What is Worship? Part 3- reflections on Philippians 2, 1-11

A few years ago I went to visit some friends of mine who went to a large church on the edge of a busy city. The place was packed with funky families and enthusiastic worshippers who all seemed to know each other and had things to do and places to go during the service. The music was great, the sermon entertaining, informative, profound, challenging and short, and the coffee was fantastic. It made me feel a bit dissatisfied with the church I was attending, great as it was, over towards Rugby. I spoke to my vicar about it and we had a chat about what made for a ‘perfect church’. He caused me to reflect that for me perhaps my dissatisfaction arose from my view that the perfect church would be a place where people think like me, worship like me and share my religious views, a place where we are always in harmony as we journey together, a place where I can do what I like. Is that what church is about, he asked me.


We’ve looked at worship being about God, not us, and how it is a 24/7 thing. Also looked at some of what we do here on Sunday mornings in relation to the early church. Today we’re going to think a bit about what it mean for us and those we know that we are people who worship God, and maybe we can reflect on what it means to us to be a part of this church. Our reading today said something very important about what it means to be a Christian, about how we are to behave and to act towards others-we should value others and do things for them, copying the way that Jesus values us and has done the most amazing thing for us-taking all our mistakes and bad behaviour so that we can be best friends with the God who made the universe. It says we should be ‘like-minded’, trying to be as Jesus-like as we can. It is a great encouragement to work to make the church all it can be. Indeed the passage actually tells us how to have a perfect church…it tells us that it is about each of us and how we think and act. We need a new attitude, one that comprises of a heart that is open and receptive to God.

Sunday Club rules-"have fun", "listen carefully", "be kind" etc. are the rules that the children themselves agreed would make the group the very best for all of them, and these rules say something about how the children downstairs are to value and respect each other and do things for someone other than themselves. Actually, those rules aren’t just for downstairs-kids, they are for when you get upstairs too. And when you get home, and when you’re at school etc . They give guidance on how to not just think about yourself. They help you to be more like Jesus.

And actually, they aren’t rules just for the children, either. We grown-ups can take guidance from them, too. They provide a good template for how we are to behave when we’re in church, valuing others above ourselves and looking not to our own interests but to the interests of others. It’s a real challenge. Who are these ‘others’, these ones with interests different from our own? Is it the rest of the congregation? The children? Or is it bigger than that? Could it be the guests we have with us today as we celebrate these wonderful baptisms? Could it be even bigger than that-could it be everyone in this neighbourhood who isn’t here? What a challenge that is, to try to put their needs before our own, particularly when we come to church on Sunday. How might that change how we behave when we are here? What might people think of us if we all always put them before ourselves, finding out what they need and trying to serve them?

But by doing so we imitate Christ, and look what the outcome of his humility was-every knee bowed, every tongue confessing, everyone accepting that Jesus is Lord and worshipping him. If we can act gently and for the good of others in all that we do, whether at church, in Sunday Club, wherever we are, we are imitating Jesus, and by doing so we are helping our family, our friends, our church family, our class mates, our work mates, our neighbours to discover something of the love of Christ. And then perhaps it will rub off on their family, friends, class mates, work mates etc. and we will see more of the love of God throughout this neighbourhood. And if that goes well maybe we’ll see more of the love of God throughout this City, throughout the Midlands, throughout Britain until every knee will bow and every tongue confess, until everyone knows that Jesus is Lord and that God loves them.

What is Worship Part 2: Thoughts on Acts 2

We are exploring the subject of worship for a few weeks and today we are looking at the Elements, the ingredients of Worship. If you were starting a new church from scratch and could ignore the last 2000 years of church history, what would you do, what ingredients would you think were important for church worship? What kind of church would it be? What would it be known for in the community? What would you do when you met together, and why? Why is it we do what we do here?

There are certain elements of worship that were there right from the beginning.

Apostles teaching, Fellowship, Breaking bread, Prayers, Sharing possessions in common

And note that they added daily to their number.

The elements described in the first century are in our worship too. Throughout church history this is what the church has done when it’s met together - in one way or another. And today we have even added to our number as we have welcomed Shianne into our midst.

Different churches and denominations today have different ways of expressing these same elements – you may be familiar with some but they are all there to enable worship, to enable us to express what God is worth to us and to help others to do the same.

