Worship is the Thing

Sunday night we had the joy to travel a short distance from where we've been staying in Haiti to join a family with 26 children, where we were invited into an hour of worship to our King.

It's impossible to reconcile the juxtaposition of worship in a 1.) first world, air conditioned, carpeted, church building with stage lights and a sound system and a set list and trained voices with a 2.) third world, sweaty, concrete patio with a few bare light bulbs and spontaneous, raw voices. And perhaps it doesn't need to be reconciled. The spirit of the living God is free to move wherever, and I've experienced it in both. Neither is "more authentic" than the other, though I am wary that the former conditions us over time to expect certain comforts in order to enter into worship, and we must be aware of the selfishness that tends to cultivate. I just heard about a big church in Colorado needing $86,000 so that they can replace the carpet. What qualifies as a need in a first world context pretty much falls apart here in Haiti...

But throughout the time of worship last night, it kept occurring to me: "worship is the thing."

Worship to God never ceases and never will; it's only growing and has been growing and will continue to grow. As all of creation yearns for final consummation even as heaven continues its steady descent to earth, the church experiences persecution from without and schism and heresy from within, but nevertheless endures. And it endures foremost where those who gather do not cease to engage in worship. As Eugene Peterson puts it:

"Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren... if there is no center, there is no circumference. People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustained purpose."

Later on Sunday night, we were informed that worship like this isn’t something the kids just do on Sunday nights. And it isn’t something they just do every night. It’s something they do every morning, afternoon, and night. Worship of their Creator informs the rhythm of their lives.

Christy and I were reflecting yesterday, and imagery came to mind where life with Jesus is like stepping into a dance with him. This dance is comprised of three phases: (And I have, like, zero clout to talk about good dancing, but hopefully the analogy is better than my actual dance skills...)

Phase 1

At first it's going pretty well. You've been invited into a dance, and you're in love. You feel like you've got a hang of it pretty quickly, you're dancing pretty well right out of the gate. And I think that's a kind of grace given by an expert dancer who makes you feel good about yourself even though there's a definite twinkle in his eye and you maybe don't realize it at the time but later you realize wow I actually didn't know how to dance at all. But that doesn't matter. Because it is fun, it is new, and it is a delight. The reality of the fact that you haven't actually learned how to dance yet doesn't diminish the feeling of having entered an enrapturing encounter.

Phase 2

As the dancing continues, eventually you do pick up on some steps. You learn some things, you know some moves, you memorize some patterns. And this is where it starts to gets dangerous, because maybe you start believing that it would be better if you lead. And maybe it gets fumbly and ugly because you're no longer yielding to the leader. Or, on the other hand, maybe you just get stuck in a simple pattern because you've gotten a hang of it and are comfortable right there with that two step and could repeat it all day long.

Phase 3

But... learning the dance is not finished. And it won't ever be. Entering into phase 3 requires a full yielding to the leader. And once that happens, everything changes. There is the importance of that memorization you went through in phase 2, but it's also constantly fresh. There are little twists and twirls and fun things thrown in, and you can't ever know exactly what's coming next, but it doesn't matter because you don't need to control it, and together, you're in step.

For most of us—definitely for me—the playing out of this analogy probably looks like a lot of phase 2 dancing and every once in a while we surrender to phase 3 and it's wonderful but also terrifying and we end up retreating back to phase 2 and stay there for a while until we're ready to try phase 3 again. And maybe that's okay. Because it is, in fact, training. But Jesus, in his constant pursuit of us, will continue to romance us. Despite our complacency, he will continue to invite us to enter completely into phase 3 where our full trust and weight is put into his arms and he carries us into this majestic display of his might and glory that causes those who catch a glimpse of the dance to stop and take notice and fall down and worship because it's beautiful. And when it's recognized as such, the glory is truly given to God; the credit for the beauty of that dance is 100% directed to Him because both the dancer and observers can tell that he had everything to do with it and we had nothing to do with it. And yet, that's exactly how he chooses to display his glory: by involving us, partnering with us, letting us into what he is doing. Through us others get to see him, and it's our delight to get to be used in that way.

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I think that the open secret to sustained life in phase 3 is sustained worship. But it's so unnatural for us. It's what we desperately need, but what we don't seem to have the time or patience for. Scripture offers numerous calls and reminders to worship, but perhaps the most overlooked or ignored is that which is found in Revelation.

The book of Revelation just barely made it into the canon of Scripture, and with all of the controversy/misunderstanding/fanciful modern interpretation that can surround it, it's no surprise that it underwent centuries of debate about whether or not it should be included. But ultimately, it made it, and it's there for a purpose; it is a summons to worship, to offer comfort along with the reminder not to fear. The main thrust of the vision John of Patmos received and penned to those seven churches in Asia is to forgo idolatrous worship of the beast (empire) and to instead worship God. It is in fact the same thrust of the entire narrative of Scripture, to worship God and God alone. But now that Christ has risen, the stakes are raised because to call Jesus Lord means that Caesar is not which has serious implications in first century Rome. Worshipping God, for first century Christians, was not a private, "spiritual" experience but a public declaration of allegiance to the true King.

Perhaps the reason we don't have the time or patience for worship is we've forgotten these serious implications. In our country, we have the freedom to worship, for which I am thankful. Yet an interesting side effect of so much freedom is a forgetfulness of just how powerful the act is in which we are engaging. Worship becomes more about how we feel or what we receive rather than what Revelation reveals it to be: an assault on the powers and principalities of the world, an assault that in certain times and places has led to martyrdom. Worship is potent. Worship displays our allegiance. Worship is a present participation in our future. Worship is the thing. †

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