The previous issue in this 1987 volume of The Mind Field explained that the
concluding three issues would deal with some practical matters: prayer, worship, and
witness. This issue contains the article on worship.
THE CHRISTIAN MIND AT WORSHIP
A striking difference between the modern West and Third World countries is often seen
by Westerners as an illustration of superstition that still clings to "backward"
nations. Third World peoples usually see all of life within a religious significance.
Westerners think that this ascription of transcendent significance to "natural"
things is a clinging remnant of ancient superstition not yet purged by scientific
thinking. They pride themselves on being free from such mythical beliefs.
This difference between East and West concerns the meaning or significance of objects and
happenings in ordinary life. Third World peoples commonly interpret them within a
religious framework. There are spirits in stones and trees, or an accident is a sign of
bad "karma". Frameworks differ, but nothing in life is religiously neutral or
devoid of meaning. By contrast, Westerners hardly hold any conviction more firmly than the
one that insists that facts, being scientifically verifiable, are totally devoid of
religious connection or significance. Facts are simply facts. If we know their causes
through empirical observation and logical thought, we have "explained" them. It
does not commonly occur to people that such an explanation explains only to someone who is
already persuaded that there is no meaning or religious significance behind objects or
events. An ophthalmologist told me a few years ago of his experience as a missionary
doctor in an African country. The natives, he said, he saw all of life within the
framework of a religious perspective, and the missionaries were trying to disabuse them of
this view. In doing so, the missionaries were teaching, probably quite unintentionally,
the unbiblical idea that natural things and events have no significant relationship to
God. My friend concluded by saying that he didn’t think his church in North America
even understood the problem.
The problem has two sides. On the one hand, the Third World peoples have misunderstood the
nature of the true, living God and so labor under an oppressive conception of religion.
Christian missionaries should be able to provide them with a new perspective, centered in
Jesus Christ, within which to experience and interpret the events and environment of their
daily lives. But the religious views of life held by the Third world cultures have at
least this much going for them. They know that there is no aspect of life, be it ever so
mundane or seemingly secular, which is unrelated to the gods.
Modern Westerners, on the other hand, do not think there are any gods at all, especially
when dealing with everyday affairs like business, government, scientific research,
housekeeping, etc. They live in what Peter Berger calls "a world without
windows," a world where the blackout curtains of the secular perspective effectively
prevent any glimmer of transcendent meaning from shining through into ordinary affairs.
Their situation is even more benighted than that of Third World peoples who at least know
that there is a world of the transcendent, that there are gods of some sort. We in the
West live under the pernicious myth that there are no gods at all so far as objective
facts are concerned.
This Western perspective is, historically, the result of the progress of Enlightenment
thought. Its watertight bulkheads separate "public" facts from
"private" values and thus empty objective facts of all religious significance.
This is not the place to trace that history; it is enough here to point out that
today’s American Christians and even missionaries are often so impregnated with
modern thought patterns that they divide their lives into "spiritual" and
"natural" segments. An offshoot of the problem can be seen in the anguished U.S.
debate about the separation of the church and the state. Even among Christians this debate
is often pursued on the assumption that there is a neutral place within which human
government can function without any relationship to Jesus Christ, who claims to have all
authority on heaven and on earth. The argument seldom gets near enough to basic Biblical
principles to generate light instead of heat.
The relevance of these introductory comments to the topic of the Christian mind and
worship will, hopefully, become apparent as we proceed.
Worship As Service
We usually associate worship with church buildings, Sunday services, hymns, prayers and
preaching. These are important and appropriate elements in worship. It would be a serious
mistake, however, to limit it to these "spiritual" places and activities.
Worship lies at the very heart of human life, not just for avowedly religious people, but
for all people. Humans cannot live without an inner commitment to values that make their
lives meaningful. This commitment is an expression of religious faith, whether recognized
as such or not. Denial doesn’t change the situation. A person who feels no symptoms
of illness doesn’t consult a physician event though he or she may be on the verge of
a heart attack. People who claim to be non-religious are in for a rude shock when the real
quality and object of their faith is exposed at the day of judgement. One way to see the
true extent of human worship is to notice the Biblical correlation between worship and
service. This emerges with stark clarity in Joshua’s farewell address to his people
(Joshua 24:14-15). Living in a day when the smog of modernity had not yet blotted out the
consciousness that all of life is lived under the influence of some god or other, he said
to the Israelites:
"Now, therefore, fear the lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away
the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And
if it is disagreeable, in your sight, to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom
you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or
the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will
serve the Lord."
(New American Standard Version)
Worship means much more than churchly activity. It means a kind of service which is as
wide as life itself.
In Aid for the Overdeveloped West, Goudzwaard points out that all men serve god(s)
in their lives. Humans being what they are, no one can be without a god. Having no god is
not an option, even for an atheist. Not believing that one serves any god is possible, but
it is an illusion that mistakes the real state of affairs. Someone or something is always
at the core of life for a human. It may be the true God in Jesus Christ, or it may be some
aspect of creation (rationality, beauty, scientific method, technology, economics, etc.)
raised to the point of imagined ultimacy and thus transformed into an idol. To serve
nothing would mean to be devoid of purpose or goals in life and would effectively drain
the humanness out of life. Westerners, who put their trust in science and its public,
value-free facts really serve the great moderns myth that life is nothing but physics and
chemistry.
