Once upon a time, I was in a Helpful Workshop about Worship.
Perhaps you too have been to one of those. It was in a church basement and I
was in my “I will be the world’s most active layperson and God will quit it
with the ideas about seminary” phase. The person standing up front, next to the
newsprint and the continental breakfast items, was talking about worship as an
“unfolding drama,” and was asking, in fairly dramatic, suspensful fashion, “If
worship is a drama, who is the audience?”
I flashed back to my childhood in Macon, GA, where in my
memory, it is always hot. Seven-year-old me is wearing a dress, tights and
black patent leather shoes. There is a ribbon in my hair. Mama is wearing a
dress too and Daddy has on a jacket and smells like aftershave. We got up early
to come to the big building with the columns out front and the marquee sign
with the service times and the short, pithy sermon title on it. We were always
late or nearly late and most weeks would fuss in the car in not-so-Christian
fashion over the stress of what being late would mean, as if we had paid for
tickets in advance or would not be seated until intermission. We’d get bulletins from ushers and sit in
spots that had come to be almost assigned. We’d face forward to the chancel
area where the “drama of worship” would unfold, complete with music, choir,
oratory, laughter and tears. If we liked something, we clapped and at a certain
point, we’d have the chance to make a donation of sorts, putting money in a
plate they passed around. We’d wait in a line to critique the pastor. We’d say
“Good sermon” and he’d say, “God bless you,” a sort of liturgical flight
attendant’s “Buh-bye” as we tired travelers stepped off the plane from the long
strange trip of worship.
Back in my Worship Workshop, I realized that everything
about Sunday worship sets up the congregation as the audience, but our
presenter was trying to get us to see that we are not the passive critiquers
and consumers of an entertainment event. The answer he wanted for “Who is the
audience for worship?” was clearly not us, but God. He pointed out that liturgy
means “work of the people” and that in that sense all the gathered community
participated in this drama of worship. But something about the analogy seemed
to be missing for me. Did that mean that God was our passive audience and that
we were up there working like roadies to earn God’s standing ovation? That seemed
a little too “saved by works” for me, and didn’t line up with what I found when
I experienced true worship, even in that same columned church at the age of 7.
Worship was an encounter with a living God, who was not just a passive receiver
of “our” worship. God participated too!
God directed it. God was all up in it in ways we could not anticipate on the
way to the “theatre”. It was a dance, full of surprises and unexpected turns
and spins. It was an encounter with a burning bush, that ignites but doesn’t
consume, a dancing fire, a loving God who calls us and challenges us, who makes
liturgy leap off the page into something else—something that changes us, little
by little, into people who look more like Christ. If worship was “our” offering
to God, it was at best a paper kite, scrawlings on a page, images on a screen.
When the community gathered for worship, we held our kite out at arms length
and waited for God to take it where God would. The holy breath would flow in
community to give life to that which we had made, taking it to places we never
thought it would go. This was no passive audience, and we were not actors. This
was silver being refined, this was a true story about God and God’s beloved
whispered in our ears by Someone other than us.
What is worship about? What is
it for? Larry Stookey has this to say,
and I don’t know that I could say it better:
What Worship is About
By Larry Stookey (reprinted with
permission)
Worship is not first of all about me.
It is above all else about GOD—
God’s
marvelous glory,
God’s
boundless compassion, and
God’s
stubborn insistence
On
transforming the world
That
divine love created and redeemed in Christ.
Next:
Through worship God wills and works
To change
all of us,
To empower
us by the power of the Holy Spirit to minister as those
Who
renounce injustice
in favor of
justice
who
reject greed
in
favor of generosity
who
forego self-direction
in
favor of interdependent discipleship.
Only then is worship about me
As I am a
part of God’s “us.”