Let’s have a look for a few minutes in a bit more detail at these elements and how we express them here. If you want to know even more about how the C of E arrived at the precise formulas that it uses feel free to ask me:

Praise of God

What we sing is what we think of God, and how we sing it is how we feel about God. –something about choruses liberating churches from confines of hymns. Music has always changed as the people of God have expressed their praise of God in the method of their age. Even what we call old hymns like Amazing Grace are only 250 years old, and so was brand new when it was first sung. You may have seen the film. What do we want to say now-need to keep revising our canon.

The apostles teaching

Why do we still need sermons after 2000 years of preaching? Surely it’s all been said? As your vicar I have been commissioned and licensed by The Bishop to, on his behalf, proclaim the gospel afresh to this generation, and indeed when Nic was given permission to celebrate Communion I marked it by asking him to make that same declaration in front of you all. Mick will have said the same when he was licensed as a lay reader. The same gospel, but proclaimed afresh. Not proclaimed like it was when we were young, or when we first went to church, but proclaimed afresh in a way that enables us, here and now, to engage with both the truth of God and the reality of the world around us. That’s why we still need sermons, to enable the Spirit of God to speak directly to us and to move us from the pews to the people, from the safety of our church building to the broken and hurting community in which we are set, from this place of beauty and warmth to the harshness of a world where people’s bodies and resources are being exploited daily within yards of where we are sat right now.

It’s not just the sermon where we might have ‘the apostles teaching’.

Studying and discussing the Bible together every other Monday is a wonderful way to explore our faith and grow as worshipping Christians, and actually when we meet for the prayer meeting every Tuesday evening we’ve been looking at what the Bible says about prayer. Bishop’s certificate, on-line courses (foundations21), books and guides, Alpha Course. The word ‘disciple’ means ‘student’ or ‘learner’. Ask yourself what nourishes you, what feeds your understanding and knowledge of God and the Bible. If we’re not learning and growing then it means that we aren’t disciples and so we might get a nasty surprise when we try to enter the kingdom of God!

Fellowship

The idea behind having the Peace just before the Eucharistic Prayer is so that if we are out of sorts with anyone, we can put things right. We talk about having ‘fellowship’ afterwards over coffee and that can be an opportunity to share something of our concerns with each other in the ups and downs of life. It doesn’t have to be all serious – there can be lots of fun in fellowship too.

There are other ways, too, though. Spending time in each others homes, helping each other with jobs or chores or sharing skills, coming together to plan something, maybe having a working party to look after this building instead of leaving it all to the wardens and deputy warden.

The Collection

Not just so that we can pay for a vicar and keep a church building over our heads! In fact here are some tough figures for you. You may not know this, but the cost of having a vicar, including training and curacy and housing etc., is roughly £50K per year. (I don’t get that much, I’m paid just over 20K. And we pay roughly £7K towards the cost of having me here.

Now I’m not suggesting that we hurriedly find another £43K to put in the plate (though if anyone has it spare I won’t say no), but we do need to think carefully about how we share our resources with others. Scripture encourages us to give a realistic proportion of what we have and earn in order to share with others - both here in our community and all over the world. The collection is part of our worship – giving back to God in gratitude so that we may share in his provision for others. And actually our meeting together is made possible because of the collections taken in other parts of the diocese. Wouldn’t it be great if one day we could offer something back, or in some way we could share our resources more widely? Feedback from Foodbank meeting.

The Breaking of Bread

This can be done formally or informally, and we need to be clear which it is we are engaging in.

We formally do this by celebrating Communion as we are about to. And when we do so we do so reverently and respecting the 2000 years of tradition that is represented when we do it. When I am leading us in Communion-most important thing I am doing and nothing should detract from it as the centre piece of our worship. That’s why, although I love to do it, I won’t play the guitar when it is a communion service.

The early Christians mostly met in people’s homes to break bread – there weren’t church buildings for a long time. Have you ever thought that offering hospitality and sharing a meal together is a way of worshipping God in an informal way?

The Prayers

Praising the Lord, confessing our sins and failures, interceding for the world – is worship. Whether silent or out loud – if it’s from the heart, it is worship.

Whether sung or spoken, in prose or poetry – if it’s from the heart, it’s worship.

Whether we read formal prayers or pray spontaneously – if it’s from the heart, it is worship.