Service and worship, then, are definitive of each other and life at the very heart of the
human person. We are by nature derived and dependent beings. Our physical birth through
human parents is a reminder that we are created and hence dependent. To be alive is to
serve some "god" whether we think so or not and whether that god is the true God
or an idol.
Worship As Sacrifice
Historically, worship has always been linked to sacrifice. The Old Testament is full of
sacrificial regulations and their observance, or of their violation in sacrifices offered
to the idols. To ancient peoples sacrifices that served to placate the gods or to secure
their favor were a never-ending responsibility. Third World peoples not yet metamorphosed
by modern Western technological and bureaucratic development still show this
characteristic. In the People’s Republic of China, for example, in spite of decades
of severe governmental repression, sacrifices to the ancestors as well as Buddhist and
Taoist sacrifices have persisted and are now again on the increase.
In the Bible, the Old Testament animal sacrifices were all consummated and so abolished in
the once-for-all-sacrificial death of the Son of God at Calvary. This did not mean,
however, that the practice of sacrifice was expunged. It now came into a fullness of
meaning which slain animals on altars could only hint at. The sacrifice of Christ became
the pattern for the life of God’s people.
Romans 12:1 explains this, "I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to
present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your
spiritual service of worship." (New American Standard Version) Sacrifice is not
removed from worship by the doctrine of the New Testament as compared to the Old; it is
translated into the sacrifice of a life lived in the service of God.
This verse talks in a very ordinary, earthly terms about our bodies and their activities.
Worship is not an ethereal otherworldly "spiritual" activity. It is to be
evident in every bodily activity and function. The Bible does not endorse the ancient
Greek distinction between a rational soul, seat of what is good in humans, and a material
body, locus of evil. God created humans with bodies. He likes bodies. He plans to
resurrect them. And His worship consists essentially in the presentation of our bodily
activities as a sacrifice to Him.
The implications of this are exceedingly far-reaching. Ordinary things are holy things,
for they are to be offered up to God in the service of worship. There are, then, no really
secular activities for Christians. What would happen if Christians were to comprehend and
practice this sort of worship is unimaginable. There would be a revival of unimaginable
proportions.
Hebrews 13:15 throws further light on the idea of New Testament sacrifice when it enjoins
us, "Through him, then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that
is the fruit of the lips that give thanks to His name." (NAS) When we begin, as C.S.
Lewis suggests, to "read" our pleasures as "shafts of glory touching our
sensibilities," and when we enter more fully into an awareness that creation in its
entirety is revelatory of God (Psalm 19; Isaiah 6:3; Job 42:5-6; Romans 1:20), then praise
will come irrepressibly to our lips and the sacrifice of the bodily life will be
complimented by the sacrifice of grateful lips.
Worship As Priesthood
Sacrifice and priesthood are inseparable. Sometimes young Christians, zealous to read
the Bible from cover to cover, are daunted by the profusion of priestly regulations in the
early parts of the Old Testament. There is, however, a reason for that profusion. The
prominence of the priesthood in the childhood of that race was indicative of something
very important in the nature and task of humans. A priest is a person who takes something
out of the created world and offers it up to God. In Old Testament times, priests belonged
to a special class, but the New Testament demonstrates the central importance of
priesthood by declaring that Christians are all priests now (1 Peter 2:5, 9). Schmemann,
in his book, For the Life of the World, makes this point in these words:
"The first, the basic definition of man is that he is a priest. He stands in the
center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world
from God and offering it to God - and by filling the world with this Eucharist, he
transforms his life, the one he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion
with Him." (page 15)
Schmemann illustrates by explaining that when we eat, we take dead food into our
bodies. This food becomes part of us, and we offer it back to God in lives of loving
service. The same thing happens to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the time we
spend, the friendships we enjoy. Our task is to take the created world into ourselves and
to offer it back to God in lives of loving service to Him and to our neighbors. In the
process we sanctify the creation and make it a means of communion with God. Husbands and
wives serve God as they serve each other (Ephesians 5:21) and as they care for their
children. Humdrum daily routines, from changing diapers to helping with homework, become
transfigured when we realize that they are priestly activities done in love to God through
service to people who bear His image. Ordinary things are indeed holy things. Driving a
school bus, or designing an airplane, or delivering pizzas - every human activity involves
doing something with God’s created world. When done as service to Him through service
to our neighbor, each one can be a priestly offering to Him whose pleasure with our
service is life’s very highest reward.
Worship and Work
Now we can return to the customary concept of worship as centered on Sunday church
service and ask, what is the relation of daily work to Sunday worship? Nicholas
Wolterstorff, in Until Justice and Peace Embrace, suggests that they exist in a
rhythmical relationship. The church service is not so different from daily life and work
so much in quality as in intensity. If our daily lives have been offerings to the Lord,
then there need be no "speed bump" between Saturday and Sunday. On the
Lord’s day we gather to celebrate what has been happening all week. Our offering to
the Lord consists of rejoicing together, singing together, praying together, and exhorting
one another in an experience of holy joy. We acknowledge publicly that what makes life
worth living is taking the world into hearts which have been revitalized by God’s
grace and giving it back to Him in loving and devoted service. Sunday is the day to stop
and enjoy what has been going on all week, just as the Lord rested on the seventh day to
review and enjoy His "good" creation. Of course, for us, sin enters into the
picture and there is need for repentance, confession, absolution and exhortation. But more
and more it can and should be that Sunday sums up and focuses the service and worship of
God which has been the pervading quality of our workday lives all week long.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
