2018-01-30
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 1:21-28
Worship
Worship. What an odd word. It’s not a word we use very often. We may say we worship the sun or a particular clothing designer or black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream. I may hope that Mary worships the ground I walk on, but I’m thinking I should let go of that! Worship is not a big word in daily conversation. And yet it’s at the heart of what we do here. And, at the same time, it’s in trouble.
When I was a child, my life was organized around three things: family, school, and church. Along with those other two, worship and church were at the heart of who I was. And this was the case with nearly everyone I knew. Sunday was church day. Whether it was boring or thrilling was hardly relevant. Like family dinners or a set bedtime or sports practices and games, this was just what you did. It gave meaning and structure and joy to our lives. It was rich.
Those days, startlingly, are now gone. For so many people, that core organizing ritual is absent. As I mention in my February Spire article, my UCC clergy colleague Michael Piazza helped lead a conference I recently attended. Michael showed us a PowerPoint slide comparing worship figures from 1970 to figures for today. In 1970, Michael said, in a 400-member church, 200 would be expected to be in worship on Sunday morning. By the year 2000, in that same 400-member church, only 100 would be in worship. By 2015, in that same church, only 75 would show up for worship. And by 2020, the projection is that, in that same 400-member church, only 50 people will be present for worship. Some of you, I know, look around and wonder what’s happened to Federated. And I can certainly see why you might wonder that. But, as Michael Piazza said to us clergy at that conference, “It’s not you. It’s not your church. It’s the situation in the church as a whole.” That’s an astonishingly precipitous drop, a land-shift in worship attendance.
And yet we would still say that worship is at the heart of church life and a full relationship with the God who creates and sustains us. It’s what Jesus does in today’s story from Mark’s gospel. And it’s this thing we’re doing now. Here we offer praise. We listen for what we need. We sing and pray and hear an ancient story read and interpreted. We do this not because God needs it, but because we need it. We do this to remind ourselves that there is One larger than we are. We do this because the things that matter most to us are not things we can accomplish on our own. We do this to find direction and hope.
If you’re like me, you sometimes, or maybe often, forget who and whose you are. The story from Mark’s gospel talks about a demon taking over a person. And no matter what we may think of literal demons, on a metaphorical level, we all know what it is to be invaded by a poison, a toxin that chips away at us and wears us down. You and I can be overcome by fear or discouragement or the insidious sense that we’re not particularly worthwhile. When life gets contorted like that, we come to worship to let Jesus drive that demon out. We come to have imprinted on our hearts again those insistent words of God: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). Not just when we act perfectly; not just when we feel great; not just when everything’s a success—that’s when the demon tells us things will be OK. But when things fall apart and we don’t know what to do to put them back together, that’s when we need to hear again and again the heavenly words spoken to Jesus at his baptism: “You are my beloved Child, in whom I take delight” (Mark 1:11). The truth is not our failings or our distress or our fears. Jesus tells that demon to get out. The truth is the joyful acceptance God offers to every one of us: come home. Come home: that’s the heart of worship. Come home to the warm and inviting hearth. Come home to recline in God’s arms. Come home to receive the blessing that counters the demons of self-hatred and sorrow and fear. Come home.
An Oklahoma minister named Sam Storms says that we come to worship “for” God. Now one way to hear that word “for” is that we come to offer God something. And in a sense we do. We come to offer God our thanks and praise. But we’re also not giving God anything that God doesn’t already have. We’re not here to help God—to bring God a meal or bind up his wound or offer her some sort of amenity. We’re not here “for” God in the sense that we’re giving something to God.
Sam Storms says, instead, that we are here “for” God in the sense that we are here for what God offers us. We’re here for what God gives us—as if we were incredibly thirsty and a truck pulled up with ice cold water. For us. You and I are “desperate for refreshment.” We come to God “for what God alone can provide: life-giving, thirst-quenching, soul-refreshing water” (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/are-you-insulting-god-in-worship). We come, not first to give, but to receive.
On the other hand, we’re not here in worship just to receive. If we thought that were all we were here for, that would be its own demon. So we come here, as well, to offer. Life is richer, for example, when we take time each day to say “Thank you.” Thank you, God, that I live in a world of the Grand Canyon and Monet’s water lilies. Thank you, God, that I have family and friends whom I love and who love me. Thank you, God, that, when things are going badly and I’m down or discouraged, you are there to say, “Hey Hamilton, no matter how bad things may seem now, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’” So we need to say, and our lives wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t say: Thank you, God!
