Dr. Ron Sumners
May 1, 2005
In your imagination, follow me into some very special rooms. I know the children can do this, but some of us adults may have trouble dusting off our long-unused imagination.
First, we go into a spacious room, dark, slightly musty, with nooks and crannies in which you could hide if you wanted to. In this room there are a number of people who seem to be lost in thought, even asleep, sitting with their eyes closed and their bodies relaxed.
Others are on their knees, their lips mumbling something. At the front someone is speaking, but his speech is quiet and almost inaudible, and his focus does not appear to be on the people scattered in the room, but on the items on a large table just in front of where he is standing. Off to the side, in the shadows, we see flickering candles in front of a statue of a woman holding an infant in her arms. What is this place and what is this activity? This is Christian worship, Roman Catholic style.
Follow me now to another room. It is very different from the room that we just left. This is not a spacious room; it is a small space, harshly lit by a couple of dangling light bulbs. The folding chairs on which some of the people are sitting are battered and bent, as if they had been given away several times before they got to this place. This room has not always been a gathering place. On the walls there are fragments of old posters advertising soft drinks and cigarettes. This has been a storefront, but now, cramped and crowded with only thirty people in it, something very passionate is happening. Over in the corner is an elderly woman who raises her hands and her voice in an awkward half-melody and everyone else chimes in. Over in the other corner a young man on an electric keyboard finds her key and hammers away, and soon the sound overwhelms you. Bodies sway and heads fly back, hands clap and feet stomp. What is this? It is Christian worship, Pentecostal style.
Again, come with me to another room. This room is unlike the others we have visited. It is large without being immense, it is comfortable and beautiful. Here the people sit as if at attention. They say nothing, they do not walk around, except for some children who seem to have a bladder about the size of a peanut. And at the front there is someone who reads from the bible. Someone talks about various activities and the people all greet in a jovial way. Some half-hearted singing takes place until someone stands to talk for about thirty minutes. There is an awful lot of talking and little action. What is this activity? This too is Christian worship, Meadow Brook Baptist style!
If we were to continue our little imaginary tour, I could show you many different types and styles of worship. The variety is bewildering. Almost anything you can imagine is used to offer worship to God. We could see anything from monks chanting in monasteries to richly ornate Orthodox cathedrals, to the honky-tonk sound of a tinkly piano in a white frame country church, to the majestic sound of a pipe organ echoing through a vast cathedral, to the sheer silence of a Friends meeting, broken only when one feels moved by the spirit to speak. Worship can be a group of sleepy teen-agers around a campfire singing “Kum ba yah” or the rousing rhetoric of a preacher who has learned how to move people with his oratory. In all these things, people express Christian worship.
Can all of this really be worship? Can all of this truly voice what needs to be expressed before God? By what standards can I judge anything that somebody calls worship?
In the 149th Psalm, I find four affirmations; four distinctives that need to be evident if the “how” of worship is to be genuine.
First, worship must be fresh. I am not talking about form. I mean that worship must have in it spontaneity, an immediacy, something human, a part of ourselves. The Psalmist puts it this way, “Sing unto the Lord a new song. Let them praise His name with dancing, making melody to Him with tambourine and lyre.”
Sing a new song. Sing a fresh song. I don’t think that the Psalmist is telling us that we can’t sing our old favorites. I don’t think he is saying that we need to pick our worship music out of the top forty. No, he is telling us that we need to be fresh. We need to be personal, spontaneous, immediate and now. Not stale and routine, but fresh! Not hackneyed and clichéd, but for our time and for our needs.
It should come from our hearts right now!
Did you know that our spiritual ancestors were very definite on this point? When Baptists began in the 17th century, they were disgusted with the ritual of the churches in their time. They were so certain that everything associated with the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England was so ritualistic and so cut-and-dried, that they threw out everything they could throw out. The established church wore robes. So, they got rid of robes. I wear a robe only for weddings and for a very special service. Our ancestors threw out ministerial robes because they looked like a dead ritual.
They threw out other things too. They threw out the prayer book. Some churches use written prayers and take words written hundreds of years ago to express their feelings. Our Baptist forefathers threw out the prayer book and said that prayer must come from the heart in the immediacy of the moment. They felt it was a tradition that was the conveyor of dead ritual, so they got rid of prayer books.
We threw out the old rituals, but we developed our own. We threw out the robes, but we donned a black suit and occasionally the evangelist could wear a white one.
