing.

Eventually it became about faces.

Jack-O-Lanterns became the norm.

Which makes sense because it looks cool. Whoever made the first Jack-O-Lantern probably became a rockstar for it. But instead of asking, "How do we carve and decorate this fruit for the harvest festival?" we ask, "How do I make a good Jack-O-Lantern?" We forget that carving pumpkins is bigger than just making faces.

Or I've seen the same thing with cooking. For some people, they talk about grilling as if it the same thing as cooking itself.

They only grill.

And, eventually, they begin to associate grilling with cooking, forgetting that there are many ways to cook things and grilling is just one medium of that.

So you try to grill everything, which works sometimes, but makes awful pasta, and you simply miss that which you are supposed to be participating in because you've confused the method with the thing itself. Grilling becomes the only way to cook, even while things are begging to be cooked differently and instead of cooking well and feeding people, you just try to master the grill.

We've got to reclaim the whole of worship, of the chavah experience.

We've got to understand the fullness of what it means to engage in this experience and begin to enter into it with all of the infinite forms and ways that our communities find necessary.

Even if it means just making a pile of rocks.








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Note: This is part of a series on worship.




Read Part 2


Read Part 3