Enough with the Worship

This morning I was reading from Paul's letter to the Galatians, and I was struck by this line.  "You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years."  Paul is chastising them for abandoning their new life in Christ and returning to something old. Perhaps this refers to Jewish festivals or perhaps pagan ones. Either way, we church folks have our special days, months, seasons, and years. (We're in "year C"by the way.)

I also came across this in today's meditation by Richard Rohr. "Most of us just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, 'Worship me!' whereas he frequently says, 'Follow me.'" And that reminded me of this passage from Amos. "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies." That's God speaking by the way, who goes on to say, "Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

It must be one of those days when I can stop making connections, because I found myself thinking back to Paul's words to the Corinthian church from Sunday's sermon, famous words that said without love (that's Christ-like, self-giving love) all else we do is meaningless.  "Noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" is one of Paul's illustrations.

Yet despite all this, church in American remains focused heavily on worship. As a pastor, I can mess up a great many things, but if most people are happy with the worship, I will get by. There's a reason we get referred to as "preachers," and people joke about us working one day a week.

I don't have anything against worship, and indeed my tradition thinks it of vital importance. But when people of faith define that faith by private belief and attendance at worship, we have moved into the territory of the quotes above.  

When it comes to this, the now largely finished Christendom role that traditional, mainline churches once played is a huge albatross around our necks. In that former time, we imagined ourselves partners with the culture in a Christian enterprise. We could concern ourselves largely with worship in the mistaken notion that the culture itself was somehow forming people to live as disciples and providing them with opportunities to serve. Being a "good citizen" was very nearly equal to "discipleship."

While being a good member of one's community can indeed by a way of living out faith in Jesus, there is plenty Jesus calls us to that our communities often prefer that we wouldn't do. While this would seemingly be obvious to anyone who as actually read the gospels, the fact that some faithful church people endorsed racially based slavery as God-ordained, fought against civil rights, and think defending the right to bear arms is a Christian duty points to how easily the obvious gets overlooked.

Still, we in the dwindling mainline church keep focusing on worship, often to the point of everything else being tokens. We keep expecting that if we do good worship people will keep coming because that was what we did in Christendom. But if anyone asks us how to experience the Spirit's help and guidance or what it actually means to follow Jesus, we stammer, suggest they talk to someone else, or tell them about the new, informal worship service we are planning.  And then we wonder why things are going so poorly for our brand.

Since I'm making so many connections today, here's another one, from a piece by Jack Haberer of the Presbyterian Outlook which begins, "The bad news is that the older generations have wrecked the church. The good news is that newer generations are poised to resurrect it — that is, to support Jesus’ resurrection program." (If you're curious you can read the editorial here.) 

I wonder if this realization by Haberer isn't critical to traditional churches.  We have to quit thinking of ourselves as wonderful, sacred bearers of God's timeless, heavenly truths, and admit that we need resurrecting. While there is plenty in our tradition that does have value and worth, that is a faithful expression of what it means to follow Jesus (By the way, some of these new generations of resurrection folks are much more keenly aware of our traditions' merits than we in them are.), there is much that is nothing but old, tired habit that we have made idols.  And increasingly, younger people who are looking for a living faith with a living God are rejecting our human-made idols that have proven as inert as the ones Old Testament prophets railed against.

There's an old adage about the church being a hospital for sinners rather than a club for saints. Even though I'm not sure we really believe that, perhaps we need to take it one step further and recognize that it is not only we individuals who need healing. The institutional church that we create could use some critical care.  Now where are those defibrillator paddles?

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