We threw out the prayer books, but we didn’t throw out ritual prayers. We built up a certain pattern of our own. I recall a deacon in my home church that was called upon to pray often. His prayer was always the same. We smart-aleck boys could say it with him. I’m sure that some of you have memorized the prayer that I say for our benediction every Sunday. Is it a ritual? Sure, it is! Is it fresh? It all depends on my heart and yours!
Worship must be fresh. We sing to the Lord a new song. We offer to the Lord our heart today. If you use what someone else has written, fine. But it needs to be from your heart. It must be fresh, spontaneous, and immediate.
It doesn’t matter whether the songs are a hundred years old or hot off the press; it is not whether they are stately and classical or spirited and down-home. It is whether we bring a fresh expectation to worship; it is whether we are going to open up and let passion fill our souls. It is not whether the instrument is a majestic pipe organ or a pair of tambourines; it is whether the experience is heart-felt, personal, immediate, and spontaneous. It is not whether the prayers are off the top of the head or off the top of the page; it is whether the one doing the praying makes them his own and leads others to pray. Worship must be fresh.
Second, worship must be done in community, not simply individual. Worship must take place in a gathered fellowship. It is not just an individual performance, it is not just personal feelings, and it is not just private experience. Worship is corporate, social, and done in community.
The Psalmist says, “Sing his praise in the assembly of the faithful. Let Israel be glad in its maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their king.”
In the assembly of the faithful, in the gathered community, we are to praise the Lord. We are more than a bunch of “I’s.” We find that God can do something with all of us together that He cannot do with individuals. God works through gathered people. Worship requires our presence before God and with each other! In worship we belong to each other as well as to God. I think that it is significant that we close every Sunday morning service by holding hands. It is a small thing but it signifies that we worship in community.
Thirdly, worship must have joy as its bottom line, not mere instruction. Worship is more than passing out information; it is celebrating release, it is finding hope and strength and freedom. Worship is joy.
There are going to be times when the mood of worship is somber and subdued; there is a time to mourn, a time for quiet. Even so, the bottom line is joy. There is one non-negotiable, one truth never to be sacrificed, and that is that God loves us. God cares for us. God takes pleasure in his people. The bottom line is joy because God is in the business of lifting us up out of the miry clay and setting our feet upon a rock, and for that there is no substitute.
How do we worship? I do not care whether you say it with a full-voiced shout or with a tiny whisper, but at least say this, “Joy!” I don’t care whether you sing it with the majesty of Bach or Beethoven or the exuberance of Michael W. Smith, but sing “Glory”, sing salvation. God loves us.
Joy is not something that is cooked up, pumped up by artificial respiration. I wish all of you could stand where I stand. I wish all of you could have seen the people I’ve seen through the years. I’ve seen people move from apathy to action. I’ve seen people move from hopelessness to joyful anticipation. I have seen people move from destructive sinfulness to righteous living. My joy is seeing love, ministry and reconciliation happen through you. That is my reward. This church pays me well. But that paycheck is not why I do what I do. It is you and all the others through the years that God has allowed me to work with. My compensation is the sheer joy I have in seeing lives changed through Jesus Christ.
And finally, our worship is not over when this service is over. It is not confined to this sanctuary. Our worship continues once we leave this room. It spills into the streets. Because we have been empowered by the spirit we are able to do bold, godly, Christ honoring things. That, too, is the “how” of worship.
The Psalmist arrives at this conclusion: “Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains of iron, to execute on them the judgment decree. This is glory for all the faithful ones.”
“Praise in our throats and a sword in our hands.” I am sure that what happens in this room seems very far away from what happens in the world. In here it is safe and harmonious. Out there, there is conflict and danger. In here we speak the language of Zion. Out there is the language of hatred, prejudice, filth, and froth. It seems that there is no connection between here and there!
How do we worship? We worship with mission in mind. We worship with a heart set on the purposes of God. We worship with a song on our lips and a prayer in our hearts, and Christ in our minds. We worship with a willing spirit, ready to be empowered to bring righteousness and justice to our world. We worship with a conscience led by the spirit of God, so that the fight against sin and oppression is winnable.
The most important “how” in our worship has nothing to do with what music we use, with how loud we are or how long the service lasts. It has everything to do with how we go into the world and what our worship empowers us to do.
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