When the Sunday Club come back they’ll probably lead us in a prayer. It might not be how you would pray. You might not hear it clearly. But know that it is worship, offered to God.

Conclusion

Worship is an affair of the heart.

When the Holy Spirit came upon the people of the first church they went from being frightened and downcast to getting together and laying the foundations to how we worship together. And the church grew rapidly and people’s lives were changed. When we worship together we would do well to reflect upon how each part of the service helps not just us but other’s too to have their lives transformed by God.

What is Worship? Thoughts on John 4.

The true worshipper worships in spirit and in truth.

I love this story. Jesus having a chat with someone he shouldn’t be talking to about having a drink and then talking about her sex-life, and then they have this amazing philosophical discourse about whether it matters where and how we worship God. So this kicks off a 4 part series on worship.

1/ what is worship

2/ the elements of worship

3/ how are we changed by worship

And then after our holiday a last one on worshipping when it’s difficult.

What is Worship?

What is worship, and why is it important? It’s not a word we use very often in everyday life, but it’s common in church. In the bit of the church that I have spent several years in it is used to refer to the music, the singing, although somehow I was never sure whether it still applied to the hymns. Maybe that’s what worship means to you. Perhaps it means something different, like when you are praying alone, or when you are receiving communion. Perhaps it just means ‘going to church’

Are worship and church services the same thing? When we gather here for our 10am service, it may be worship for some or all of us, but it could just as easily be reciting a script and singing songs or coming and meeting with friends. How do you think it was for some of the guests we had here last week? Going through a church service is only worship if something deeper is going on (which may also have happened for some of those guests). Jesus told the woman that place didn’t matter, that we don’t need to come to church to know him. We don’t need to come to church to worship him. We don’t need to come to church to seek forgiveness. We don’t need to come to church to receive God’s mercy. Our offerings to God, our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving as well as our petitions and the pleadings of our contrite hearts, are acceptable to God when they are offered in integrity, when we worship in spirit and in truth.

Let’s look at the definition of worship. The English word ‘worship’ comes from an older word ‘worthship’. If you’ve seen X-factor you’ll have seen people being asked what it would mean to them if they won. “It means the world to me” or “It means everything”. They’re saying what the prospect of winning is worth to them – that’s ‘worthship’. So when we talk about worshipping God, the heart of it is about showing what God means to us. Do we sound as sincere as those young singers? The heart of the meaning of worship is about expressing how much God matters to us, in response to the love he has shown to us in Jesus.

And church – the community of people who follow Jesus - is a worshipping community. But the music isn’t the worship. And neither is the quiet prayer time. Nor the communion. the words, the songs and all the other ingredients are there to help us to express our worship when we’re in church. Our calling is to worship, not to services. Coming to church may be helpful to us. It can help in so many ways, providing teaching and fellowship, and it may also allow us to filter out the chaos and confusion that prevents us from seeking and finding God in our daily lives. As it says in Proverbs, we ‘sharpen’ each other by coming together ‘as iron sharpens iron’. Church services help us to express what God means to us, sometimes in surprising ways.

So if worship is about the whole of life, and not just services held at a particular time, what do we mean by worship? What has the Bible got to say about it?

The first and most obvious thing to say is that worship is about God and not us.

All too often debates about worship become discussions about specific things and about our tastes. People talk about whether they like old services or new ones, organs or guitars, and why did they do that, stand there, etc. You can probably tell that I am used to doing things informally during church services. But please don’t mistake that for not desiring to express how great God is.

Because the questions we should be asking are about how our lives show what God means to us. When I come here on a Sunday morning I ask myself How do I show how much God means to me in the way that I prepare myself, the way that I strive to do my very best when serving his church? Even formality can express a lack of respect for God if it is not used to communicate how amazing he is.

Further questions: How do I show God’s worth in the way I talk to people or about them? How do I show his worth in my attitudes, my values, my relationships? Last week Graham helped us to think about how do we put God first in our giving, in our spending, in our priorities, in our ambitions? And actually, for most Christians the question isn’t ‘how’? but ‘do I’ put God first in these areas?

Putting God first means living in a way that the world at large may not expect, may find strange, may even oppose, but in a way that shows God’s heart. As James reminds us, it’s about caring for widows and orphans (James 1:27), and back in the Old Testament, the prophets said it was about justice, not religious rituals (Micah 6:6-8). That should be true for us individually and in our life together.