We are here to respond, not only by saying Thank you, but in countless different ways. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard had a telling analogy for worship, one you may have heard before. “Although many people assume that worship is a performance in which God is the prompter, the pastor is the performer, and the congregation is the audience, it is more properly understood as a performance in which the pastor is the prompter, the members of the congregation are the performers, and God is the audience” (quoted in Martin Copenhaver, To Begin at the Beginning, pp. 126-127). It may be tempting, in other words, to think of Mark, Susi, and me, along with lay worship leaders, as the ones doing the acting on a Sunday morning. God prompts us and then we do the best we can—which can lead to that old Protestant parlor game of having “roast preacher for lunch,” as you dissect and evaluate what the worship leaders have done, and how well we’ve done it. No, said Kierkegaard, we clergy are the prompters; we’re the ones who remind the gathered faithful of their lines and their movements on the stage of life. It’s you—and I, too, of course—who are the actors. You are the ones who practice the work of faith. You are the ones who live it out.
So worship is sort of this interplay between our receiving what God offers us, and our living out lives of gratitude and love in return. God drives the figurative demons out and showers us with blessing, and we seek, as best we can, with God’s help, to share that love with others.
You’ve heard me say before that when I was in my mid-twenties, I woke up one Sunday morning and felt lost and alone. Remembering the faith of my childhood, I knew I needed to worship. I knew I needed to be reminded of the truth of my life, that God surrounds me and fills me and holds me, and that there is hope and direction for me. I needed to be in worship for the blessing that I hoped for from God. The story of my life has been, in many ways, the repeated rediscovery of that blessing. I have been blessed by my mother and now-deceased father, my brother and his family, my spouse, our two sons, a daughter-in-law and now a grandbaby. I have a job that fills me, and more comforts than anyone has a right to.
Worship reminds me that, not just in some amorphous general way, the love of God shines all around me every single day. This past Wednesday, I went out for my customary morning walk. You may remember that it was an icy morning—four times that day, in fact, I heard tales of people falling on the ice. Well you can probably guess what happened to me. As a pickup truck approached me, I stepped off the road onto the curb. It was sheer ice, and down onto my back I went, right on someone’s driveway. The man in the pickup, whom I know casually, leaped out of his truck and walked right to me. And what I remember so vividly is the way he looked at me. He may simply have been trying to see if my pupils were dilating, but that’s not what I took in. What I saw was a man looking at me with tender compassion, to make sure I was OK. “Are you alright?” he asked. “I saw your head hit the pavement.” I assured him that I felt fine, that I didn’t seem to have broken anything, and that I would be OK continuing my walk home. He touched me gently on the arm, then returned to his truck to go to work. Strikingly, two days later, on Friday morning, he passed me again as he headed to work. Again he stopped, rolled down his window, and asked me solicitously how I was. I told him that, other than a slightly stiff neck, I felt fine. And I thanked him for his care. “I really appreciate your stopping the other day and today.”
Worship reminds me of the intense special blessing it is to be wrapped in arms of care. It’s that that God offers us every moment of our lives. That’s the first thing we come to worship for—to receive blessing and warmth and reassurance.
At the same time, though, when I first returned to worship as an adult that day in my twenties, I needed to be there, not just to receive, but to give. I needed be reminded that my life was incomplete without some sort of passing on of that love I had received. I had a rather pedestrian job at the time, with no real outlet for giving in an ongoing way. And while many people find ways to give when they have such a job, I didn’t. Something in me knew I needed to find work that made some sort of difference. So I took a new job in a halfway house working with mentally challenged men who had committed crimes. The purpose of that halfway house was to help these men learn to live in the community. We taught them to shop and cook and do their laundry. We taught them to ride public transportation. And we reinforced for them the importance of honoring the integrity of others. It was work that made a difference for those men.
What was striking, though, was the way it enlarged my world and made a huge difference for me, as well. I still have vivid memories of the four men with whom I worked. Teddy O’Neil, suave and minxish; Joe DeRocher, lithe and powerful; Joe Diaz, charmingly ready to put one over on you; and Bill Bailey, a little fireplug who hated it when you sang “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” to him. Why are these men and their obvious challenges so present to me nearly forty years later? Why do I easily recall their names and faces and characteristics? I have a sense that it’s because, in the sometimes difficult, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious interactions I had with them, we were connecting on a level that really mattered. I was giving them something they needed. And they were giving me something I needed more than I could possibly have known at the time. And in that mutual giving, something of worship’s force and beauty was being enfleshed. Petty and selfish and errant demons were being driven out. We were vessels of God’s love for each other. In that giving and receiving, we were, all of us, “blessed to be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2).
What in the world does all this have to do with worship, you may well be wondering? Worship is literally attending to what’s “worthy”—they come from the same word. In worship, we adore what’s at life’s center. We receive God’s giant hug and we let it remake us, let it ground us again in the incredible gift it is to be alive and to be children of God. And as we receive that amazing gift, as we invite it into our lives, it drives away the figurative demons and enables us to do the work we were meant to do. It gives us strength and courage to challenge systems of oppression. It empowers us to visit people who are sick and feed people who are hungry. It reshapes us into people who are there not just for ourselves, but for so many others in whose presence both we and they are enriched. This is the power and the glory of worship. May it always be so!