The Play's (Not) the Thing: a Word about Worship

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.”