Second worship is about what we put into it, not what we get out of it

I have a confession. One of my pet hates in church services relates to music. When I was younger I listened to lots of very diverse music and I have very broad and eclectic tastes. This week I have been listening to Beyonce, Ed Shearan, Chase and Status, and Miles Davis. I like all sorts. But one thing I don’t like is those choruses written with a sort of Hebrew style that get faster and faster. You know the ones, and you may well not share my view. I don’t know why, but they sort of bug me. Which I’m sure is why God put it on the hearts of the children when they chose the songs for the service after the sleepover to sing not one but two of them when I was on guitar duty and was unfamiliar with playing them. So what did I do? Now I’m not telling you this to make me look all holy but just because its what happened: I spent hours on the Saturday playing them over and over to ensure that I could make the necessary chord changes as the songs got faster. Hours practising my least favourite type of song ever, till I couldn’t get them out of my head. But I did it out of love for God and for the children. And I enjoyed it. JFK said “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. In all our thinking about worship, perhaps we need to hold on to something similar. I see that this has been paraphrased on the leaflets here asking about people’s gifts, and look at the fruit-different people, different voices, different faces, amazing growth and life in the Sunday Club. And I’m sure that there are other gifts lying waiting to be discovered but which some of you will be reluctant to offer up, perhaps due to lack of confidence or because you haven’t been encouraged. Worship isn’t done for us, it’s from inside us to glorify God, to encourage one another and to share with others. Everything we do should build up others when we meet. So when we experience something in a service that we may not particularly like or is unfamiliar, like a new song or a different prayer, or if we are asked to do something outside our comfort zone like read or preach or sing up front we need to consider how it might encourage others and strengthen them.

Third, worship is about who we are, and not about performing certain rituals.

The most used word in the Bible for Christian worship has quite a funny meaning. In the original language, it’s proskuneo and it’s usually translated as worship or sometimes pay homage.

Some commentators claim that it means to approach like a dog (pros = towards, kuon = dog) – a domesticated dog.

Story of Cerberus. Surprise that he did this as never had done EVER!

Here are a few examples of the word being used:

·        When the wise men fall to their knees and pay homage to the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:11)

·        When a leper approaches Jesus and bows to him (Matthew 8:2)

·        When a man with an unclean spirit falls at Jesus’ feet. (Mark 5:6)

·        It’s also the word used throughout the passage we heard today when they discuss worshipping in the Temple compared to worshipping on a mountain, and then Jesus says the kind of worshipper the Father wants is one who will worship in Spirit and in truth. (John 4)

·        It’s also the normal word for worship in heaven in the book of Revelation.

But notice, nearly all uses of this word concern worship outside religious buildings. When Jesus went to synagogues and the Temple it usually didn’t go well. He got a death threat after preaching on Isaiah in Luke 4, outrage that he healed someone on the Sabbath in a synagogue in Luke 13, and plots to kill him when he gets to the Temple during the days before his crucifixion.

Worship is actually about the big picture, about what we do for the other 166 hours of the week when we aren’t here. Do we live lives, in some sense, in acknowledgement that Jesus is sovereign in our lives, in every part of them?

So it’s vital to understand that worship isn’t confined to church:

A church service is when we come together to share in worship with others, to learn about the God we worship, and encourage each another. It is a vital and important resource, which is why worshippers will give carefully and prayerfully to support the life of the church. (look at first reading) It’s why Graham came to speak to us, to remind us that bringing in the kingdom of God starts with our own hearts and whether we prioritise the life and work of Christ’s church.

So as we've looked at what is worship, we’ve learned that it is about God, not us, that it’s about what we put in and not what we get out, and it is about who we are, not what we do in church.

Worship is expressing what God means to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not for 1 ½ hours one day a week. It’s about the way we live our lives, the choices we make, the words we use, the money we spend, the time we give. In other words it’s about who we are and the priorities we have. And worship is an amazing privilege, to be able to come into the presence of the living God and express how awesome he is. If for some reason we could no longer meet here on a Sunday we would still know God. We would still be called worship him. We would still need to seek forgiveness. We would still freely receive his mercy. And it is in knowing this, that worship is something we do all the time, everywhere, that we truly find God, like the woman here recognising Jesus as Messiah. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

So as we go through this series, my prayer is that God will enable both us and others worship God in Spirit and in truth. Amen.