Why Worship?

At the beginning of this week I asked myself one simple question. “Why worship?” Given that one of the most important roles I play in community is to lead worship, you would think I’d already answered this question for myself, but you’d be wrong. I have a heart for worship, every bit of my being longs to worship, like prayer I feel that I am right with God when I worship, I even have some notion of a desired outcome of worship, but I had, before this week, never sat down and constructed a theology of the specific act of communal worship. I’m not sure I have even now, for the answer I have reached this week feels more like a waypoint on a journey than a final destination, provisional, so I offer you a tour, not an answer, a trip through my heart and my head.

It all began with this week’s psalm, classified as a psalm of praise. In fact, praise psalms provide the text for this second Sunday, as well as the sixth and final Sunday, of this series. The first line of the psalm is a directive, Praise the Lord! We more often hear it in its Hebrew form, or some derivative of that form, where it is simply this: Hallelujah! Hebrew spelling, Latin version, doesn’t matter, it is always an instruction. Praise the Lord!

But why praise the Lord? Why praise God?

In primitive cultures, where things like plate tectonics and atmospheric pressure were mysteries, there was a need to construct a deity as a place holder and target for all of the anxiety and mystery of human life. The idea of God was an idol, material or immaterial, a force that one could propitiate in order to assure survival. Blood magic, sacrifice, anything to convince this force to provide rain, but not too much, to help you defeat the giants you might face. This is still the primitive theology of the prosperity gospel, where false prophets like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, and no, I’m not making that name up, where these men preach that earthly holiness leads to earthly success, sort of like that “wisdom” psalm we encountered last week. But we can see clearly that that particular theology had long been abandoned by the time Jesus came along. Bad things happen to good people, as Rabbi Kushner famously wrote, and no amount of Jobian fiction will explain it away.

And so, in the kerygma of Christ, we see the promise of delayed reward. Praise and obey God now, receive your prosperity after death. Which is only slightly more credible, especially to the progressive Christian, who recognizes, along with the late Gordon Kaufman, that God is neither anthropomorphic, human-shaped, nor anthrocentric, human-oriented. It just doesn’t seem likely that God created the entire cosmos simply to place God-like creatures, tiny and finite, on one speck orbiting one star in one galaxy for one brief moment. What’s worse, this anthrotheology posits a God that is a needy codependent, the entire reason for human existence being God’s need to be praised. Hogwash!

Even if we concede a human-oreinted God, we’d have to admit to what Marilyn McCord Adams calls the “metaphysical size gap,” the idea that for God to be God as we understand means that the praise, needs, bargains and sins of the single human cannot change God. Never mind the logic that says if some tens of thousands of hockey fans are praying for a Lightening victory and some tens of thousands are praying for a Blackhawks victory, then how is it fair to the righteous fans of one team or the other when their prayers go unanswered? Never mind what happens if one Chicago-native too many sins between game five and game six, tipping the balance and sending the Stanley Cup to the tropical south.

So we do not praise God for God. We do not praise God to bargain with God. Praising God, however right, is driven by our humanness. We are “toward” God in our being just as the Word is “toward” God in the opening lines of John’s gospel. At least those of us who believe in the divine experience the world in this way. So praise is just one mood of this towardness, of this relatedness. And we are toward, related to, other humans as well, for we are social animals, our thriving dependent on our interconnectedness, despite the cult that glorifies Ayn Rand, Ted Kaczynski and Cliven Bundy. And so we act out our praise of God, this mysterious way in which we are toward God, in community, in acts of worship. But why?

Worship, communal worship, appears to be dying fast, the post-mortem already complete in prosperous parts of Europe. We’ve tweaked worship, added slides and guitar and praise music, and people still don’t come. Most of your own children, many raised in this church, do not worship, for we have worked on the how of worship without ever addressing the why. These people still long for God, still seek to soothe their metaphysical angst by turning to the church for baptisms, weddings and funerals, but they see no value in the exercise of communal worship. They do not find God there. We can blame Sunday-morning soccer, we can blame lives that are busier and busier so that Sunday is all that is left for rest and family, but in truth Sunday morning worship, the communal praise of God, simply doesn’t matter because usually it doesn’t do anything but take time and check some imaginary box.

