Rev. Tom Lenhart
Sermon April 13, 2008
“Is Worship All That Important?”
1 Corinthians 14: 26-33, 40 and Matthew 18:15-20 

            The question -- “Is worship all that important” -- may sound like an odd subject to preach on? You might ask does a minister really want to know the answer.  Moreover, to pose the question in a sermon is a little like preaching to the choir as those of you here have all made a choice this morning to attend and participate in worship. And, it is not like there weren’t other things for you to do on this Sunday morning. In many ways it takes a greater commitment today to worship God with so many alternatives on a Sunday morning than in times past when blue laws and cultural traditions and taboos limited the things one could acceptably do on Sunday morning.  We have choices our forefathers and mothers often did not.

            Before we think about the importance of worship – it makes sense to try and understand what worship is. As you might imagine there are many definitions. The English word “worship”, for example, comes from the Anglo-Saxon “weorthscipe”-- a combination of the ancient words for “worthy” and “ship” – and means to focus on something “worthy of reverence and honor.”[1] Similarly, the Hebrew and Greek words for worship, “shachah” and “proskuneo” relate to bowing down before another.[2] Christian worship is, thus, in an important sense our reverential response to God’s love of us.

Yet, none of these definitions fully captures the meaning of worship. It is something known -- not through a definition -- but best known through experience. Barbara Brown Taylor, the gifted writer and Episcopal Priest, has written  

Worship is the ongoing practice of faith, not only the practice but the actual experience of it. Whether it takes place around a [wooden] kitchen table or the carved marble altar of a great cathedral, worship is how people of God practice their reliance on their Lord. Through liturgies of word and table -- “liturgy” meaning “the work of the people” -- we do what we were created to do. We pray, we listen to God’s word, we confess, we make peace, we lift our hearts, we hold out our hands, we are fed, we give thanks, we go forth. We practice the patterns of our life together before God, rehearsing them until they become second nature to us. In the liturgy of the word we come to understand that the God who has been involved with us since time began is involved with us still. In the liturgy of the table we experience the incarnate Lord who feeds and forgives and calls us to follow him in the world. Through both of these encounters we expand our images of what it means to be human and what it means to be divine, so that we are better able to live into the fullness of our heritage as sons and daughters of God.[3] 

         As Taylor highlights worship is the opportunity for us to participate in various activities – praying, blessing, listening, and singing, for example. Worship is not, however, synonymous with a specific liturgy. The form worship takes reflects a particular time and place. Liturgy – the work of the people-- is the product of tradition – the ways a faith community has worshiped in the past, of theology, and of efforts continually to find ways that speak to the full panoply of those who newly seek to worship.

                     The liturgy a particular church adopts is very much like the selection of an instrument to play a piece of music. The same piece of music can (with minor changes) be played on a guitar, a piano or a violin -- by a quartet or an orchestra.  There is no one, universally correct instrument -- only the one that speaks most clearly and effectively to a particular group at a particular moment in time. Quite likely the choice may be different at a different time or for a different group. Critically, however, the fundamental essence of the musical piece is the same though the medium is different. And so worship liturgies can take the form of a traditional service such as ours (which is not especially “high church”) or one from the Anglican Common Book of Prayer which is).   Or they can take -- as is the case with our three Contemporary worship services here this spring -- the form of a modern ecumenical, less traditional service, for example, from the Iona Community in Scotland or from the Taize Community in France.

                     Done well each order of worship seeks to achieve the same basic goals – to connect us to our historic antecedents, to be normative – that is to give us guidance on how to live faithfully -- and most importantly to create the opportunity for God to be present – for each participant to experience simultaneously    God as transcendent and yet as immediate and with us. Over the years I have worshiped on Easter in Paris, in Edinburgh and in Stockholm. Though the liturgies of those services were markedly different and at times the languages used were unfamiliar, I understood exactly what was happening and the experience of God’s presence shown through.

William Temple the Archbishop of Canterbury, during World War II, wonderfully summarized the goals of worship this way: 

-- To quicken the conscience by the holiness of God.
-- To feed the mind with the truth of God.
-- To purge the imagination by the beauty of God.
-- To open the heart to the love of God.
-- To devote the will to the purpose of God.[4]

                                    x            x            x 

Let us now return to the initial question “is worship really that important”? Franklin Segler and Randall Bradley in their book on the theology and practice of worship have answered the question this way:

The most important function of the church is not evangelism or nurture but worship. Worship forms the center from which all other priorities of the church revolve. If God is to be the priority of our lives, individual and corporate, then the activity that acknowledges God’s supremacy, worship must be the core of all the church does. [5]

But aren’t the other activates we do here – outreach, education, pastoral care and fellowship very important?  The answer, of course, is yes. But I think the point here is that in the church these activities must rightly flow from our worship experience rather than being activities that are in some sense independent of it. Many organizations reach out to engage in social justice activities to lift up the poor and to respond to oppression and injustice, locally and globally. Likewise, there are other places in our world in which we are educated on moral values – on how best to live. And there are other groups and organizations where we develop, nurture and sustain friendships with others. What, of course, separates us as a church from other organizations -- is the underlying animation (the source) for those activates – namely, our faith in a transcendent God who came into our world in the loving person of Jesus to share in our joys and suffering and who by so doing changed everything.