Now, I have no patience for “spiritual not religious,” code to me for “lazy and self-centered, but unwilling to admit it.” But the failure is ours. Far too many of those left in the pews come out of habit, come to see friends, come to seek self-fulfillment through performance, leadership, the need to be needed. There is far too little power in our churches, and too many other places to get some of what the church offers.

Why come to church to change the world when I can pick and choose organizations to receive my money and my time that are a better match to my values, and that all too often are more effective than the old paternalistic models of charity to which so many churches desperately cling?

Why come to the church for a moment of transcendence when I have a fine recording of Adagio for Strings, and I can crank that baby up and soar?

Why come to church for healing when a therapist will tell me what I want to hear, and I can anesthetize myself with mind-numbing products, from the latest feel-good pill to the cheapest goods from China?

Why come to church when the church is so conformed to culture that it preaches the same nationalism, the same consumerism, the same capitalism, as corporate journalism, as corporate entertainment, as corporate education?

Why praise God and worship when praising God is not going to change my material existence, and if the pastor even believes in heaven and hell at all, she or he is likely to tell every family that passes through the door that the dead loved one is in the bosom of Jesus? Can we even believe in the old check-box theologies anymore?

Why bother with these expensive old buildings and this demanding messiness of community?

Paul wants us to believe that our lives will be remarkably different if they are given over to Christ.

C.S. Lewis says the question is not whether Christians are better than non-Christians, but whether the individual person is better as a Christian than they would be without faith.

If we are truthful, our lackluster praise, our boring worship, is unremarkable, watered down pablum designed to offend no one, to make no demands. It has no power to shape lives We re-enact powerful rituals, but we have made them convenient and polite and they have lost all power. A sprinkle here, a Jesus cookie there… There are churches that switched to white wine for communion because the whole idea of blood is so uncomfortable and besides it is easier to clean up if it spills.

Why praise God? If our praise doesn’t get us anything that we can see?

Because we are toward God. Because we are not simply animals designed to rut and reproduce. Because we have that X in the equation, these souls. We see evidence of this mysterious X in art, in sacrificial love. That part in us that soars is toward God and toward the other, the other beyond one’s own family, for even thieves take care of their own. No philosophical tricks will ever reconcile the Social Darwinism that vilifies the poor and justifies greed to the agape love, that radical X that takes root in the Hebrew prophetic trajectory and that bears fruit in the life and teachings of Jesus.

We stand on the edge of next, always leaning over. We only become ourselves in our becoming. As much as I love Buddhism, I’ll never be a good Buddhist, because I never want to eliminate desire, eliminate attachment, for my heart longs for God and longs for you and longs for justice. I am becoming in a world that is becoming, created by a God that is becoming. Maybe this is why there is no answer, why every systematic theology, every catechism, is doomed to fail. There is only the journey with that Divine Mystery we name as God.

When worship is done well, it feels like a wave of divine becoming, not because we have manipulated and managed to create an emotional frenzy, but because it taps into that becoming, that being toward. It feels like surfing, like being drawn in and moved by something beyond our control. It challenges our senses and tugs at our X and those who lead worship are simply the vessels for this power. And that is why no worship that is about meeting my needs will ever be real worship. Worship can involve transcendence, can speak to changing the world, can give you the tools to get through next week, can give you comfort when you need comfort and challenge you when you are stuck, but it does so only in that it aligns, is toward, God and toward God as experienced in the other. This is the opposite of the aimlessness and sin mentioned in our UCC Statement of Faith. This is aim.

We praise God because we are of God and our hearts long for God. We worship God because we are toward God and toward the other, and that moment of communal worship is a moment of doubling, of tripling, of giving and receiving, a threefold relationship of self, other and God. It is a moment when we are right with the world, in our proper place, when we are home.

When we do that, when worship isn’t about habit or the fear of death, but is about the experience of life, then our houses of worship will be filled. The Sunday Times will wait, the Sunday soccer leagues will be abandoned. It can happen in a soaring Gothic Cathedral, in a storefront church in the inner city. It can happen at any time, in any place, if only we let it.

May we become, in praise and in worship, every day.

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