            So far I suspect you are with me, but I imagine you are thinking “but one can be a person of faith and yet not come to worship -- it’s OK to engage in private prayer or meditation.” And again I don’t doubt that but I continue to believe there is something unique about participating in corporate worship. There is something unique when we worship in community together.  It is different from anything else one does. When you participate in a board meeting here you are doing work not so different from that which you encounter in your professional and personal life. When the trustees evaluate whether we need to make a particular repair or to readjust our investment policy that is not so very different than what each of them does in their personal lives when they have to get a new furnace or look painfully at their investments or savings account. Likewise, when we arrange a potluck dinner here the things we are doing are pretty familiar. But worship is different – it is unique. It takes us out of our comfort zone. We are asked to do things we don’t do any where else and to think about things that often we would like to push to the background – questions of justice, providence, suffering, mortality, fulfillment and satisfaction.

            Coming to worship for me was for many years a matter of ongoing debate. On the one hand I thought maybe I should go.  But on the other did I really want to? Wouldn’t it be more fun – and heaven knows I deserved fun after a long week of work – to play touch football with friends or a game of tennis on Sunday morning. When I seriously injured my knee in a football game on Sunday morning years ago, my minister, father did mention that I might have been somewhere else at that time and avoided the injury. But my internal debate was serious. Did I really want to confess my sins and listen to a sermon that might remind me of my failings?   I knew my foibles well enough and I was just fine pushing them to the back of my consciousness. And yet on the Sundays when “the go to church” arguments prevailed, I often got much more that I needed, more than mere fun and exercise. Sure there were moments when I was forced to face unpleasant aspects of my life and actions. But then I was wonderfully reassured that the God above forgave me and did not abandon me. And certainly at times my moral compass was thankfully re-centered from the ethics of the marketplace to the ethics of the man from Galilee.   .

            It has been said that at its heart worship is about relationship. In worship we find moments of connection with God – sometimes in prayer, sometime in the melody or words of a hymn or anthem, and, yes on occasion, in a chord that is struck by a sermon. But corporate worship is also about our relationship with each other. We worship as a group for a reason. Certainly, we can pray to God on a one to one basis but that is not the same as worship. The great commandment says we should love God and our neighbors as ourselves. Symbolically how would one reflect that? I submit in the figure of a cross -- with the vertical axis reflecting our love of God and God’s love of us and the horizontal axis reflecting the love of neighbor. (To me that horizontal axis often looks like a pair of open arms stretched out to embrace another.) The cross is also the symbol that best reflects the importance of worship. Worship is that area right in the middle where the two axes come together. Worship is the experience – at its best – when we are simultaneously connected to God and our neighbors.

            Take for example the prayer of confession that we say in unison each Sunday. Why do we do that? There are number of interconnected reasons. First, we are confessing to ourselves. In that moment we are acknowledging what we most often seek to avoid – our failings. We are also, however, confessing before God – acknowledging that we have failed to live in God’s image -- to be as God would have wanted. We are also confessing publicly to our neighbors and they to us. And by doing so we place before those we have hurt our failings and our commitment to do better as they do likewise to us. We also in that act of confession share an awareness that we are not alone in our failures. And finally we all hear in the words of assurance that we are forgiven -- that we are not abandoned by God. The horizontal aspect of worship reminds us that we do not journey alone through life and we experience similar joys and disappointments with our fellow children of God. The vertical axis reveals that all of us are joined with God. No other experience -- no other church activity besides worship -- does this. Worship connects the vertical and the horizontal like nothing else.

            The church is many things and does many things – which are important and embodiments of our faith. In a sense the church is like a train – with many necessary cars – fellowship cars, education cars and outreach cars – the engine, however, that pulls God’s train is worship.  The answer to my sermon question is that worship is not important but rather essential. Worship comes in many forms; my hope for each of us is that we find and participate in one that speaks to us – if we do it will make all the difference. With worship at the head of this train – it is truly bound for glory. All aboard! Amen.